In a novel
published in 1960 and almost forgotten for decades, John Williams told the
story of an ending. Not the end of a civilization, or an empire, or even a
physical landscape, but the end of an idea: the West as a promise. Its title is
Butcher’s Crossing, and it is, on the surface, the story of a buffalo
hunt. In truth, it is the most devastating parable ever written about greed,
the myth of the frontier, and the moment when nature ceased to be the mirror of
freedom and became raw material.
Williams
—better known today for Stoner, that other elegy to the quiet defeat of
modern man— wrote Butcher’s Crossing before the concept of “ecology”
existed as moral awareness. Yet his intuition was flawless: he understood that
the American plains were not falling beneath bullets, but beneath numbers. That
the dream of the frontier did not end in a gunfight, but in an accounting of
hides and dollars.
The novel
begins in Kansas, around 1870, in a dusty, foul-smelling town called Butcher’s
Crossing. There arrives Will Andrews, a Harvard-educated young man, the son of
a preacher, who abandons the safety of the East to “find himself” in the West.
What he seeks is not gold or glory, but an idea: the purity of the wild, life
stripped of artifice, the frontier as spiritual revelation.
His quest
leads him to Miller, a buffalo hunter as charismatic as he is brutal, who
promises paradise: an untouched herd in a lost valley high in the mountains of
Colorado, where the animals still graze in uncountable numbers. Andrews
accepts. What follows is a descent —both physical and moral— into the dark
heart of the American wilderness.
The journey,
which begins as adventure, soon turns into obsession. Miller leads the group
—four men, two wagons, and a score of horses— toward a remote valley, a place
that seems untouched since creation. There they find what they sought:
thousands upon thousands of buffalo. The scene, described by Williams with a
mix of awe and foreboding, feels almost biblical: the valley as a natural
cathedral about to be desecrated.
For weeks, the
men kill without pause. Gunfire echoes by day and night. The carcasses pile up;
the hides are stacked; blood dyes the river red. When winter arrives and the
mountain pass is blocked by snow, the hunters become prisoners of their own
hell —surrounded by rotting bodies, guarding a treasure that has lost all
meaning. The valley, once a paradise, turns into a tomb.
What makes Butcher’s
Crossing extraordinary is not only Williams’s precision in recreating the
West —its smells, its silence, the exhaustion of horses— but how he transforms
that world into an allegory of capitalism and excess. The hunt is not merely an
economic act; it is a modern ritual, a way of erasing the sacred. The hunter,
turned businessman, keeps firing until beauty itself ceases to make sense.
When the
survivors finally return to Butcher’s Crossing, they discover that the market
has collapsed. No one wants buffalo hides anymore. All their effort, suffering,
and slaughter are worth nothing. Miller, the visionary hunter, sinks into
drink; Andrews, the idealist, realizes he has taken part in an act of
irreversible destruction. The West he dreamed of as a space of redemption has
revealed itself as a moral desert.
In Williams’s
pages, one hears the same silence left behind by the real buffalo hunters of
the Great Plains. Between 1868 and 1881 —in just thirteen years— thirty-one
million bison were exterminated by white hunters armed with powerful rifles.
Thirty-one million. The figure seems impossible, but the records confirm it:
rivers of blood, hills of sun-bleached bones, mountains of skulls ground into
fertilizer.
The buffalo,
once the sustenance and symbol of the Plains tribes, vanished almost
completely. With it died the mounted Indian, his culture, his cosmology, his
freedom. “An Indian without buffalo,” wrote one ethnographer, “has no
identity.” And indeed, that extermination was both an ecological tragedy and a
deliberate political strategy: to starve the tribes into surrender. General
Phil Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri, said it plainly:
“Those hunters
have done more to solve the Indian problem than the army has in thirty years.
Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is gone.”
Butcher’s
Crossing never cites those speeches or numbers, yet they pulse
in its marrow. Williams wrote a tragedy without preachers or manifestos —only a
handful of men who, believing they were conquering the world, discover they
have emptied themselves. The novel is also a parable of the American man before
nature: his impulse to dominate, his inability to stop, his fascination with
the death he himself provokes.
In its best
passages, Williams achieves what neither history nor journalism can: he makes
us smell the burnt fat, hear the dull echo of shots, feel the trembling air
when the last herd falls. And after that thunder, silence, the same silence
that still drifts across the prairies today, dissected by highways like
scalpels of asphalt through what were once seas of grass and life.
Read today, Butcher’s
Crossing has the moral purity of a biblical fable and the bitter lucidity
of an ecological report. It is a novel about the voracity of progress, about
the moment when humanity ceased to see nature as a spiritual frontier and began
to see it as an inventory. Each buffalo felled is a page torn from the American
myth; each hide, a confession.
In a sense, Williams anticipated the literature of American disillusionment —the end of the frontier as a redeeming myth. In his book there are no heroes, only men who mistake possession for freedom. The result is emptiness. Like the valley where the buffalo fell, Butcher’s Crossing is the hollow heart of a continent.
A century and a half later, the American bison has returned to the plains in small protected herds, a national symbol of shared guilt. Yet the lesson of Butcher’s Crossing still stands: the man who kills without measure, who fells trees, drills mines, or melts glaciers, still believes he can possess the world without losing himself.
Williams, with the serenity of an ancient moralist, tells us otherwise: each time man destroys what sustains him, he kills a part of himself. That is why, before reading the real history of the buffalo’s extermination —the story of Dodge City, of Adobe Walls, of the hunters who ravaged the West in the name of the market— one should first heed this literary warning: that of young Andrews, standing at the top of the frozen valley, looking upon thousands of fallen animals and understanding, at last, that the greatness of America also has its cemetery.
