Butcher's Crossing
In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey, the men reach a place of paradisal richness, where they abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter. So caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time, the men are overtaken by winter and snowed in. In the spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
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In 1873, a young Harvard dropout arrives in the Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing carrying his father's money and finances a buffalo hunt deep into a hidden Colorado valley. The trip does not end when the herd does.
Butcher's Crossing was written by John Williams and published in 1960. It is one of three Williams novels rediscovered after his death, alongside Stoner and Augustus, all of which became critical successes years after their initial release.
Yes. A 2022 film adaptation directed by Gabe Polsky and starring Nicolas Cage was released. The film follows the novel's brutal buffalo-hunting expedition closely.
Butcher's Crossing is 274 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Butcher's Crossing takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Butcher's Crossing is a standalone novel by John Williams, not part of a series.
Butcher's Crossing is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.