Butcher's Crossing
Butcher's CrossingJohn Williams
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Butcher's Crossing (1960)

John Williams

Others: Positive

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.

ISBN:
9781590171981
Length:
274 pages

Genres: literary fiction, classics

Lists: …

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Reviews1

Loved it

number five butcher Crossing by John Williams this was actually sent to me by my good friend Dana thanks a bunch man an outstanding Outdoorsman novel set in the wild west of Colorado we're in a young man who travels out west named will Andrews commissions an experienced Hunter named Miller to lead a Hunting Expedition to a spot Miller claims is filled with Buffalo but very remote in the mountains very dangerous to get to their intention is to go up there kill the Buffalo and come back and sell the Skins sure enough Miller's correct but it's soon revealed that when he's able to do what he's best at something takes over and he simply can't stop killing a brutal but beautifully written Story by the author of Stoner which I thought was excellent