John Williams - Butcher's Crossing

The myth of the West, a place of adventure and endless empty space, held a grip on the imagination in the 19th century as much as it does today. John William's Butcher's Crossing is the story of what happens to a wealthy young East Coast man who leave leaves Harvard and travels to the eponymous town to find adventure and himself. Using his own wealth to outfit a buffalo expedition, despite warnings against the hazardous nature of the trip, Will Andrews leaves behind his comfort zone and heads out into the wilderness. His companions are relics from a different era. His mentor Miller is a grizzled buffalo hunter who remembers the herds so big that they looked like smoke. He claims to know of a secret valley where buffalo still roam in vast numbers. His companions, other than Will, are sceptical, but they're being paid so they tag along.

The story is quite simple. The plains are in a process of change. Miller can't find the way because landmarks have come and gone. The roads are well travelled and there's the occasional building. The travellers come across rotting piles of bones from previous hunts. It begins to look like its a wasted quest. But the party does eventually reach the valley and there begins a mass hunt - on a scale that sickens Will, but rapidly teaches him new work. He has to learn to skin an animal that moments earlier had been standing proud in the grass. Now its reduced to skin, bone, guts and pieces of meat. The men eat the livers raw to ward off disease. Will learns fast.

Williams excels in telling the details of the hunt. The skinning, the shooting, the cooking, the hard, hard labour. I don't know if the author ever went buffallo hunting, but he certainly gives the impression he knows what its like. Its unlikely that he nearly died of dehydration in the desert, or froze through a long winter in the wilderness but again the reader feels like he did.

Its a western, but of a different calibre to those about gunfights and wars against the Native Americans. This is about the plains as a space were men and women eek out a living, but were the vicissitudes of the market matter even hundreds of miles from a spot on the map called Butcher's Crossing. Its a raw and powerful story that will stay with me a long time.

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