Butcher's Crossing

Butcher's Crossing is the second novel by the American writer John Williams, first published in 1960. It is a western, and an unusually exact one, written at a time when the genre's conventions had become fixed.

Will Andrews is twenty-three, the son of a minister who studied at Harvard, and he gives up his education because he has been convinced by Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing that a life spent in the open is more honest than the one he is being trained for. He reaches the small frontier town of Butcher's Crossing, Kansas, where most of the men are either making money or looking for a way to spend it, and he allows himself to be persuaded by an experienced hunter that there is money to be made from a herd of buffalo in a remote valley of the Colorado Rockies. The novel follows the expedition out and back, and the men have to deal with the country, the cold and the scale of what they have been sent to kill.

Williams wrote the book as a deliberate answer to the romantic version of the West, and the practical work of hunting, skinning and surviving is described with the same attention he gave to the scholar's life in his later fiction.