Butcher's Crossing

Butcher’s Crossing drops readers into the blood and economics of the 1870s buffalo hide trade, one of the fastest environmental collapses in US history. Through the fictional hunting expedition, Williams examines the realities of capitalism, manifest destiny, and mass extinction. The 1870s marked the peak and collapse of the buffalo hide trade. Before that decade, millions of buffalo roamed the Great Plains, sustaining Indigenous people for centuries. However, the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, combined with technological advances in tanning that made buffalo hides commercially valuable for industrial belts and machinery, created unprecedented demand. Professional hunters like the novel’s Miller could kill dozens of animals per day, leaving carcasses to rot while taking only the hides. Between 1872 and 1874 alone, hunters shipped millions of hides east, and by 1883, the buffalo population had collapsed from an estimated 30-60 million to fewer than 1,000 animals.

Williams depicts this economy with unflinching realism, showing how the promise of profit drove men into remote wilderness areas with dogged, single-minded determination. Though the novel’s protagonist, Will Andrews, initially seeks communion with nature in the tradition of Transcendentalism (as described in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, particularly his essays “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”), he instead witnesses wholesale slaughter motivated purely by market forces. The expedition becomes trapped by early snow, and when they finally return to Butcher’s Crossing, the buffalo hide market has collapsed, rendering their massive harvest worthless. This economic volatility reflects the boom-and-bust cycles characteristic of extractive frontier economies.

In addition, the novel illuminates the complicity of various actors in this system. Towns like Butcher’s Crossing existed solely to service hunters, skinners, and hide traders. Merchants financed expeditions, taking their cut regardless of environmental consequences. The federal government tacitly encouraged buffalo extermination as a means of subjugating Plains tribes by destroying their primary food source, a strategy that the military leaders of the era explicitly endorsed. Through his meticulous portrayal of the hunt and its aftermath, Williams crafts a critique of American attitudes toward nature and progress. Butcher’s Crossing reveals the buffalo hide economy as emblematic of a broader pattern in the transformation of living ecosystems into dead commodities, pursued with industrial efficiency until nothing remains to exploit. The novel provides both historical documentation and a moral reckoning with this formative period of US expansion (Nijhuis, Michelle. “Butcher’s Crossing Betrays the Brilliant Novel That Inspired It.” Literary Hub, 17 Oct. 2023).