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