Butcher's Crossing

As a seasoned, obsessive buffalo hunter, Miller instigates the novel’s central expedition and symbolizes the destructive side of westward expansion. He claims to know the location of an untouched buffalo herd deep in the Colorado wilderness and persuades Andrews and the others to finance and join the hunt. Miller is a force—single-minded, taciturn, and governed by instinct. He’s defined almost entirely by his identity as a hunter, detached from community and moral accountability. From the outset, Miller establishes himself through isolation and self-reliance, declaring, “I hunt on my own or I don’t hunt at all” (32). This insistence signals his rejection of cooperation, compromise, and sentiment in favor of an absolutist relationship with the land. His authority derives from experience and knowledge, yet it manifests as domination rather than stewardship. Miller’s refusal to engage emotionally with others underscores his separation from social norms and ethical restraint.

Thematically, Miller embodies The Deconstruction of the American Frontier Myth. While the myth celebrates rugged individualism and mastery over nature, Miller reveals its darker implications in exploitation, excess, and environmental indifference. His relentless slaughter of the buffalo illustrates human arrogance confronting a natural world and treating it as an object of conquest. Miller is a static character; he neither evolves nor reflects on his actions. This rigidity contrasts sharply with Will Andrews’s trajectory from Romantic idealism to disillusionment. As Will gains self-awareness, Miller remains trapped in obsession, illustrating the dangers of unchecked individualism.

Miller’s reputation reinforces his mythic status. Schneider’s assertion that “Miller always gets what he’s after” (55) casts him as legendary, a man whose will appears to dominate both men and nature. As the novel progresses, this reputation becomes ironic. Miller’s pursuit reveals compulsion, an assumption that nature exists solely to be tamed, extracted, and consumed. Williams repeatedly aligns Miller with animal imagery, emphasizing his primal detachment: “Miller spoke very little, as if hardly aware of the men who rode with him. Like an animal, he sniffed at the land” (78). This portrayal positions him as deeply attuned to the wilderness yet devoid of empathy or a feeling of connection to it. Unlike Andrews, who struggles to impose meaning on experience, Miller remains unmoved by suffering or waste. Miller’s final actions confirm his moral emptiness. When the hides lose value, he responds via destruction, burning McDonald’s office in a final, primal attempt to assert control. The fire echoes the buffalo slaughter, as both enact violence for its own sake. Rather than a heroic frontiersman, Miller emerges as a figure of ruin, embodying the novel’s critique of human arrogance and the collapse of frontier idealism.

Miller’s one-handed hunting companion, Charley, is a round and dynamic character whose internal contradictions highlight the psychological and moral complexities of frontier life. Charley is a devout believer and always carries a Bible with him. However, his dependence on alcohol reveals the tension between his desire for spiritual order and the harsh, chaotic realities he faces. Charley’s religiosity and drinking exist in constant opposition. Alcohol numbs him against fear, isolation, and the brutal labor of the hunt, while the Bible represents a moral anchor and a framework through which he attempts to interpret the events around him. He sometimes assumes a prophetic tone, reading signs from scripture and interpreting the wilderness as a moral landscape, yet he’s unable to fully reconcile his faith with the suffering, death, and disorder he witnesses.

His missing hand, lost to frostbite on a prior hunting expedition, is a symbol of the physical and existential cost of frontier life. The stump marks him as both resilient and diminished, a living reminder of human vulnerability amid nature’s harsh demands for survival. The loss emphasizes the limits of physical and moral control in an environment that tests both body and spirit. During their winter entrapment in the valley, Andrews observes Charley absorbed in his Bible: “[Andrews] saw his blurred, rheumy eyes fixed upon the ruined pages of his Bible, as if desperately [trying] to keep those eyes from looking beyond into the white waste of snow that diminished him” (201). This moment captures Charley’s struggle to hold onto meaning and faith in an empty, dangerous landscape. His attention to scripture is both a refuge from and defiance against the indifferent wilderness.

Charley’s psychological depletion at the end of the hunt reflects the destruction Miller has wrought. Though physically intact, Charley is mentally and spiritually exhausted, a human casualty of Miller’s obsessive, destructive pursuit. However, even after witnessing Miller burn McDonald’s office, Charley blindly follows him again, not out of fear but awe, demonstrating his dependence on Miller and the hold of charismatic authority. In this way, Charley embodies the complex human consequences of frontier expansion through the tension between morality and survival, reverence and subjugation, faith and disillusionment.