48 pages • 1-hour read
Butcher's Crossing
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Part 2, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and animal death, substance use, sexual content, and death.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
After breakfast, Miller, Andrews, and Schneider set out from camp. Schneider waits while Miller and Andrews move ahead toward the herd, Andrews carrying the bullets. Miller shoots the lead animal, preventing the herd from scattering. He explains to Andrews that calm, direct movement doesn’t alarm the buffalo, and the animals remain largely still, making them easy targets. Miller then methodically begins killing the buffalo. As the rifle overheats from repeated firing, he sends Andrews back to camp to retrieve another rifle and water to cool the barrel. Andrews tells Schneider what he witnessed. Schneider responds that Miller has “a stand,” meaning that he has effectively claimed control of the hunt, but that keeping up with the skinning will be a lot of work.
Andrews returns to Miller, assisting him by cleaning and cooling the first rifle as Miller continues to shoot, speaking little. When Schneider arrives, he demands that Miller stop, warning that they can’t possibly skin and process all the buffalo before nightfall. Miller angrily refuses, insisting that he’ll skin everything he kills. The shooting continues well into the afternoon. Andrews’s eyes burn from the smoke, and his head throbs from the relentless crack of gunfire. Miller no longer seems fully human, firing without pause. Eventually, the buffalo scatter, ending the slaughter, and Andrews helps Miller count the kills. Miller has shot 135 buffalo. Schneider points out that skinning this many animals will take all afternoon and night. Miller can’t help because his hand is badly swollen from the repeated recoil of the rifle. Schneider shows Andrews how to skin the buffalo properly, explaining how to make the cuts so that the hide comes off in a single piece, and how to use a horse to pull the skin free.
Andrews skins a buffalo on his own but tears the hide in the process. Schneider tells him to stop and instead take a buffalo carcass back to camp to dress and prepare for dinner. At camp, Charley helps Andrews string up the animal. It’s Andrews’s first time butchering an animal, and when he cuts into the buffalo’s stomach, its contents splatter all over his clothes. The other men remove the liver and eat it raw, offering some to Andrews; however, he flees into the woods and vomits. Before returning to camp, he strips off his clothes and washes them in the stream. The men cook and eat the buffalo. Schneider remarks that his belly is full and jokes crudely about wanting a woman, teasing Andrews about Francine, until Miller sharply tells him to stop. Miller and Schneider then return to the valley to continue skinning the remaining buffalo, while Andrews settles in for the night. Unable to sleep, he keeps thinking about running from Francine and the dead animals and reflects on how each carcass was once a living, powerful, and majestic creature.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
As fall arrives, the men settle into a grim daily routine of hunting and skinning. Charley collects and transports the hides, which soon accumulate into large stacks to dry. Miller allows Andrews to hunt, and Andrews kills four buffalo. The constant exposure to carcasses and decay no longer affects him as it did at first, and he begins to admire Miller’s hunting skills. Despite the shared labor, however, the men don’t grow closer. Instead, they become increasingly silent, worn down by physical exhaustion and emotionally numbed by the repetitive labor.
Charley becomes anxious about the weather, drinking more, and quietly prepares for colder conditions by sewing heavy blankets from buffalo hides. Schneider wants to leave, as he’s tired of eating buffalo and longs for a woman. Miller declares they won’t leave until they destroy the entire herd, planning to haul out what hides they can and return later for the rest. Schneider calls the plan “insane” and demands his payment. Andrews pays him, and Schneider moves away from the group to sleep alone.
The herd shrinks from thousands to only hundreds, and Miller’s fixation intensifies. He withdraws almost completely from speech, communicating only through animalistic sounds and gestures: “[H]e grunted when his name was spoken, and his directions to the rest of them became curt motions of hands and arms, jerks of the head, and guttural growlings deep in his throat” (159). He no longer bothers to clean the gunpowder from his face. During the next hunting day, unseasonable warmth accelerates the carcasses’ decay, making the labor brutal and foul. The herd has splintered into smaller groups, complicating the killing. Miller forces Schneider and Andrews to help drive the buffalo back into a single mass so that he can establish another stand. The tactic works, and Miller resumes shooting. As the slaughter ends, the first snow begins to fall, which visibly unsettles Charley.
The temperature suddenly drops, and a blizzard traps the men in the valley. Forced to abandon the wagon, they tentatively lead the horses and oxen back to camp. The storm destroys most of the stacked hides, but Miller salvages the remainder, fashioning them into makeshift bags to provide shelter. Schneider refuses to stay, taking a few hides before leaving the group entirely. The blizzard rages for two days, burying the men under snow and forcing them to remain inside the bags for protection. Andrews drifts into dreams of warmth, comfort, and home, as well as memories of Francine.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
The men emerge from their shelters to find the valley completely buried under snow. The animals and most of the men are physically unharmed, but Charley shows clear signs of mental deterioration. Miller rides out to inspect the mountain pass, though Schneider bluntly states that they’re snowed in and trapped for the winter. Miller soon returns and confirms this grim reality. Despite the danger, Schneider insists on leaving and attempting to cross the mountains alone. Miller warns him that he won’t survive the conditions and urges him to stay, arguing that they need his help, especially since Charley’s condition is worsening.
Miller tells Andrews they must remain in the valley until spring, a confinement that could last six to eight months. Andrews assumes responsibility for cooking, and he, Miller, and Schneider construct a more permanent shelter from buffalo hides. In the days that follow, everyone except Charley works steadily to prepare for winter. They sew blankets and clothing from hides, gather and stack firewood, and make the camp as secure as possible against the cold. They release the oxen and horses so that they can forage for grass beneath the snow, and Miller continues to hunt for food during the day. Andrews notices Schneider beginning to talk to himself and behave erratically, but Miller dismisses the behavior as a normal response to prolonged solitude.
Miller tries to steady Charley by giving him whisky mixed with coffee, but it doesn’t ease Charley’s mental decline. Charley digs through the snow to recover his buried Bible and carefully dries its pages. After that, he withdraws completely, speaking to no one and spending all his time reading scripture. Only Miller seems to thrive in the isolation. He disappears for most of each day, returning at night with large game to sustain them, appearing energized by the conditions.
In contrast, Andrews becomes increasingly unsettled. He loses a clear sense of who he is and often feels trapped and resentful toward the other men. Seeking relief, he takes a solitary walk, only to experience snow blindness that leaves him incapacitated for days. Schneider begins carrying a sidearm and continues to demand his monthly payment from Andrews, and these transactions become Andrews’s only reliable marker of time as the winter drags on.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
In March and April, the men begin to emerge from their winter confinement. The horses and oxen, having roamed freely for months, are “nearly wild,” and the men must patiently work to break and tame them in preparation for the journey home. Each day, Schneider travels to inspect the mountain pass, gradually testing whether it’s crossable. When he reports that he managed to walk through, despite snow still piled over his head, Miller calls him a fool, warning that the snow could easily have collapsed and buried him. Miller continues to hunt for food, but at times kills animals without bothering to harvest them. The rising temperature causes the meat of thousands of dead buffalo to rot, and the valley fills with a pervasive stench. Andrews understands Scheider’s desire to return home but can’t pinpoint what he’s personally returning to.
At the end of April, Miller announces that it’s finally time to leave the valley. They can take only a fraction of the hides, though Miller insists that he’ll return for the rest. They stack the wagon dangerously high, and Schneider warns that the load is unstable and risks breaking the wagon or toppling on the descent. Despite these concerns, they begin the slow, careful journey down the mountain. As they depart, Andrews looks back one last time at the valley, now irrevocably altered by their presence, and appreciates the signs of spring covering the death and destruction.
When the men reach the river crossing, what was once a shallow summer stream is now a fast-moving torrent. Miller crosses first to test the water and confirm that passage is possible. After he returns, the men agree that Charley will ride an ox and lead the team across, with Schneider following behind. Miller and Andrews cross safely, and Charley nearly succeeds as well. However, a large log suddenly barrels down the river, overturning the wagon. As an ox is swept away, its hoof strikes Schneider in the head, killing him. The wagon, the oxen, the hides, and Schneider’s body are all carried downstream and lost. Andrews instinctively wants to try to save Schneider, but Miller immediately deems the situation hopeless. Charley interprets the death as divine judgment, claiming that it was “God’s will” because Schneider was a sinner.
Part 2, Chapters 5-8 Analysis
The hunt itself thematically contributes to the Deconstruction of the Frontier Myth. What initially seemed like a triumphant discovery of abundance becomes a grotesque parody of mastery. Miller’s methodical slaughter strips the buffalo of any symbolic grandeur, reducing them to dumb, stationary targets. Andrews recognizes that Miller kills without acknowledging limits or purpose. When Andrews attempts to speak to him, “Miller [does] not answer; he [turns] upon him, wide, black-rimmed eyes that [stare] at, through him, blankly, as if he [does] not exist” (133). This moment reveals Miller’s transformation from a frontiersman to an instrument of death, a man whose fixation empties him of human connection. The myth of the heroic hunter collapses under the reality of industrial-scale, wasteful killing. The valley, which Andrews once imagined as a hidden Eden, is charnel-like, and the American frontier reveals itself as a site of excess and moral decay that erases men’s humanity rather than bringing them to higher planes of existence.
Andrews, like the land, understands himself as diminished: “He [thinks] of himself now as a vague shape that [does] nothing, that [has] no identity” (201). This is the final thematic stage of Disillusionment and the Loss of Idealism. Emptiness has replaced the sense of self that Andrews hoped to discover in the West. As the days of hunting and skinning stretch on, he becomes increasingly alienated from the group and himself. He physically transforms but becomes psychologically dislocated: “Andrews [runs] his hand over his face; it [is] rough and strange to his touch; the beard, which he [is] constantly surprised to feel upon his face, [distracts] his hands and [makes] his features unfamiliar to him” (150). His body no longer feels like his own, as he loses the innocent self he brought west. Andrews’s Emersonian hope that nature would reveal his truer self is exposed as naive. Instead of transcendence, he feels suspended in nothingness, erased of all feeling and individualism, and perceives the experience as the antithesis of Romanticism. As winter strips away his imagination, he becomes unable to conceive of himself outside the valley: “He [cannot] think of himself outside of where he [is]” (160). The frontier, which once promised freedom and self-discovery, is now a psychological prison. Time loses meaning, marked only by Schneider’s demands for payment and the repetitive cycle of survival. Andrews’s earlier idealism has no foothold here; survival and endurance are all-consuming.
This dissolution intensifies during the winter entrapment, when the theme of Human Arrogance Versus Nature’s Indifference dominates the narrative. A landscape utterly indifferent to the men’s plans punishes them. The blizzard obliterates the hides, traps them for months, and renders the labor of the hunt largely meaningless. Nature offers neither judgment nor help, only consequences. Even Miller, who appears to thrive physically by hunting game throughout the winter, can’t escape the indifference that surrounds them. Schneider’s self-isolation, refusal to submit to Miller’s authority, and eventual death in the river underscore how little human intention matters to uncontrollable forces. The river crossing annihilates the last remnants of frontier logic, and the wilderness renders man’s attempt to dominate the land a failure, as the loss of the wagon, the hides, and Schneider show, revealing in seconds the fragility of human endeavor.
The buffalo becomes an ironic symbol, as Miller directs the men to strip the hides from hundreds of animals and doggedly persists in excessive, wasteful slaughter, all in pursuit of profit. However, after the blizzard traps the men in the valley, the hides are no longer commodities but necessities, repurposed into blankets, clothing, shelters, and crude bags to keep them alive beneath the snow. What they once harvested as surplus is now vital for survival. This reversal exposes the hollowness of the frontier economy that motivated the hunt. The hides retain value only when divorced from commerce and reattached to basic human need. Williams suggests that nature tolerates exploitation only insofar as it’s tied to survival; when excess replaces necessity, the land responds with indifference and consequence. The men must rely on the very materials they intended to monetize, revealing that their labor acquires meaning only after profit has been stripped away. The irony underscores the collapse of the Romanticized frontier myth, as the land doesn’t reward human pride or ambition. Further highlighting this irony, the arrival of spring, which usually symbolizes rebirth and renewal, reveals that the valley is no longer a place of wonder but of rot as the buffalo meat decays in the warming air, filling the valley with stench and underscoring the waste of the slaughter. Miller’s continued killing of animals he doesn’t harvest for meals further demonstrates how completely purpose has dissolved into compulsion.
The collapse is completed during the escape from the valley. The river crossing disaster eliminates Schneider as the last dissenting voice and erases the rewards of the hunt. Charley’s declaration that it was “God’s will” provides no comfort, only a hollow moral explanation that can’t account for the waste and suffering that preceded it. With cold finality, Miller overrides Andrews’s plea to save Schneider, whose death illustrates the moral cost of Miller’s destructive impulse. Throughout the expedition, Schneider is the pragmatic counterweight to Miller’s obsession, repeatedly warning against reckless decision-making. When he’s swept away with the wagon, hides, and oxen, his demise is inseparable from the material consequences of the hunt. The tools and profits of the slaughter carry him off, binding human loss directly to environmental devastation.
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