Butcher's Crossing

Williams systematically dismantles the romanticized mythology of the American frontier by exposing the material and ideological realities underlying westward expansion. In the introduction to Butcher’s Crossing, In the book’s Introduction, Michelle Latiolais situates Will Andrews’s westward journey within a familiar American literary tradition:

Andrews wants to go where no man has gone before, and though he’s leaving the house in which he was born and raised, he isn’t yet born, nor is he yet grown. It is a story you have heard before, an ur-story, one of self-discovery, a dream sought, and a setting out fearlessly and confidently to achieve this realization, a young man going west (Introduction).

Williams, however, deliberately subverts this tradition, creating a revisionist Western that inverts such ideological assumptions while exposing the fragility of human ambition in the face of nature’s inexorable persistence.

Andrews embarks on his journey, finding inspiration in Transcendentalist ideals drawn from Emerson and believing that immersion in the wilderness will yield spiritual insight. His own reflections underscore this expectation: “[W]herever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that was the central meaning he could find in all his life” (48). Williams methodically subverts this romantic premise, instead revealing the frontier as a theater of commercial exploitation and environmental devastation. Andrews’s withdrawal from civilization stems from a search for meaning, yet isolation exposes his vulnerability rather than clarifying his identity. The wilderness offers no proving ground for heroism; instead, obsession, moral ambiguity, and physical limitations govern outcomes in an indifferent landscape.

The buffalo hunter Miller inverts the myth of the frontiersman. Rather than embodying self-reliant individualism, he pursues the hunt with monomaniacal obsession driven by profit and personal compulsion. The wholesale slaughter of buffalo herds represents an industrial operation characterized by mechanical efficiency and staggering waste. The buffalo hunt, a climactic symbol of human ambition, degenerates into overkill and waste, demonstrating the destructive consequences of attempting to dominate a landscape that won’t yield to human mastery.

Williams challenges the foundational myth that frontier hardship produces moral transformation or self-knowledge. The narrative denies the classical rewards of the Western, presenting no clear heroes and villains, no moral compensation for struggle, no ethical vindication in triumph, and no narrative closure in heroism. When the hunting party finally returns to Butcher’s Crossing after winter imprisonment in the mountains, they discover that the buffalo economy has collapsed. Market forces render Andrews’s spiritual quest meaningless, suggesting that the frontier’s significance was always economic rather than metaphysical.

Butcher’s Crossing is thus an anti-Western that investigates the mythologies of the American frontier. By contrasting Andrews’s idealistic aspirations with the harsh realities of the landscape and McDonald’s obsessive destructiveness, Williams challenges the narrative of moral or spiritual fulfillment through westward expansion. Rather than elevating the men who enter it, the wilderness reveals their limitations. In Williams’s frontier, ambition receives no reward of insight or triumph but stands exposed as folly by a landscape that human desire or suffering can’t move.