Butcher's Crossing
About this book
In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey, the men reach a place of paradisal richness, where they abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter. So caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time, the men are overtaken by winter and snowed in. In the spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
Reader Profile
4.2/5 · 42893 readers · 265 pages · ≈ 4 h 54 m · Challenging
How long does it take to read Butcher's Crossing?
About ≈ 4 h 54 m — 265 pages, assuming roughly 250 words per page at 225 words per minute.
How many pages is Butcher's Crossing?
265 pages in its most-read edition.
What genre is Butcher's Crossing?
It sits on the Westerns, Classics, Fiction shelves.
Has Butcher's Crossing been made into a movie or TV show?
Yes — screen adaptations include Butcher's Crossing (2024), Butcher's Crossing (2023), Butcher's Crossing (2022).
Is Butcher's Crossing in the public domain?
No — it is still under copyright.
Who wrote Butcher's Crossing?
John Williams.