The Vanity of Human Wishes

Butcher’s Crossing a novel by John Williams.  Library of America.  John Williams, Collected Novels.  Daniel Mendelsohn, editor.  pp. 1-255.  *****

There was a moment in Butcher’s Crossing when I was strongly tempted to stop reading.  Our protagonist, Will Andrews, had staked a man named Miller to a project that Miller claimed could not fail.  Though buffalo all through the West were over-hunted and depleted, he knew of a place where a huge herd went to graze, the kind the hunters used to see in the old days, buffalo as far as you could see.  An old friend of Miller’s, Charlie Hoge, believed in his friend implicitly.  A man named Schneider, hired to skin the buffalo, was more skeptical, and expressed his doubts at every turn.  But Miller was ready to go.

After an agonizing journey through Kansas into the mountains of Colorado, during which this quartet had faced any number of obstacles, including several days when they nearly died of thirst, they finally arrived at the fabled valley in Colorado that Miller had been talking about, and sure enough, it was packed with prime buffalo, the kind whose coats were thick and would sell for a great price in the small community of Butcher’s Crossing, from which they had set out.

Miller knew how to kill the head bull first, the leader, so the other animals wouldn’t flee but stumble around without direction.  They would be buffaloed, an expression I’d heard before but never really understood.  Miller would only be slowed by the fact that his rifles would heat up and need time to cool off.  He was ready, singlehandedly, to commence the slaughter.  That was where I happened to leave off after a couple of days of reading.

Of the many enterprises of white men on the North American continent, I regard this as one of the most shameful and contemptible.  It robbed Native Americans of their way of life and utterly ignored the ecology of the situation, making the buffalo nearly extinct just for profit, ignoring the meat of slaughtered animals all around them.  Did I really want to read this?

I looked forward maybe 25 pages.  If I would still be reading buffalo slaughter at that point, I wasn’t interested, but something else seemed to be going on.  I decided that the author wasn’t interested in carnage for its own sake.  I wanted to see what happened.

I was glad I did.  The most powerful part of the novel by far is its second half.  It isn’t that these men got what they deserved.  They got what life was inevitably going to bring them.  It was the fate of all such grand ventures.

As someone who has mostly written about his own experience, I’m impressed by writers who explore a variety of subjects.  Here is a novelist, John Williams, who wrote three novels in his life, one about this expedition to kill buffalo in the old West, one about a literature professor in the 20^th century (the closest to Williams’ own experience), and a third about ancient Rome.  Could three subjects possibly be more different?  Furthermore, Butcher’s Crossing is jammed with detail about every aspect of this expedition, from investing in a wagon and oxen to the geography of the journey to making bullets for the hunt to skinning a buffalo.  The detail is painstaking and fascinating.  I don’t know how the man knows all this, I kept thinking.  Yet I was completely convinced.  He knew whereof he spoke.

Will Andrews is not a Westerner himself.  He was a student at Harvard, inspired by no less a lecturer than Ralph Waldo Emerson, and something about Emerson’s lectures made him want to go out and face life, rather than staying back at the university and thinking about it.  A relative died and left him a tidy sum of money.  He decided to head West and see what life offered him.  How he chose Butcher’s Crossing I don’t know, but it existed pretty much as a community of buffalo hunters.  There was a livery stable, a general store, one hotel, one saloon (with a few prostitutes) and, outside of town, a man whose business it was to buy buffalo skins from hunters and sell them to businesses that wanted them.  Business was booming.  The only problem was the shortage of buffalo.  But Miller had an answer for that.

He’d been waiting for years, actually, having stumbled across this valley with its massive herds of buffalo in his previous wanderings.  He needed someone with the foresight and vision to bankroll him.  Andrews was actually not that man.  He was a naïve Easterner who had lucked into some money and was looking for an adventure.  He’d never even been with a woman (as one of the prostitutes, who took a liking to him, soon found out).  What he wanted was some experience of life.  He got it.

It would be a shame to tell any more of the plot.  This is a classic set of characters: the naïve guy from the East who’s never even ridden a horse; the middle-aged man who is itching to have a chance of this plan that he had conceived years before; the grizzled old guy who has already lost one hand to frostbite, but who trusts his younger friend; and the cynical skinner who is so skeptical of the enterprise that he foregoes his share of the profits, which stand to be huge.  He wants to be paid by the month, as the months occur.  He also wants to play it safe whenever possible.  Take the longer route to Colorado, rather than risk not having water.  Leave a few buffalo for the next expedition.  Get out early, while the getting his good.  He’s right in most of what he says.  But he never wins the argument.

What Andrews eventually discovers is that Miller is not really a visionary and dreamer.  He’s been holding onto this idea for so long that it has become an obsession.  When he begins killing, he somehow can’t stop, not because that’s the right thing to do—his skinners, which now include Andrews, who is learning as an apprentice—can only skin so many animals at a time, and the longer the buffalo have been dead, the harder it is to skin them.  That doesn’t matter to Miller, who has become almost mad with his plan.  Once he starts to kill, he won’t be stopped.  He’s the Captain Ahab of the prairie.

We can’t help thinking as we read all this, what did this have to do with the vision of Emerson?  Ironically, though, in the second half of the book, Andrews does discover some truths about life, some spiritual truths as well.  Maybe any experience would have shown him those things, but he gets a crash course, in spectacular fashion.  It’s a coming-of-age novel for him.

It’s also an astonishing performance by author John Williams.