An unexpected train of thought I kept having while reading
Butcher's Crossing was about trust. Specifically, the trust you put in an author to see you through to the end of the story gently. Of course, this isn't always what you want as a reader, or what an author wants your experience to be. Several times over the 10 days it took me to read it, I considered stopping reading
Butcher's Crossing. At the very beginning, I had the sense that things could go very badly indeed. And if this book had been by just about anyone besides John Williams, I likely would have stopped. But I trusted Williams to make it bearable and even beautiful, and in the end it was.
Butcher's Crossing follows 4 men on a buffalo hunt in the Rocky Mountains in the 1870s, centering on one member of the party, Will Andrews, a young man from Boston who has come west to find himself. The slaughter of the buffalo through the middle of the book was depressing and difficult to read, and in the end futile, which is sort of the point of the story. The one lengthy description of a buffalo stand (which cursory further research shows was based on
a myth about buffalo behavior) was heartbreaking. It probably didn't help that I was recently in Kansas where I visited a buffalo sanctuary. To think that millions of buffalo roamed wild throughout that part of the country 150 years ago and that most of them were just slaughtered -- well, to say it got me feeling down would be putting it very lightly.
Although there was virtually nothing "industrial" about this book (the introduction of the railroad, which plays a small part in the book being the notable exception), it made a grim picture of industrial era. The reason for the hunt -- to supply the in-demand buffalo hides for popular robes back east, the scale of the kill -- in the area of 4000 buffalo, and the bottoming out of the market for buffalo hides that renders the whole exercise meaningless, all signal market-driven modernity. Reading this reminded me of two quite different roughly contemporary books that chronicled this time period as it was happening:
Moby-Dick and Zola's
Au Bonheur des Dames (I could just imagine the department for buffalo hide robes in the latter).
As I said at the beginning,
Butcher's Crossing was occasionally quite beautiful. After being trapped in the Rockies for months, when the moment comes for the hunting party to return to Kansas, Will Andrews feels elation at being finally able to leave, but also "a curious sadness like a presentiment of nostalgia." A presentiment of nostalgia. Beautiful.
