The Bloody Autumn of Butcher's Crossing: Butcher's Crossing, John Williams

Abstract

Abstract:A writer in the New Yorker called John Williams the "author of the greatest American novel you've never heard of." They were referring to John Williams's Stoner, but equally if not more important in our era is Butcher's Crossing. Usually classified as a Western, it is a scathing indictment of the toxic masculinity and Emersonian egotism that drove men west to "find themselves" through conquest, in this case the brutal destruction of the American buffalo. Williams's chronicle of a bloody autumn of slaughter should stand alongside Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as one of the great works of American environmental writing.