During the last hour of the stand he came to see Miller as a mechanism, an automaton, moved by the moving herd; and he came to see Miller\u2019s destruction of the buffalo, not as a lust for blood or a lust for the hides or a lust for what the hides would bring, or even at last the blind lust of fury that toiled darkly within him\u2014he came to see the destruction as a cold, mindless response to the life in which Miller had immersed himself.<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In an idyllic valley tucked between towering peaks, straight out of Zane Grey, Miller mills buffaloes into salable piles of hides.<\/p>\n
We know how to read this: a clash between young civility and bloodthirsty evil. In Heart of Darkness <\/i>terms, Andrews is the novel\u2019s Marlow, its callow, suffering storyteller, and Miller its demoniacal Kurtz. Yet Williams makes it brutally clear that Will Andrews, no matter how innocent he may seem, does also unmistakably will <\/i>the slaughter he laments. His money bought the guns, the wagons, even the lead they melt for Miller\u2019s bullets. The way Williams tells it, we not only (as Wordsworth put it) \u201cmurder to dissect,\u201d we also murder just by being alive. There is no way for westward-moving white men to encounter \u201cvirgin land\u201d without roughing or using it up. The seemingly stable distinction between encountering and exploiting ain\u2019t what it\u2019s cracked up to be.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not about whether you bring a rifle; as Williams sees it, you yourself are the rifle. In a 1980s interview about the genesis of Butcher\u2019s Crossing<\/i>, Williams said that on first moving to Denver in 1954, he \u201cwondered if there has ever <\/i>been anything that was really the white American West, or whether it was just an invention of the East.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup>, pp. 12\u201331). ] If that\u2019s not a chilling enough account of what Williams is trying to say about the so-called discovery and development of \u201cour Great West,\u201d we might also think about a metaphor that runs through a lapidary 1986 poem by Williams, \u201cThe Skaters.\u201d The poem opens by relating the skaters\u2019 joy in sheer speed across fresh sheets of ice. Yet the cost of that speed turns out to be inescapable:<\/p>\n Through all the warming air they turn and spin, \u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Skating is not just gliding, it is also wearing away what\u2019s beneath your blades.<\/p>\n Not only is this a novel about the price to be paid even for the most innocent kinds of movement over virgin land, it is also an exploration of the instability of all the categories we set up to distinguish between white-hat and black-hat behavior. The role played by the novel\u2019s only significant female character, Francine, brings home how intimately Williams links Emerson\u2019s Transcendentalist desire to explore the ever-new with the seemingly diametrically opposed desire to turn everything beautiful into a cash transaction. Francine, a prostitute, is unapologetic about her reasons for liking Butcher\u2019s Crossing: fewer girls to compete with here than back in St. Louis. Yet she also likes the very same thing Andrews likes: virginal newness, freshness, youth\u2014which is why she\u2019s willing to take a break from her profession and sleep with Andrews for free. You might say that what the prairie represents for Andrews, Andrews represents for Francine. Francine, then, is somewhat like Miller, an unapologetically profit-seeking hunter after easy buffalo kills; but she is also somewhat like Andrews, who is only on the hunt for fresh, new experiences. The novel draws no bright line between profit and high-minded passions\u2014only a troubled and troubling continuum.<\/p>\n So what finally does Williams want his readers to make of Andrews\u2019s Emersonian optimism, Miller\u2019s pragmatic murderousness, Francine\u2019s compassionate search for oblivion? After the failure of the hunt, Andrews and Miller come back home to meet the embittered hides dealer McDonald, who has been bankrupted by shifting fashions back in Europe and is now surrounded by worthless piles of buffalo hides. He offers the novel\u2019s bleakest diagnosis. \u201cYou\u2019re no better than the things you kill,\u201d he informs Andrews, then goes on to tell him why \u201cyoung people \u2026 always think there\u2019s something to find out,\u201d when really:<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing. \u2026 You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you\u2019re ready to die, it comes to you\u2014there\u2019s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain\u2019t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Rather than leaving us with this piece of late Mark Twain darkness, however, Williams ends the novel by following Andrews back to Francine for a week of thoughtless beauty and pleasure, a space apart from the world.<\/p>\n Butcher\u2019s Crossing<\/i> also follows him when he sneaks away from her, leaving the money she had pointedly refused to accept from him\u2014money that makes their week together another salable commodity. That mercenary moment hints that at its core the novel is pushing readers to relate the pointless slaughter of unsalable buffaloes to the absence of Native Americans (except for those \u201cRiver Indians\u201d Miller finds not worth killing) from this spookily white West. The well-meaning Andrews\u2019s unwitting swathe of destruction (which he can stand back and blame on the rapidly obsolescing Miller and his killing ways) mirrors the destructive zeal of Cold War America, reaching out eagerly, with Emersonian zeal, to the east, west, north, and south. Remember that this book came out in 1960: Louis L\u2019Amour ruled the Western novel, and Hollywood featured leather-skinned John Wayne\u2019s machismo and the liberal piety of Gary Cooper\u2019s High Noon<\/i>. Is it surprising there was so little space for Williams\u2019s un-American pessimism?<\/p>\n Butcher\u2019s Crossing <\/i>ends with the reader certain, dead certain, that the destruction of the past cannot be undone. Yet there\u2019s a hint of hope in the novel\u2019s final line: \u201che rode forward without hurry, and felt behind him the sun slowly rise and harden the air.\u201d Andrews is riding westward, even though he is travelling over the very land he and his cronies turned from wilderness into waste, past now-worthless piles of hides, and past the buffalo meat they had poisoned to kill off timber wolves. Go west, not-quite-so-young man. The novel takes seriously both the cost and <\/i>the appeal of what it calls \u201cvitality\u201d\u2014it\u2019s what Andrews feels moving through him during a river crossing late in the book.<\/p>\n As the animal stepped slowly forward, Andrews felt for brief instants the sickening sensation of weightlessness as he and the horse were buoyed and pushed aside by the swift current. The roaring was intense and hollow in his ears; he looked down from the point of land that dipped and swayed in his sight, and saw the water. It was a deep but transparent greenish brown, and it flowed past him in thick ropes and sheeted wedges, in shapes that changed with an incredible complexity before his gaze.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Five minutes later the river sends a log crashing into Andrews\u2019s partner Schneider\u2014a log that kills horse and rider both, then casually tips their winter\u2019s worth of buffalo hides into the flood. But those \u201cthick ropes and sheeted wedges\u201d are still there, still haunting.<\/p>\n Williams does not aim to shows us Nature as it is when we are not around; instead he details what it feels like when it tugs at us, makes us respond to its lineaments and its power. That helped me realize something was missing from Thoreau\u2019s dream of \u201cContact! Contact!\u201d with Nature in its unapproachable inhumanity. Touching a realm of Nature beyond<\/i> Man won\u2019t stop us from being Millers; those who shoot and those who just pay to watch are not so very different. If there is Nature to be found out there, it\u2019s also to be found in ourselves.<\/p>\n There is no reason we should congratulate ourselves for being among the living: \u201cvitality\u201d is not a virtue, just a fact of life. Still, we make sense of Nature by being buoyed and pushed aside by it. It is right and good to reckon up the consequences and the costs of all the elegant skating we do over Nature\u2019s face: trace your carbon footprint, and ask yourself whose bullets you may be inadvertently paying for. Finally, however, to make sense of Nature means to experience <\/i>it. If everything we do has a price, that doesn\u2019t mean it has no value.<\/p>\n Canyonlands National Park, Utah; 103\u00baF under a cloudless summer sky. I\u2019d call the canyon floor below \u201cbone-white,\u201d if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones behind. This is the part of the world where Edward Abbey (in his 1968 Desert Solitaire) said he came \u201cto look at and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2595,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[154,258,17,14,32,20,109,174],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[2274],"class_list":["post-1116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-american-studies","tag-b-sides","tag-fiction","tag-history","tag-landscape","tag-literature","tag-masculinity","tag-migration","pbseries-b-sides"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nAnd do not feel that they grow old
\nAbove the fragile ice they scrape and thin.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n![\"Albert](\"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/39f0bdcc-e310-4584-9570-5836e291b4c1.jpg\")