''Butcher's Crossing'' and The Western

There have been fine novels about the Old West, many of which have become classics of Americana and rank with the best literature of our age. Some are lyrical, with a hue of mystery and legend, like Jack Schaefer’s ’’Shane.’’ Others are epics spun with fine realism, like Alan LeMay’s ‘’The Searchers,’’ Larry McMurtry’s ‘’Lonesome Dove,’’ A. B. Guthrie’s ‘’The Big Sky’’ and ‘’The Way West,’’ and Milton Lott’s ‘’The Last Hunt.’’ With brilliant use of the language of the time, Charles Portis’ ''True Grit’’ plunges us into the rugged, real West and the irony of a distinctly nonromantic hero. Oakley Hall’s ‘’Warlock'’ attempts to resolve one of the iconic legends of the West, his Olympian figures clashing over the rule of law. Mary Doria Russell’s ‘’Doc’’ and ‘’Epitaph’’ paint a startling and provocative new pictrure of the Earp/Holliday saga. There are the classic short stories of Dorothy M. Johnson, and Walter Van Tilburgh Clark’s riveting study of justice and character, ‘’The Ox-Bow Incident,’’ is timeless.

Set all these, and any vestigial romantic visions of the Old West, aside for a moment. While nothing can ever erase the indelible beauty of ‘’The BIg Sky’’ or ‘’The Searchers’’ or any of the aforementioned books, a relatively little known masterpiece, ’‘’Butcher’s Crossing’’ by John Williams, blows the Western horizon wide open and expands our understanding of America. Written in 1960, ‘’Butcher’s Crossing’’ might just as well have been written yesterday. It obliterates the innocent dream of a new dawn on a far frontier that persists, sometimes disastrously, under the American psyche.

A fateful tale of a brutal buffalo hunt, ‘’Butcher’s Crossing’' is not really a ‘’western’’ at all, but a deconstruction of the deep-rooted American myth of the young man setting out to find himself in the pristine romance of the West. Exploding comforting myths of the West can be upsetting, so deeply engrained are our feelings of the West from books and films, but ultimately such a confrontation is therapeutic, as splashes of cold reality often are. Facing the ‘’shadow’’ is essential to growth and well being. When an assumption of impervious innocence arrogantly underlies a culture and remains unexamined, tragedy can result. The extermination of the buffalo, the treatment of native and nonwhite Americans, the debacle of Viet Nam….emanate from an unquestioned moral superiority that often not only discounts people who are different from us, but Nature itself. In this sense, ‘’Butcher’s Crossing’’ is balm for the American soul, albeit a strong and bitter one to take. It is a book that deepens our understanding and appreciation not only for the people of a time and place, but for ourselves.

In its unrelenting realism, the book cuts away any fanciful conceptions of life in the West that have been in our psyches since the tales of Zane Grey. What emerges is a fresh, immediate experience of how it was. The focus is unrermitingly on painstaking details, the smell of the air, the feel of the dust, the sound of the oxen’s hooves, the twining of a rope, the heat and sweat, the foreboding silence that pervades day and night in the wilderness. And as the forces of nature close in, the tension of the unspoken words of the men - Andrew the idealistic, eastern greenhorn and Miller the dark, hulking mountain man - is nearly overwhelming.

The dream of the golden West, captured in many fine novels, will live on, but ‘''Butcher’s Crossing’’ shows us the consequences of the unexamined life, the pursuit of the dream of innocence without the leavening of self-awareness, and a longer view.

''Butcher’s Crossing’’ is fine literature first, a ‘'western’’’ second, and an essential read.