Boston

Boston is the home Will Andrews leaves for the West, but it does not remain a stable refuge in memory. Associated with his father, his years at Harvard University, and the streets and rooms of his youth, the city becomes both a point of origin and a contrast to the wilderness he seeks. As his memories of Boston blur, that contrast sharpens: the urban world he once inhabited seems increasingly remote beside the open country west of Butcher’s Crossing.

Home, Family, and Education

Boston enters the story through family ties. Will Andrews presents himself to J.D. McDonald as the son of Benjamin Andrews, whom McDonald knew in Boston. A letter from his father confirms the connection. Reading it, McDonald recalls visiting the Andrews home for tea twelve or fourteen years earlier, before the war, and thinks he may have seen Will as a child. The recollection gives Boston a domestic history: it is a place where the older men once met in a parlor, and where the young traveler belonged to a household McDonald can only partly remember.

The city is also the setting of Will’s unfinished education. When McDonald asks what he had been doing before coming west, Will explains that he was in his third year at Harvard University. McDonald treats that background as a sign of future prospects, imagining the conventional paths of work or teaching that might have followed a fourth year. Will’s departure interrupts that expected course. Boston thus represents not simply his past, but a life and career he has chosen not to continue in the usual way.

A Journey Away

The physical distance from Boston accumulates through a nearly two-week journey by stagecoach and train. Will remembers traveling from Boston to Albany, then from Albany to New York, with later city names no longer clearly attached to the roads he took. Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Saint Louis pass through his recollection alongside hard seats, dirty stations, and long waits on wooden benches. Now that he has reached his destination, the discomfort seems to drain from his body; the journey becomes a sequence of places and hardships viewed from the relief of arrival.

That distance is also psychological. Less than a month after leaving Boston with money inherited from his uncle, Will lies in a bare hotel room in Butcher’s Crossing and tries to summon the house near Clarendon Street and Beacon where he was born and spent his youth. Some details survive with unusual sharpness: a dark parlor, a sofa upholstered in deep red velvet, its carved walnut frame, a milky-white lamp decorated with painted roses, and watercolors made by an aunt during her Grand Tour. Yet the more deliberately he tries to hold the scene, the more it thins like fog. The furnishings remain as fragments, while the home itself recedes into an almost unreal past.

The City in Memory

Boston returns not as a complete panorama but as a remembered urban image. Will pictures streets crowded with carriages and passersby beneath irregular rows of elms, tall buildings pressed close together, and marble ornament stained by smoke and city dirt. The image is not presented as a neutral inventory of the city: it arises in his mind while he faces the western prairie and tries to explain why he came. Against the unsettled expanse, Boston stands for a world whose origins seem to have become obscured by the life built upon them.

His recollection also follows water. The Charles River winds among cultivated fields, villages, and small towns, carrying the waste of people and the city toward the great bay. As a child, Will had looked east from the cliffs above Massachusetts Bay, beyond the gray Atlantic. These remembered views place Boston within a landscape of human settlement and movement, even as the western country draws his attention toward a different kind of origin. He struggles to name what he seeks there: a freedom, beauty, hope, and vigor he feels are missing from the more intimate world he has left. The comparison does not make Boston a simple enemy; it reveals the distance between the life he remembers and the life he hopes to find.

Boston and the Western Frontier

Boston also connects Will’s private departure to the commercial networks reaching Butcher’s Crossing. He learns that a representative of Bates and Durfree passed through Boston; conversation there led to the information that McDonald worked for the firm in Kansas City, and in Kansas City Will was told that McDonald had moved west. The route by which Will finds his father’s acquaintance therefore runs through business contacts as well as family memory. McDonald, who has since established a business of his own, becomes the intermediary between the Boston household and the frontier town.

The city’s distance from the West is measured against the changes underway there. McDonald expects a railroad to transform the settlement and increase the value of its land. Later, the railroad’s tracks are being laid fifty miles north, while hunters sell bison meat to the railway company and leave the hides to rot. Boston itself is not the site of these changes, but it belongs to the chain of movement and commerce that links distant places to the West. In Will’s experience, the city is most significant as a remembered origin: a home and education that recede from view, a point on the long route west, and a measure of how radically his chosen landscape differs from the one he has left.