Colorado’s Rocky Mountains

Colorado’s Rocky Mountains are the rugged approach to the secluded valley where Miller’s hunting expedition finds its bison herd and carries out its mass hunt. The ascent gives way to a flat, grass-rich basin enclosed by steep mountain walls; once there, the mountains help isolate the hunters from the plains and the town they left behind, while the valley’s growing fields of carcasses make the consequences of their work impossible to mistake.

Terrain and Approach

The expedition follows an irregular bison trail up the mountainside. As the track climbs and dips through the pines, William Andrews walks beside the wagon, first buoyed by the mountain air and then worn down by the labor of the ascent. The men repeatedly brace themselves against the wagon wheels to steady it as the oxen slip on the steep ground. By afternoon, Andrews’s legs are numb and his back burns; the thin, dry air stings his throat and chest.

The trail’s hazards become especially clear near a sharp turn. Charley Hoge must angle the wagon carefully around it, with the right wheels scraping against pine trunks and the left nearing a ravine three or four hundred feet deep. Beyond the bend, the trail rises toward a gap between two dark, jagged peaks. The wagon and the men labor up the final slope, with the oxen surging forward when Hoge cracks his whip and shouts.

The Valley Beyond the Peaks

After the climb, the track descends through the pines for roughly three hundred yards before the ground opens into a long, narrow valley winding between the mountains. Its floor is level, compared in the narration to the top of a table, and thick grass ripples in the breeze across the basin. From the ridge, the valley seems profoundly still, a place Andrews experiences as untouched by human presence. His exhaustion gives way to a moment of held breath and deliberate quiet as he tries not to disturb the silence.

Miller points out a dark patch moving beneath the pines on the opposite slope. Andrews gradually makes out its rippling edges and imagines that, despite its distance, the herd extends nearly half a mile across and more than a mile in length. The reveal makes the difficult passage through the mountains a threshold: the hunters have reached the enclosed landscape that is to become the expedition’s world.

A Landscape Altered by Hunting

The scale of the valley’s later transformation is set against Miller’s recollection of earlier hunting grounds. He describes the Kansas plains as once black with bison, with hunters able to kill a thousand or fifteen hundred animals in two weeks; by the time he speaks, only small herds remain, and a successful expedition might yield two or three hundred. He predicts that Kansas will have no bison left to hunt within a year or two. His account places the expedition’s remote destination within a wider history of depletion rather than outside it.

Miller also shows Andrews the remains of a large animal, which he estimates at at least two thousand pounds. Kicking a rib free from the skeleton, he recalls that during the great hunts, mountains of bones lay across the country, from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill River stretch. He expects even these remains to be taken eventually by farmers for fertilizer, though he doubts they will be of much use. He contrasts that anticipated disposal with the many practical and decorative uses Indigenous people made of bison bone, including needles, knives, arrow points, jewelry, toys, and combs. The discarded skeleton thus connects the mountain journey to the aftermath of the earlier plains hunts: what had been an abundant animal becomes first a resource and then a residue.

Inside the valley, the same pattern advances toward its extreme. As Miller’s shooting continues, Andrews sees the herd diminish amid the exposed bodies of dead bison. The surviving animals graze among the carcasses, on grass marked by dried blood. Andrews realizes that Miller will not leave while a single bison remains. The basin’s enclosing mountains, which first made it appear separate from human history, now contain the consequences of the hunt and intensify Andrews’s sense of being cut off from elsewhere.

Isolation and the Wider Trade

The mountains shape Andrews’s experience not only through terrain but through the narrowing of his remembered world. As he watches the valley, the route over the mountains, the plains crossed in heat and thirst, and even Butcher’s Crossing recede into a confused, dreamlike memory. The basin seems to give his existence a form and place; he cannot imagine himself away from it. Its enclosure therefore becomes both a physical fact and a measure of his growing estrangement from life beyond the expedition.

The eventual return to Butcher’s Crossing reconnects the remote hunt to changing commercial conditions. McDonald tells Miller that the railroad is being laid fifty miles north of town and that hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad company while leaving the hides to rot where the animals were skinned. This news concerns the wider hunting economy rather than the mountain terrain itself, but it sharpens the contrast between the valley’s apparent remoteness and the market forces that reach the expedition’s aftermath. The mountains shelter the hunt from ordinary settlement; they do not place it beyond the consequences of resource extraction or the changing value of what it kills.