Kansas is the broad, increasingly emptied landscape through which Will Andrews travels west from Butcher’s Crossing toward Colorado. It first appears to promise an almost boundless wilderness, but the journey exposes a country already altered by hunting, settlement, and railroad construction. Its significance lies in that contrast: the same plains that inspire Andrews with their scale have become a working landscape where American bison are counted as dwindling returns, their remains gathered for use, and their meat and hides assigned different market values.

Grasslands and the western horizon

From his room in Butcher’s Crossing, Will Andrews watches the country open toward the west. The horizon recalls the overwhelming immensity he once felt as a child looking out over Massachusetts Bay, but the new landscape is not simply a destination. As the afternoon wind blurs the line between land and sky, the limits of the world seem to dissolve; at night, the village appears to contract beneath the darkness. The image gives Kansas both a physical reach and a psychological force: Andrews is drawn toward what he cannot clearly delimit.

The expedition’s first movement west makes that openness tangible. Before dawn, Miller leaves the road and turns across the plain. The wagon rolls through thick yellow-green grass, and its parallel tracks are swallowed by the horizon almost as soon as they are made. The road’s disappearance is practical as well as symbolic: the party is leaving established routes behind, though the open country is already marked by human use. They pass a sod-roofed cabin, a cleared plot returning to grass, and a rotting wooden plow beside an abandoned wagon. Miller takes the derelict homestead as evidence that its occupants have given up.

The route follows the Smoky Hill Trail, which runs close to the Smoky Hill River toward Colorado. Miller expects the established trail to be easy and short, but beyond Colorado the party will travel without one. On the sixth day, the men reach the end of the Smoky Hill Trail and stop to look back along the river’s course. Kansas is thus presented not as a fixed boundary but as a passage: a plain crossed by trail and river before the expedition turns toward the foothills and the more remote country beyond.

Bison abundance and depletion

Miller measures the change in Kansas through the shrinking number of American bison. When he arrived four years earlier, the spring plains had seemed black with animals, packed across the grass for miles. A two-week hunt could then yield a thousand or fifteen hundred good spring hides. By the time he speaks to Will Andrews, the bison move in small herds, and a hunter may be fortunate to take two or three hundred in a hunt. Miller expects that in another year or two there will be nothing left to hunt in Kansas. His account turns the apparent abundance of the plain into a brief historical interval, already ending within the span of his own residence.

The remnants of that abundance are visible on the ground. Beside the skeleton of a particularly large animal, Miller recalls that five or six years earlier hunters could ride among mountains of bones from Pawnee Fork to the end of Smoky Hill. The carcass is not an isolated relic but part of a transformed landscape. Miller anticipates that a farmer will load the bones onto a wagon and use them as fertilizer, though he doubts they will do much good. He also describes other uses for bison bone: Indigenous people made needles, knives, arrow points, ornaments, toys, and combs from it. The bone therefore carries several histories at once—as the residue of mass hunting, a possible agricultural material, and a resource fashioned into useful objects.

Settlement, trade, and changing uses

Kansas is also a place organized around the hide trade. J.D. McDonald describes Butcher’s Crossing as a village sustained by hides and populated largely by hunters and hard men; he expects the railroad to change its future. Miller offers a more specific account of the trade’s operation. J.D. McDonald organizes many hunting expeditions and pays fifty cents a head for raw summer hides, which are thin and comparatively poor. He may have thirty or forty expeditions out across the country at once, yet the hunters receive so little of the proceeds that they are fortunate to make it through the winter. Miller rejects that arrangement, insisting that he hunts for himself or not at all.

The grassland is not empty of other travelers or residents. The party encounters a family with a failing mule, whom Miller advises to turn toward Fort Wallace rather than continue alone. They meet five mounted men heading to Colorado to claim an unworked mining concession. Near the river, they pass makeshift shelters dug into a bluff, where children are playing and older Indigenous people sit by the entrances. The residents do not return Miller’s greeting. His contemptuous description reduces them to a category and dismisses their way of life, while the scene itself makes clear that the country the hunters cross is inhabited. The encounters place migration, mining, subsistence, and hunting alongside one another without making them equivalent forms of land use.

Railroad construction supplies the clearest sign that the old routes are being joined by a new infrastructure. The men first notice long parallel tracks cutting across the plain toward the hills. Miller stops, kneels, and runs his fingers over the smooth steel before looking toward the mountains. Later, J.D. McDonald points out that the railroad is being built fifty miles north of his land. Its arrival does not fulfill his expectation that the land will become valuable as gold: the hunters are selling bison meat to the railway company while leaving the hides to rot where the animals were skinned. The market has shifted, but the slaughter’s waste remains visible.

A landscape made legible by loss

The narrative repeatedly sets Kansas’s vastness against the increasingly precise measures of extraction: hides per expedition, animals per hunt, miles of trail, and piles of bones. That contrast prevents the open plain from functioning as an untouched wilderness. Its grass can erase the wagon tracks, yet the remains of bison, abandoned homesteads, and railroad steel disclose how thoroughly human activity has entered it.

For Will Andrews, the journey’s daily repetition gradually replaces the first shock of the landscape. The party rises, drinks coffee from tin cups, drives tired animals, eats hard biscuits and dried fruit, and camps again. The routine becomes the only remaining shape of his life as the plain seems to change little from one day to the next. Kansas therefore operates both as an immense horizon that unsettles his sense of scale and as a worked environment whose changes can be read in the diminishing herds and the uses made of what is left. The country’s apparent openness and its material depletion are not opposites: the same distance that invites Andrews onward conceals, until the evidence is close at hand, the costs of the trade that has crossed it.