The State of Colorado is the remote destination of Miller’s expedition and the setting of the hunt that changes Will Andrews’s sense of where his life belongs. Reached after the bison of Kansas have been sharply reduced by commercial hunting, its mountain valley seems at first to offer escape from scarcity. But the expedition’s arrival there does not restore an untouched wilderness: Miller’s determination to kill every bison turns abundance into another landscape of depletion, while winter confines the hunters within the place they came to exploit.

Setting and Route

The expedition’s journey toward the State of Colorado unfolds across plains where the signs of settlement and economic change are already visible. Miller notices tracks on a broad north–south trail and guesses that cattle are beginning to come up from Texas, an unfamiliar mark since his previous journey. Later, Will Andrews sees the parallel lines of a railroad running across the plain toward the first hills. Miller reaches the rails first, dismounts, and runs his fingers over the smooth steel before looking toward the jagged mountains beyond. The scene places the mountain country in a region increasingly crossed by transport and commercial routes, rather than beyond all human change.

The route also passes through places inhabited by people whom the hunting party barely acknowledges. At a river bend, the men encounter makeshift shelters cut into a bluff, with children playing outside and older men and women sitting nearby. Miller greets them, but they do not respond; he dismisses them as people who live on rabbits and catfish and says there is no point in shooting them. The brief encounter does not establish that the shelters are in the Colorado valley itself, but it makes the expedition’s passage west more complicated than a journey through empty land: people are present, while the hunters’ attention remains fixed on their own purposes.

From Kansas Scarcity to a New Hunting Ground

Colorado becomes a practical answer to the decline Miller has already witnessed in Kansas. He recalls that, when he arrived at Butcher’s Crossing four years earlier, the spring plains had been black with bison for miles. A two-week hunt could then yield a thousand or even fifteen hundred animals and good spring hides. By the time he speaks with Will Andrews, only small herds remain, and a successful hunt brings in a few hundred. Miller expects that in another year or two there will be nothing left to hunt in Kansas. He considers trapping, mining, or pursuing other animals, but also insists that bison can still be found by someone who knows where to look.

The bones scattered across the Kansas prairie make that decline visible. Beside the remains of a particularly large animal, Miller describes how, during the great hunts, piles of bones stretched from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill River. He kicks a rib loose and imagines a future farmer collecting the bones for fertilizer, a diminished afterlife for animals whose remains had once been used for tools, weapons, ornaments, and toys. His recollection gives the Colorado expedition a history: the hunters are moving toward a new supply of bison after their previous grounds have been emptied, carrying the logic of the earlier hunts with them.

The Valley and the Hunt

Will Andrews later answers simply that the party has been in the State of Colorado, hunting. The bluntness of the answer conceals the scale of what happened there. In the valley, Miller shoots faster than Will Andrews and Fred Schneider can skin and process the animals. Their work stretches into the dark; they rise before dawn to cut into carcasses stiffened overnight, while Miller’s rifle keeps sounding through the day. At night they find him by the fire, nearly motionless, his face darkened by the grime of the hunt. The mountains provide the setting for an operation whose pace is set not by the hunters’ capacity to work but by Miller’s continued shooting.

As the herd dwindles, the valley changes from a promised hunting ground into a field of exposed carcasses. Will Andrews becomes accustomed to the rancid smell and sees the surviving animals wandering among the dead. He understands that Miller will not leave while even one bison remains alive. This expectation also alters how he measures time: instead of counting days, as Fred Schneider does, he thinks in terms of how many animals remain and when their number might allow the party to depart. The valley has become the measure of the expedition’s duration as well as its objective.

Confinement and Return

The hunters’ stay in the valley lasts through a winter that leaves the expedition snowbound in the mountains. When Miller and Will Andrews eventually return to Butcher’s Crossing, J.D. McDonald greets them in astonishment, having supposed them dead. He assumes that Miller has come back empty-handed after being trapped by snow. Miller corrects him: three thousand winter hides remain hidden in the mountains, waiting to be retrieved. The hides make clear that the expedition has not failed to kill; its problem is that the goods it has obtained are still separated from the market and from the town.

The return also reveals how sharply Will Andrews’s experience of place has shifted. During the hunt, the wider world beyond the high, enclosing mountains has receded from his memory. Butcher’s Crossing and the plains seem remote and dreamlike beside the valley, where he has spent what he regards as the most important period of his life. The landscape has given his existence a temporary shape, even as the slaughter that sustains the expedition empties it of the animals that first made it valuable.

That conflict belongs to a broader transformation of the western economy. By the time the hunters return, the railroad is being laid fifty miles north of Butcher’s Crossing, and hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad company while leaving hides to rot where the animals were skinned. The detail is not evidence that the railroad runs through the Colorado valley; rather, it places the expedition’s remote hunting grounds within a changing regional system of extraction and transport. The State of Colorado offers Miller a refuge from Kansas’s depleted herds, but not an escape from the trade and expansion that help make such depletion possible.