Will Andrews

Will Andrews is the young outsider whose passage through the hunting expedition turns an imagined frontier into an encounter with exhaustion, violence, and loss. His changing relation to the land is inseparable from the expedition’s destruction of the bison: what begins as a search for experience ends with him unable to imagine the world beyond the valley, then returning to a town whose commercial future has collapsed. His departure from Butcher’s Crossing offers no triumphant return or settled purpose, only movement into an open country whose direction he has not yet chosen.

Identity and Introduction

When Will Andrews meets J.D. McDonald in Butcher’s Crossing, he has only just arrived from Ellsworth. J.D. McDonald presents the settlement as a place sustained by hunters and hide trading, while dismissing its residents as people who use the land without knowing what to do with it. He contrasts them with men who plan for the future and predicts that the railroad will change the town. Andrews listens from the position of a newcomer: he has not yet spoken with the people J.D. McDonald condemns, and the frontier’s competing claims—to live from the land, to trade its products, or to develop it—are still being introduced to him.

The conversation with Miller supplies a harsher economic history. Four years earlier, Miller says, the spring plains had been black with bison, and a two-week hunt could bring in a thousand or fifteen hundred animals. By the time Andrews hears this account, hunters may be fortunate to take two or three hundred in a trip, and Miller expects Kansas to be hunted out within another year or two. Andrews asks what Miller will do when that happens. The answer ranges from trapping to mining to hunting elsewhere, but Miller also insists that bison remain for those who know where to look. Andrews’s new world is thus framed at once as a place of opportunity and as a resource being rapidly exhausted.

Crossing the Plains

The journey makes that depletion visible in the remains left behind. Beside the bones of a particularly large animal, Andrews tries to reconstruct the living bison from the book illustrations he remembers, but the image will not fit the scattered skeleton. Miller kicks a rib loose and recalls a landscape once covered with bones from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill. He foresees that even these remains will soon be gathered by farmers for fertilizer. As he describes the many uses Indigenous people made of bison bone—from needles and knives to arrow points, jewelry, toys, and combs—Andrews encounters a contrast between the animal’s varied uses and its reduction to a commodity or residue.

The expedition also passes an Indigenous encampment beside a trail near the river. Children playing in front of makeshift shelters stop to watch the travelers; the adults do not answer Miller’s greeting. Miller dismisses the people as river Indians and describes them contemptuously in terms of the food they eat. The scene gives Andrews a view of the human presence that the hunters’ language of empty land and commercial opportunity can obscure, even as the group continues on without engaging with the encampment.

On the plains, repeated chores become the structure of Andrews’s days: coffee from hot tin cups, packing bedrolls, tending the animals, hard biscuits and dried fruit, then beans and bacon by firelight. The routine offers his life a form even as it loses meaning through repetition. That fragile order is tested by thirst. During a night ride, Andrews grows so weak that he can barely hold the saddle horn or breathe; his mouth is painfully dry, and he drifts between delirium and pain. When an ox falls and cannot rise, the men pull it upright, then push the wagon’s wheels while Charley Hoge drives the team forward. Andrews becomes separated in the darkness, panics at finding himself alone, and rides toward the distant sound of the wagon. After rejoining the others, he watches Miller closely—not because Miller can take him where he wants to go, but because following him is Andrews’s only immediate safeguard against being lost in the darkness.

The first sight of the distant hills comes after the party has traveled toward low clouds for much of an afternoon and through the night. Andrews wakes late the next morning, sees a dark rise on the western horizon, and shakes Miller awake in excitement. Later, the men encounter a north–south trail bearing what Miller recognizes as cattle tracks, evidence of herds coming up from Texas. That afternoon Andrews sees the railroad running across the plain toward the first hills. Miller reaches it before him, kneels, and runs his fingers along the steel before looking toward the mountains. The railway that J.D. McDonald had imagined as the instrument of the town’s future is no longer merely a prediction: it has entered the landscape the expedition is crossing.

The Hunt and the Valley

At the valley herd, Miller separates the men’s roles: Fred Schneider is to stay and watch, while Andrews accompanies Miller as they circle around to approach from downwind. The division places Andrews close to Miller’s method, where observation and obedience precede the shot. As the herd begins to stir, Andrews is told to move quietly. The hunt soon becomes not a single encounter but a relentless process. Miller’s rifle sounds through the day while Andrews and Fred Schneider struggle to skin and butcher the animals quickly enough. They work after dusk and rise before dawn to cut into carcasses stiffened by the cold. By evening Miller sits blackened with powder before the fire, almost motionless apart from his eyes.

As the herd thins, Andrews recognizes the scale and direction of Miller’s purpose. The remaining bison graze among their dead, on grass marked by dried blood, while the carcasses give off a rancid smell to which Andrews has grown accustomed. Unlike Fred Schneider, Andrews has not been counting the passing days. He has measured time by the herd and understands, without needing to ask, that Miller will not leave while even one bison remains alive. The valley has also displaced the world outside it in Andrews’s memory. Butcher’s Crossing, the mountains they crossed, and the thirsty plains return only in fragments, almost like a dream. Looking across the valley, bounded by steep mountains beneath an immense sky, Andrews feels that his own existence has taken shape there; he cannot imagine himself away from it.

His response to the slaughter reaches beyond the work of hunting. On the night Fred Schneider recalls Francine, Andrews remembers leaving her room in Butcher’s Crossing. He connects that flight with his more recent flight from a slaughtered bison in the Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. He understands that the animal’s blood and exposed entrails were not, by themselves, what made him run. The shock was seeing a creature that had been alive and proud reduced to inert meat, stripped of its former identity. In that destruction, Andrews felt something within himself being destroyed too. His recognition binds his unease about Francine to the violence of the hunt: in both episodes, an encounter with another body exposes a crisis he cannot yet face directly.

Loss and Return

The return journey culminates in the river-crossing disaster. When the wagon overturns, the current drags it and the oxen downstream; the load’s harness breaks and the bison hides scatter into the water. The men on shore watch the wreckage disappear. Andrews drops to his hands and knees, turning his head in distress and crying out. Miller states that a winter’s work has vanished in two minutes. Andrews turns toward Fred Schneider, beginning to insist that they must act, but the hides and wagon are already gone. The loss converts the expedition’s accumulated labor into an immediate material catastrophe.

Back in Butcher’s Crossing, J.D. McDonald initially takes the returning men for dead. Recognizing Miller and Andrews, he approaches Andrews and grips both his arms, his hands trembling as his whole body begins to shake. The reunion places Andrews before the man who had once spoken confidently of plans, hunters, and the railroad. Now J.D. McDonald is in financial distress and offers Andrews his land, warning that it must be made productive or surrendered. Miller recalls J.D. McDonald’s former faith that the railroad would make the land valuable. The railroad is indeed being built, but it will pass fifty miles to the north. Meanwhile, hunters are selling bison meat to the railway company and leaving hides to rot where they were skinned. Andrews hears the economic aftermath of the hunt stated plainly: the expedition’s chosen commodity has lost its value, while the animals’ meat has found another market.

Andrews also returns to Francine and addresses the way he left her. He tells her that during the winter trapped in the valley he kept thinking about that night, and that she was not responsible for his departure; he had acted alone. His explanation does not erase his earlier flight, but it marks a change from retreating without explanation to acknowledging the hurt and taking responsibility for his choice. The connection remains part of his unsettled passage rather than a resolution that restores his former life.

Departure and Significance

At dawn, Andrews takes his horse from the stable and gives the stableman one of the two banknotes he has kept. He rides through the dusty street, past what remains of Butcher’s Crossing, and imagines the town’s wooden buildings being dismantled, its sod huts worn away, and prairie grass slowly covering the road. He passes the still-smoking remains of J.D. McDonald’s shack and the cottonwood grove, crosses the stream, and turns to look back before facing the plain. The dawn light, new grass, reins, saddle, and breathing horse give the departure a physical immediacy, but no destination accompanies it.

Andrews rides toward open country without knowing where he is going beyond a general direction; he expects that the answer will come to him later in the day. The ending therefore refuses to convert his experience into a clear plan or a conventional homecoming. The young newcomer who once listened to J.D. McDonald’s confidence in the town’s future leaves after seeing the costs hidden beneath that confidence: the bison reduced to bones and hides, the railroad altering the market, the expedition’s work swept away, and the settlement itself beginning to disappear. His departure is an act of continued movement, not proof that he has found a final identity or purpose.