Will Andrews’s existential disillusionment and alienation

Will Andrews’s existential disillusionment is the slow collapse of the belief that the wilderness will reveal his truest self. The journey west gives way not to a recovered identity but to an awareness that the stories he has relied on—about discovery, ambition, and escape—may have been as empty as the commercial venture that carried him there. By the novel’s end, he does not replace those stories with a new certainty. He leaves Butcher’s Crossing with no settled destination, having recognized the vanity of his former pursuits without claiming that he has found an answer in their absence.

The frontier’s promises and contradictions

J.D. McDonald’s early account of Butcher’s Crossing establishes the ambitions and limits against which Andrews’s later disillusionment can be measured. Andrews has arrived from Ellsworth only the previous afternoon when McDonald describes a village filled with hunters and hard men. In McDonald’s view, the hunters use the land to live but cannot imagine what else it might be for; men like himself, with plans and a capacity to think about tomorrow, are what give the place a future. He expects the railroad to change the town. His confidence makes the frontier seem legible as an investment: land and a hide trade that will become valuable when transportation arrives.

The westward journey unsettles that picture through repetition rather than through any single revelation. The expedition passes a family living in makeshift shelters by the trail: children stop playing to watch the riders, while the older people remain still and do not answer Miller’s greeting. Miller dismisses them as river Indians and judges their hunting worthless. The encounter shows that the travelers are not moving through an uninhabited landscape, even as Miller’s response reduces its inhabitants to an obstacle or an object of contempt. For Andrews, the journey increasingly loses the character of discovery. Its repeated tasks—coffee from tin cups, worn-out horses, hard biscuits and dried fruit, marching, feeding the animals, and making camp—become a ritual that supplies his life with its only remaining form while steadily losing its meaning.

The railroad, once promised as the force that would make the region valuable, appears in the prairie as long parallel lines leading toward the first hills. Miller recognizes it before Andrews does, rides toward it, and touches the smooth steel with his fingers before looking up toward the mountains. The scene holds together two kinds of expectation: the material fact of a new line crossing the plain and the wilderness that still stands beyond it. Later, J.D. McDonald reveals the distance between his forecast and what actually happened. The rails are being laid fifty miles north of the town, and hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad company while leaving the hides to rot where they skinned the animals. The railroad has arrived, but not as the simple guarantee of local prosperity that McDonald once imagined.

J.D. McDonald’s account of waste

When J.D. McDonald confronts Andrews after the expedition, he turns the outcome into a bleak inventory. Andrews and Miller killed three or four thousand bison and packed the hides, but the animals were left to decay and mice made nests in the hides. The wagon was destroyed and, McDonald says, would serve the beavers as a dam; Andrews is left with calluses and the memory of a dead man. The later news about the meat sharpens the indictment: the hunters could have earned nearly five cents a pound for the carcasses, but the meat they abandoned went to flies and gray wolves. What had seemed like an immense undertaking has produced both ecological destruction and commercial failure, without the reward that might have made its costs intelligible to its participants.

McDonald’s judgment reaches beyond the failed hunt. He tells Andrews that people are raised on lies, taught more refined ones, and may only recognize near death that they have spent their lives believing in something beyond themselves. He presents the expedition as an example: a year spent pursuing a foolish dream, and nothing lasting gained from it. His speech is not neutral—he is speaking from his own defeat and pressing his conclusion onto Andrews—but the concrete wreckage gives it force. The destroyed wagon, ruined hides, wasted meat, calluses, and dead man are not abstractions. They are what remains when the promise of a transformative adventure is measured against its consequences.

Andrews resists the conclusion, insisting that there must be something more than this accounting. When J.D. McDonald asks what remains, however, Andrews has no answer. His silence marks the gap between his remaining belief and his ability to defend it. The episode does not establish that McDonald is simply right; it shows that Andrews can no longer make his former hopes self-evident. The dream has been tested by its material outcome, and his refusal to accept the verdict cannot yet become a different explanation.

The failure of former attachments

In the last morning scene, Andrews’s disillusionment extends from the expedition to his intimate and familial life. He watches Francine sleeping and sees her without the idealizing distance that had previously shaped his attention: her hair is disordered, her mouth partly open, and the lines around her eyes and the slackness of sleep are visible. Rather than turning away in contempt, he feels tenderness and compassion. He remembers that he had once pitied her for the humiliations she endured, but now judges that earlier pity mean and contemptible. The change is not a recovery of his old passion. He can hardly remember the desire that brought him to her room, and he sees that passion, like his journey west, as arising from vanity.

Thoughts of his father deepen the recognition that departure is also a refusal of return. Andrews imagines the daylight reaching the family home in Boston and feels a grief close to mourning. His father appears in his thoughts as a distant figure, and Andrews understands that he will not go back with J.D. McDonald to the city where he was born and formed. The wilderness had once seemed capable of giving him a more authentic shape than the world he left behind. Now he recognizes the illusion in that hope, but that recognition does not send him home. His estrangement is therefore not a clean break from one life into another: he declines both the old home and the wilderness as sources of a final identity.

The novel gathers this emptiness through Andrews’s recollection of other faces and moments: Charley Hoge’s vacant, melancholy gaze; Fred Schneider’s contemptuous look at the river just before a horse’s hoof erased the expression from his face; Miller’s blind insistence before the mountain blizzard; Charley Hoge leaving the fire to follow Miller into the night; and J.D. McDonald’s desperate, livid face as he pursued Miller among his burning hides. These memories connect Andrews’s private crisis to the failures and fixations he has witnessed. They do not supply a single explanation for those lives, but they make the void he recognizes feel recurrent rather than exclusively his own.

Departure without a destination

Andrews leaves Francine money rather than waking her. He takes two bills from his pouch and places the others on the table, reasoning that she will need money wherever she goes and that some of it will help him pay for a new carpet and curtains. He does not touch her face, although he wants to, because he fears waking her. The practical division of the money accompanies an emotional parting that he does not explain to her. He takes his sleeping bag, leaves quietly, and gives one of his two bills to the stableman before saddling his horse.

At dawn, Butcher’s Crossing appears to him already reduced to ruins. He rides past the still-smoking remains of J.D. McDonald’s cabin and the stand of cottonwoods, crosses the stream, and turns toward the plain. The signs of the town’s eventual disappearance—wooden buildings dismantled for their material, sod huts worn away by weather, grass covering the road—make departure part of a broader vanishing. Yet Andrews does not ride with a plan to rebuild or recover what was lost. He feels the reins, saddle, and horse beneath him, breathes the air rising from the new grass, and sets off with only a general direction in mind. He expects that the specific direction will occur to him later in the day. The ending offers movement without a declared purpose: Andrews has abandoned the identities promised by home, desire, and wilderness, but remains open to what comes next without knowing what it will mean.