William Andrews’s spiritual longing for the wilderness

William Andrews’s spiritual longing for the wilderness is the inward force that draws him away from the life he has known and toward the western plains. At first he imagines nature as a source of freedom, beauty, and renewal, a realm more fundamental than the urban world he left behind. The novel gives that hope real power, but also subjects it to the material facts of the expedition: the wilderness Andrews seeks is neither separate from human commerce nor protected from its consequences.

Origins of the Longing

Andrews cannot easily explain his purpose to J.D. McDonald. Looking past the village toward the western distance, he recognizes that any name he gives his desire will be inadequate. What he seeks feels like freedom, beauty, hope, and vigor—the very qualities he believes have been absent from the more intimate parts of his life. He imagines the prairie’s roots reaching into fertile earth and renewing it year after year, in contrast to a world that seems to retreat from its own origins. The wilderness represents not merely a change of scenery but a possible source of renewal for a life he feels has become estranged from its beginnings.

That contrast brings Boston sharply into view. In the midst of the open prairie, Andrews remembers crowded streets, carriages and pedestrians moving beneath elms, buildings darkened by smoke, and the Charles River carrying the city’s waste toward the bay. The memory does not simply establish where he came from; it gives physical form to the civilization he wants to leave behind. His clenched fists and damp palms register how difficult it is to translate this opposition into an explanation for McDonald. He finally describes his purpose as wanting to know the country as fully as he can, something he feels he must do.

The desire has an intellectual and spiritual history. At Harvard University, Andrews had felt constrained by the routines of college and by the religious language he heard at King’s Chapel. Yet beyond Cambridge, alone among fields and woods, he had experienced the landscape as a release from that mediocrity and confinement. Recalling Emerson’s image of the self becoming a transparent eye, Andrews remembers a moment of self-forgetting in which he seemed to see everything while becoming nothing. Nature had made him feel part of a larger presence and had offered a glimpse of a hidden nature within himself. The open country near Butcher’s Crossing becomes, in this sense, a hoped-for sanctuary more compelling to him than either King’s Chapel or Jackson’s Saloon.

The Horizon and the Decision to Go

While Miller is away, Andrews spends long hours at his hotel window, watching the village and the country beyond it. His gaze repeatedly turns west. The horizon first appears sharply bounded beneath a clear sky, then wavers in the heat, merges with the sky as the wind rises, and loses its clear edges. At night, as darkness seems to make the village contract, Andrews sometimes feels as if he is falling. Lights in the street, a struck match, or a lantern at an open door restore him to the familiar room. The scene joins attraction to disorientation: the immense landscape awakens wonder, but also makes the limits of human orientation unstable.

The horizon recalls his childhood view from the cliffs of Massachusetts Bay, where the immensity of the Atlantic had overwhelmed his mind. Now the prairie produces a similar astonishment. Andrews thinks of legendary explorers who sailed toward the edge of a vast expanse and never returned, imagining the fear of an apparently endless fall. The western land is not simply a promise of escape; it is an unknown that can unsettle the person drawn toward it.

When Andrews later wanders to McDonald’s shack, he listens to McDonald’s warning that association with hunters can ruin a man. Andrews remains calm and expresses gratitude for McDonald’s concern, but his resolve has already taken shape. Outside, he lets his feet carry him along the wagon tracks, hesitating at the main road like a compass needle finding its direction. He believes nature exerts a subtle magnetism, and that in recent days its attraction has become strong enough to penetrate his habits and ideas. He turns west, toward the river and the country beyond it.

The river becomes a threshold in Andrews’s imagination. From its bank, he sees the town on one side and wilderness on the other, and understands the hunting expedition he arranged with Miller as a stratagem that made departure easier for his settled habits. Business is not what takes him west. He feels he is leaving in freedom and that, wherever he lives in the future, he will move farther from cities and back toward wilderness. Even a return to town, he thinks, could become another way of leaving it more completely. This conviction makes the expedition at once a practical journey and the vehicle for a deeper break with his former life.

The Wilderness as Experience and Resource

The country Andrews enters does not remain an abstract spiritual ideal. Before reaching the mountains, the travelers encounter evidence of earlier hunting on the Kansas plains. Miller describes a time when bison covered the land for miles and a hunter could bring home a thousand or fifteen hundred animals in two weeks; now only smaller herds remain, and a successful hunt might yield a few hundred. Beside a large skeleton, Miller recalls that bones once lay in mountains from Pawnee Fork to the end of Smoky Hill. The bones might be gathered for fertilizer, though Miller also describes their many uses by Indigenous people. The scene makes visible the accumulated aftermath of commercial hunting: the landscape Andrews approaches as a source of renewal is already marked by resource depletion and the remains of mass killing.

The travelers also pass a group of Indigenous people living in makeshift shelters cut into a river bluff. Children stop playing to watch them, while the adults do not answer Miller’s greeting. Miller dismisses the group with contempt. Their brief appearance complicates the idea of an empty frontier: people inhabit this country, but the hunters’ perspective reduces them to an obstacle or a category rather than engaging with them. Andrews’s search for wilderness therefore unfolds within a landscape already shaped by unequal claims, settlement, and hunting.

The railway supplies another measure of change. Andrews sees its parallel lines cutting across the plain toward the first hills, and Miller recognizes them with astonishment before touching the smooth steel. The party then continues toward the mountains and follows a stream into a broad valley. The railway and the hunters represent different movements into the West, but both make the supposed remoteness of the country vulnerable to transport and extraction. Even before Andrews enters the valley, the wilderness he imagines is implicated in expanding systems of access and use.

The Longing Tested by the Hunt

In the valley, Andrews’s attention becomes bound to the place and to the scale of the hunt. Miller’s firing continues while Andrews and Schneider struggle to skin the animals, often working past sunset and rising before dawn. The herd thins, and the carcasses lie across the ground, their smell so familiar that Andrews almost ceases to notice it. He realizes that he has never imagined the day when the last bison will be killed, yet has always understood that Miller will not leave while any remain. He measures the time not by the passing days, as Schneider does, but by the number of animals left and the progress toward loading the hides.

This fixation changes Andrews’s relation to the world beyond the valley. The route back across the mountains and plains, and even Butcher’s Crossing, become blurred and dreamlike in memory. The valley, with its flat yellow-green floor, enclosing mountains, pines, and bright cottonwoods, seems to give his existence its shape and place. His attachment fulfills part of his longing: he is no longer merely looking toward an immense country from the edge of town. But that sense of belonging grows within a landscape being emptied by the very activity that brought him there.

The later return to Butcher’s Crossing exposes the gap between the expedition’s labor and its commercial promise. J.D. McDonald points out that hunters are selling bison meat to the railway company while leaving the hides to rot, and calculates what Miller could have earned from the meat he abandoned. His observation makes the slaughter’s waste newly legible: the animals have been killed, but the expedition’s intended profit has failed to secure their full value. McDonald’s bleak account of lives sustained by lies and unrealized possibilities also stands against Andrews’s belief that the journey will disclose a meaningful origin. The longing remains a defining impulse, but the novel tests it against a wilderness that offers no guarantee of spiritual salvation and bears the visible costs of human desire.