William Andrews

William Andrews is a young Harvard-educated newcomer to Butcher’s Crossing whose longing to know the wilderness draws him into Miller’s bison-hunting expedition. He initially imagines the western landscape as a source of freedom, beauty, and spiritual renewal; the hunt makes that ideal inseparable from the destruction of the animals and the increasingly damaged world the men leave behind.

Identity and Background

Andrews enters the story as a stranger to Butcher’s Crossing, arriving from Ellsworth and signing his full name in the hotel register. His background is shaped by Boston and Harvard University: only months earlier, he had attended morning services at King’s Chapel and listened to religious instruction in the college’s classrooms. His father had encouraged him to read Emerson, but Andrews had not read the Bible closely. When Charley Hoge tries to discuss scripture with him, Andrews’s admission of ignorance changes the tone between them: Hoge becomes suspicious and speaks to him as a preacher rather than an equal.

Andrews remembers that, during his college years, the natural spaces beyond Cambridge had offered a release from the narrowness and mediocrity he felt in college life. Recalling Emerson’s image of becoming a transparent eyeball, he remembers feeling emptied of self yet able to perceive everything, connected to a nameless force and to God. The memory helps explain why the prairies around Butcher’s Crossing feel strangely familiar to him. The book’s opening reflection on living creatures’ apparent contentment also resonates with his impulse to contemplate life beyond the constraints of human society, though his later experience complicates any comforting vision of nature as a spiritual refuge.

From Longing to Commitment

J.D. McDonald warns Andrews that the settlement depends on hides and that its hunters are rough men. He fears that contact with them will become an obsession, and imagines a more settled future for the young man. Andrews calmly answers that he has come to know the country as fully as he can because he feels compelled to do so. When he looks west across the prairie, he cannot find words adequate to the freedom and beauty he seeks. His thoughts instead turn to Boston: its crowded streets, smoke-stained buildings, and the Charles River carrying the city’s refuse toward the bay. Against that urban image, the prairie seems to him rooted in fertile earth and renewed year after year.

His decision to travel with Miller begins as a practical arrangement, but Andrews recognizes that the hunt is also a pretext for pursuing a deeper desire. At the river, he imagines the water as a boundary between the town and the wilderness. The expedition, he realizes, is not what ultimately draws him west; he is leaving freely, in the hope of moving away from the city and toward what he regards as the origin of his inner life. He imagines that even a return to town would become another step away from it. This conviction gives his departure the force of a personal threshold, but it also risks making the landscape serve an ideal formed before he has encountered it closely.

When Miller asks whether Andrews is genuinely interested in joining him, Andrews confirms that he is. Miller makes clear that the hunt will remain his own, while Andrews must provide the money for transport and supplies. Their preparations require a wagon and oxen: Miller favors the animals because they can graze along the route and pull heavy loads, even if they travel slowly. On August 25, the four men meet behind the stables with a wagon carrying provisions for six weeks. Andrews has converted his desire for experience into a material commitment to the expedition.

The Expedition and Its Human Landscape

On the journey, Andrews encounters signs that the country is neither empty nor untouched. The party passes a family traveling with a mule that Miller believes will not survive the route, and later meets five wary men heading to Colorado to claim a mining site. At a riverside promontory, Andrews sees children playing near makeshift shelters and older Indigenous people seated by their entrances. The children stop to watch the travelers; the adults do not return Miller’s greeting. Miller dismisses the group contemptuously. The encounter registers the difference between Andrews’s expansive idea of wilderness and the inhabited places through which the expedition actually passes.

The journey’s daily repetitions increasingly shape Andrews’s life: rising, drinking coffee, packing bedding, tending the animals, eating hard biscuits and dried fruit, and making camp again in the dark. The ritual gives his days a form even as its meaning seems to diminish through repetition. Elsewhere, the party discovers a north–south trail marked by what Miller identifies as cattle tracks, evidence that herds are being driven up from Texas. Later, Andrews sees the parallel lines of a railroad cutting across the plains toward the hills. Miller recognizes the railway first, approaches it, and runs his fingers along the smooth steel. The scene places the expedition’s older hunting economy beside the infrastructure changing the region.

Hunting, Ruin, and a Changed Sense of Scale

Andrews witnesses the consequences of earlier hunting in the Kansas plains. Beside the remains of a large American bison, Miller recalls a time when immense numbers of animals stretched from Pawnee Fork to the end of Smoky Hill. He describes how hunters once brought back a thousand or fifteen hundred animals in a fortnight; now a successful hunt might yield only two or three hundred, and he predicts that Kansas will soon have none left. Miller kicks a rib from the skeleton and describes other uses for bison bones, from tools and arrow points to ornaments and children’s toys. The bones’ possible value contrasts with their likely future as fertilizer, or with the careless waste of the animals themselves.

In the valley, the daily pace of killing makes the expedition’s purpose harder to ignore. Andrews and Fred Schneider struggle to skin and butcher the animals Miller shoots, often working before dawn and after the day’s hunt. The rifle’s repeated report follows them through their labor. As the herd shrinks, Andrews realizes that he has never seriously imagined the moment when it will be gone. He has understood, without needing Miller to say so, that Miller will not leave while a single bison remains alive. Andrews measures the passage of time by the number of animals left, rather than by the succession of days.

The valley also displaces Andrews’s memory of everywhere else. Butcher’s Crossing, the plains, and the mountain route fade into a confused, dreamlike recollection. The valley’s yellow-green floor, enclosing mountains, pines, and bright aspen crowns seem to give his existence a shape and a place; he cannot imagine himself away from it. This powerful sense of belonging is bound to a landscape being emptied by the hunt. In that contradiction, his inward identification with the wilderness no longer guarantees kinship with the living animals that inhabit it.

Disillusionment and Narrative Role

After the expedition, Andrews hears McDonald describe the changes in the hide trade. Hunters now sell bison meat to the railway company and leave the hides to rot where they have skinned the animals. McDonald points out that the meat Andrews’s party left behind could have earned money by the pound. The railway, once imagined by McDonald as a promise of rising land value, has arrived on a route fifty miles north; it has not rescued the old business in the way he anticipated. The landscape has been transformed both by the slaughter and by a market that now values what the hunters discarded.

McDonald’s final judgment turns from commerce to the meaning of Andrews’s choices. He describes life as sustained by successive lies, ending in the realization that a person may have achieved nothing of what he imagined possible. He inventories what the expedition has yielded: thousands of dead bison, hides left to rot, a wrecked wagon, calluses, and the memory of a dead man. Andrews answers that this is not so, but terror catches in his voice. The exchange does not establish what he will make of the loss; it exposes the distance between his earlier faith in discovery and the wreckage McDonald sees.

Andrews’s trajectory is therefore not a simple escape from civilization into freedom. He begins by treating the wilderness as the source of an authentic life, but his journey brings him face to face with commercial exploitation, human settlement, technological change, and the consequences of his own participation in the hunt. His changing sense of time and place shows how completely the valley has entered his experience, while McDonald’s account forces the possibility that intensity and sacrifice do not necessarily amount to discovery. The character’s central tension lies between the spiritual meaning he seeks in nature and the destructive human activity through which he enters it.