The American Civil War era

The American Civil War era is a point of reference rather than a fully dated setting in the novel. A remembered Boston acquaintance places the action roughly twelve to fourteen years after the prewar past, while the story’s western communities confront the rapid depletion of the bison and the arrival of railway lines. The contrast makes the war-era marker part of a broader transition: from an earlier social world to a West being reorganized by hunting, trade, and settlement.

The Prewar Memory

J.D. McDonald recognizes William Andrews through a letter from Andrews’s father, whom he had known in Boston before the war. McDonald recalls visiting the family’s sitting room for tea, perhaps twelve or fourteen years earlier, but admits that he no longer remembers whether he saw the boy. He remembers himself then as a mere clerk at a textile firm, someone of little consequence in the father’s eyes. The encounter links the novel’s western present to a distant urban past, but the connection is uneven: Andrews’s father had spoken of McDonald often, while McDonald remembers only a handful of visits and doubts that he mattered to him.

That asymmetry gives the temporal reference a personal dimension. The war divides McDonald’s recollection from the present, yet what he dwells on is not military history but the distance between his former insignificance and his later identity as a man with a business and plans for the settlement. The past survives as a social memory, imperfectly held and differently valued by the two men.

A Changing Bison Economy

The western present is marked by an economic order built around hunters and hides. McDonald regards the settlement as dependent on the hide trade and imagines that the railway will change its prospects. He describes hunters as people who use the land for a living without knowing what else to do with it, setting his own confidence in development against the rough economy on which the village depends.

Miller’s account of the hunting business supplies a measure of how quickly that economy has altered. He and McDonald arrived in the area four years earlier, when the plains in spring appeared black with American bison for miles. A two-week hunt could then yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals; by the time he speaks, a hunt of two or three hundred is considered fortunate, and he expects Kansas to be exhausted of bison within another year or two. McDonald’s expeditions pay hunters fifty cents per raw summer hide and keep thirty or forty parties working across the country, while Miller rejects that arrangement and hunts for himself or not at all. The scale of the trade and the speed of the decline belong to the same historical change.

The aftermath remains visible in the landscape. Miller recalls that, until five or six years earlier, riders could travel among enormous deposits of bones from Pawnee Fork toward the end of the Smoky Hill. He points to a carcass and kicks a rib loose, making the past abundance tangible as remains underfoot. He also imagines that a farmer may collect the bones for fertilizer, although he doubts they will be of much use that way. His account of Indigenous uses for bone—tools, arrow points, ornaments, and children’s toys—contrasts with the prospect of reducing the remains to a commodity. The bison economy leaves not only fewer living animals but a changing use and meaning for what is left behind.

Railways, Settlement, and the Occupied West

The railway is first an expectation in McDonald’s plans for the village, then a physical presence encountered on the trail. During the journey west, William Andrews sees its parallel lines crossing the plain toward the foothills. Miller, who has already spotted them, stops to touch the smooth steel before looking toward the mountains. The gesture sets the railway’s material certainty against the open country through which the hunters have traveled: a new route is being laid across a landscape that had seemed defined by distance and repetition.

That expansion does not begin on empty land. On the way, the party encounters five or six Indigenous people seated near makeshift shelters cut into a riverbank, with children playing outside. The children stop to watch the travelers; the adults do not answer Miller’s greeting. Miller dismisses them as river Indians and reduces their lives to the animals they eat. The brief meeting exposes a limit in his account of the West: he treats the country as a hunting ground and its inhabitants as negligible, even as the scene shows people already living there.

The railway’s eventual economic effects differ from McDonald’s confident forecast. Later, he says that the line will pass fifty miles to the north, and that hunters are selling bison meat to the railway company while leaving hides to rot where the animals were skinned. The railroad therefore does not simply make the hide business more valuable, as McDonald had predicted. It redirects the value of the kill, while the discarded hides register the waste produced by a trade that has already depleted its central resource.

Historical Significance

The novel uses the prewar recollection to orient a story whose main historical pressures are felt through changed work, land use, and transport rather than through a direct account of the war. Its chronology is relative, not calendrical: a remembered Boston world lies twelve to fourteen years behind the western encounters, and Miller’s own recollections measure the bison decline over only a few years. Within that compressed span, an apparently inexhaustible herd becomes scattered, the plains acquire trails and railway tracks, and a settlement built on hides anticipates a new economy.

These details complicate the idea of the West as untouched space awaiting development. The railway enters a lived-in landscape; commercial hunting turns animals into hides and meat, then leaves bones and carcasses behind; and McDonald’s hopes for progress cannot control where the line goes or which part of the bison becomes profitable. The era’s significance lies in this collision between remembered past and material transformation: the world after the war is not merely later in time, but differently organized around extraction, transportation, and settlement.