Butcher's Crossing — Content Guide for Parents
Found in this book
- ViolenceCentral
- Scary contentSupporting
- ReligionSupportingChristian
- Race & cultureBrief
- ClimateSupporting
- Sexual contentSupporting
- Gender rolesBriefChallenges traditional roles
Not found
- Gender & orientation
Couldn't confirm
- Profanity
- Profanity: The sources describe the plot but say nothing about the book's language; the R-rating for language is for the film.
Content themes
Factual summary of themes present in this book. No opinion — just the facts.
Get the full theme breakdown in the app
Summaries and source quotes for every theme.
Download for iOSExample theme card
Religion
PRESENTContains references to prayer and church attendance. A minister character plays a supporting role in two chapters.
About this book
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
Frequently asked questions
Is Butcher's Crossing appropriate for a 7-year-old?
The story's centerpiece is the men's mass killing and skinning of thousands of buffalo, and it ends with a drowning death and the burning of the hides. The men nearly die of thirst, then are snowed in by a blizzard and suffer cold, hunger and cabin fever, and one is killed crossing a flooded river.
Does Butcher's Crossing have violence?
Found (Central): The story's centerpiece is the men's mass killing and skinning of thousands of buffalo, and it ends with a drowning death and the burning of the hides.
Does Butcher's Crossing have scary content?
Found (Supporting): The men nearly die of thirst, then are snowed in by a blizzard and suffer cold, hunger and cabin fever, and one is killed crossing a flooded river.
Does Butcher's Crossing have religion?
Found (Supporting, Christian): One of the hunting party, Charley Hoge, is a devout Christian who carries a Bible, quotes verses and starts religious debates, and the hero is a minister's son.
Does Butcher's Crossing have race & culture?
Found (Brief): Native Americans appear only in a dismissive remark by a hunter that they are not worth bothering with or shooting.
Does Butcher's Crossing have profanity?
Couldn't confirm: The sources describe the plot but say nothing about the book's language; the R-rating for language is for the film.
Does Butcher's Crossing have climate?
Found (Supporting): The story shows hunters wiping out a whole buffalo herd for hides, and reviewers describe this as the destruction of wilderness.
Does Butcher's Crossing have sexual content?
Found (Supporting): A prostitute named Francine is a recurring character, and the hero first refuses her and later spends a week with her.
Does Butcher's Crossing have gender roles?
Found (Brief, Challenges traditional roles): A reviewer says the novel departs from romanticized ideas of Western masculinity, and the narration has Will reject a 'womanish nausea' at the killing.
Does Butcher's Crossing have gender & orientation?
Not found in the sources we checked.
