Butcher’s Crossing is a fiercely intelligent and beautifully written western novel. Set in the 1870s, it follows the journey of Will Andrews, a young man inspired by Emerson to seek an original relation to nature. Leaving Harvard, he ventures west, finding himself in the small Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing, a place filled with restless men eager to make and waste money.

Andrews befriends a man who speaks of immense herds of buffalo hidden in a beautiful Colorado Rockies valley. Enticed by the promise, Andrews joins an expedition to hunt the buffalo. The journey is grueling, but the valley's richness is worth the struggle. However, as they indulge in an orgy of slaughter, the men lose track of time, and winter traps them in snow.

The following spring, driven to madness by cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they return to Butcher’s Crossing, only to find a world as irrevocably changed as they are.