In the 1870s, Will Andrews, a young man from a proper eastern family drops out of Harvard to go west. Intoxicated by the heady fumes of Emersonian transcendentalism, he seeks that "original relation" to Nature celebrated by the sage of Concord. He knows he is not going to find it in college.

Andrews washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town that is, as its name suggests, nothing more than somewhere between here and there. In other words, nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for a way to make money or a way to waste it, and before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them. He regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies, and he convinces him 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 the buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Then winter 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.

John Williams's fiercely intelligent, beautifully written Western is a harrowing confrontation with the American dream.