Reading Butcher’s Crossing

Interesting to note that what’s essentially the cinematic equivalent of Butcher’s Crossing—that would be the film Meek’s Cutoff—has been very underappreciated despite being one the best films I’ve seen in recent years. They’re both about the myth of the West, and deconstructing that myth.

I think Crossing is just as good as Stoner, essentially the latter transferred to the setting of the declining Old West. Anyway, read both.

The other answer has to do with Butcher’s Crossing itself. Trevor and Brian wonder whether it’s relatively neglected because it’s a Western, a genre in decline since the 1960s. I’m not sure that Butcher’s Crossing is a “Western” so much as “a novel of the West”—and please, don’t ask me to explain the difference between the two before I’ve read more Westerns. They mention that it has been described as a “revisionist Western,” and that could mean the same thing.

I think it has more to do with the specifics of the content of Butcher’s Crossing, and Americans’ continued trouble relationship with the realities of settling the West. Westerns, in a certain way, don’t face this reality. That is perhaps too strong; there is certainly ugliness in The Virginian. But the very jacket copy of the NYRB Classics edition of Butcher’s Crossing describes “an orgy of slaughter,” with men “so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time.” This in particular seems like a fair bet at a turnoff for many readers, and for me too these passages were difficult to read.

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