The book begins and ends in the fictional frontier town of Butcher's Crossing, Kansas, in the early 1870s, where Andrews joins a buffalo-hunting expedition.
It is considered by many to be among the first pioneers of a more "realistic" breed of western novel, along with a few other notable works including Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Oakley Hall's Warlock.
[3] Reflecting on the state of the western genre at the time of writing Butcher's Crossing, Williams wrote: "The subject of the West has undergone a process of mindless stereotyping".
[6] Miller claims to have stumbled upon a remote mountain vale in Colorado years ago, where a rare buffalo herd lives that few people have ever seen and which therefore promises a big payout.
Miller eventually returns with a hired skinner named Fred Schneider, who will make the fourth member of the group, and the expedition quickly departs Butcher's Crossing to reach the mountains before winter.
[1] The group finally arrives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and Miller leads them to a scarcely used trail that takes them over a pass and into the hidden valley he had promised.
Andrews is at first appalled and sickened by the mass slaughter, by the reduction of the noble buffalo to skinless and fly-ridden hunks of meat, but as the days pass he is inured to the sight and smell of death.
Without time to build a more suitable shelter, the men nearly freeze to death and are forced to fashion crude sleeping bags out of raw buffalo hides.
After several days of incessant snowfall, the expedition realizes that they are stranded until the snow melts and the pass becomes usable again–which means they will be waiting until the spring, very likely a duration of six to eight months.
Throughout the winter, each man retreats into himself: Charley ceases to do his job, Schneider talks only to himself, and Miller hunts and disappears into the forest for entire days.
[1] Devastated, Andrews, Miller, and Charley Hoge return to Butcher's Crossing, but find the town mostly deserted: the hotels and saloons are unused, entire buildings have disappeared, and the few faces occupying them are all different.
[1] Several of Butcher's Crossing's themes revolve around the plot in William Andrews' quest to find himself in the vast expanses of the unsettled West.
And in its pitiless depiction of men reduced to the most basic and extreme of situations--thirst, cold, heat, exhaustion, isolation, not to mention the undesirability of each other's company--this book very nicely fits into the contemporary vogue for survival-manual entertainment.
"[1] Archie Bland, a writer for Independent magazine agrees with this, saying that parts of Butcher's Crossing, specifically the ending, do not quite hold up to his later novel Stoner.