Summary

The novel begins in the fictional frontier town of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas. It is the 1870s. A young man named William Andrews arrives in town on a coach from a nearby, more established town called Ellsworth. Andrews departs the coach at Butcher’s Crossing and enters Butcher’s Hotel, where he pays for a room. The room is simple and bare, with no running water or modern amenities. In Chapter 2, Andrews goes to the office of J.D. McDonald in Butcher’s Crossing. McDonald is a businessman engaged in the buffalo hide trade, buying hides from hunters and selling them to garment manufacturers in the east. Andrews says that his father knew McDonald from when McDonald lived in Boston about ten years ago. Andrews says that he was in his third year at Harvard College, but he left in order...