How long does it take to read Butcher's Crossing?
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams takes about 5 hours 1 minute to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 1 minute
A weekend read
First published 1960. 274 pages, about 75,350 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 22 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 1 minute |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 8 minutes |
The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey, the men reach a place of paradisal richness, where they abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter. So caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time, the men are overtaken by winter and snowed in. In the 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.
Subjects: American bison hunting, Western stories, Fiction, American Western Fiction, Literature - Classics / Criticism, Westerns
