In the East he became one of the wealthiest financiers in America--and one of the most feared and hated.Now, suffering from incurable cancer, he has come back to New Mexico to die alone. But when an all-out range war erupts, Flint chooses to help Nancy Kerrigan, a local rancher. A cold-eyed speculator is setting up the land swindle of a lifetime, and Buckdun, a notorious assassin, is there to back his play.Flint alone can help Nancy save her ranch...with his cash, his connections--and his gun. He still has his legendary will to fight. All he needs is time, and that's fast running out....

    With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It is the 1870s, and 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 on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews 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 buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon 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.

    Here is the saga of loyalty and treachery, tragedy and triumph.

    If the cattle were diseased, the men were worse -- they were Texas Rebs, some of them still wearing faded Army gray. They were outcasts, driving hard across a land where war wounds still festered, They were gamblers, staking their futures on a herd of pure-bred cattle.

    Photographer Alexander Burdick drives his old mule-drawn army ambulance and a smooth-bore shotgun to the New Mexico Territory and into a range war.