What I’m Reading: Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Nature’s Metroplis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon, is a thorough, detailed book about the history of Chicago. Yet it doesn’t give an account of the labor movement, the ward system, mayors or aldermen, or the elevated trains, and only the barest mention of skyscrapers. So what sort of Chicago history could this possibly be?

Rather than those topics, well-discussed elsewhere, the story told within this book is just as interesting, and perhaps more surprising: Nature’s Metropolis is actually a history of Chicago’s relationship to its rural hinterland, and how the two developed in tandem during the 19th century.

Cronon’s thesis is that most people have a conception of the rural Midwest as “natural,” and the city of Chicago as totally manmade and separate from nature. He himself took this view when driving on family vacations across the region as a boy. But really, the wheat and corn farms, cattle lots, and small towns of downstate Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas are nothing like the natural prarie landscape that preceded them. In their own way, they are as manmade as anything in Chicago. These rural features came about starting in the 1840s, developing along with the growing metropolis that functioned as a gateway to the more settled eastern part of the country, sending the natural resources of the Midwest to New England, New York, and the mid-Atlantic, while drawing manufactured goods and the capital to finance the whole operation in return.

In the 1830s, Chicago was still only a small settlement with a minor US Army fort and a handful of French and American fur traders. But in 1833, the US government decided to finance a canal that would link the Chicago River to the Mississippi, thus connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system, and Chicago experienced an overnight boom. Yet it was not this canal that was to make Chicago the great city it became, but a new technology still in its infancy at that time: the railroad. It was the railroad that connected Chicago to the resources of at first western and southern Illinois, and soon the entire Midwest. But not only that, it was the railroad that spurred the exploitation of those resources by providing farmers, cattlemen, and lumber mills with an easy way to get their goods to Chicago’s great markets and processing centers.

After the early chapter on the railroad, Nature’s Metropolis proceeds with chapters discussing grain, lumber, and meat, and the Chicago innovations that both resulted from and further spurred the development of these resources. For instance, in the 1840s and 1850s, Chicago found itself overwhelmed by the growing influx of wheat and corn from the ever-expanding Midwestern farms. Two inventions allowed the city to handle this trade: the grain elevator and the futures market. Grain up to that point had been handled in large sacks labeled with the name of the farmer who had produced it so that the eventual sale proceeds could be returned to him when it was sold in New Orleans or New York. But the steam-powered grain elevator, invented in Buffalo but introduced in Chicago in 1848, enabled train cars full of grain to easily dump their contentsin on one side, and just as easily be reloaded onto waiting ships in the Chicago River. This required doing away with the old sack system, instead providing farmers with receipts for the sale of their grain on the spot. It also had the effect of turning grain into a true commodity, for no longer was it sold as individual shipments traceable to a single farmer, but as a never-ending “golden stream.” The receipts provided the farmers could themselves be bought and sold, which in turn led to the creation of the futures market at the Chicago Board of Trade. Not only could farmers use this market to hedge against future price changes, but market traders could themselves speculate on future price movements, leading to an entirely new class of financial professionals.

After these middle chapters on the commodities, the final chapters cover the themes of Chicago as a “gateway city” and what that meant–as well as how it captured the role of gateway to the west from St. Louis, a far older and better-established city–in addition to chapters on the role of catalogs in spreading commerce, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, vice in Chicago as a market unto itself, and finally, the rise of suburbs and vacation resorts as a final reordering of the relationship between city and hinterland.

One part of the book turned out to have unexpected personal relevance for me: the final section of the chapter on lumber, which described the “cut-over district” in Wisconsin and Michigan left after the northern white pine forests had been exhausted in the 1890s. It reminded me of old pictures I’ve seen of the land in the Arkansas Ozarks where my step-mother’s family collectively owns thousands of acres, passed on from her grandfather, who purchased it in the 1930s for next to nothing. And it’s easy to see why he got it for so cheap, because the hills in the pictures are bare, cut down to stumps, just like the pictures of the cut-over district in Nature’s Metropolis. When I first saw the aged photos as a teenager, I had trouble reconciling the lushly forested land I was familiar with to the waste left after the clearcutting decades earlier.

This later clearing in Arkansas is even alluded to in the book. After the exhaustion of the white pine forests, starting around the 1880s, and definitely by 1900, the national lumber market was increasingly supplied by the Pacific Northwest, as well as the yellow pine forests of the South, primarily in Arkansas and Louisiana. The railroad network had gradually expanded in the South after the Civil War, providing the lumber companies better access to the relatively virgin forests there. Besides that, yellow pine was similar to white pine, only stronger, so there was a ready market. But the distance of these new areas from Chicago led to the city’s eventual decline in handling lumber in favor of Kansas City, which was much better sited to handle the southern trade.

Even besides that (admittedly distant) personal connection, this is one of the better books of urban history I’ve ever read. It tackles an important theme I hadn’t seen before– the mutual and necessary interdependence of rural and urban development in 19th century America– and convincingly proves it with thorough, careful research. I found chapter after chapter and line after line to be fascinating and informative in a way that reminded me of reading Edwin Burrows’s and Mike Wallace’s Gotham, their comprehensive history of New York City, though Nature’s Metropolis has a shorter length and tighter focus than that book.

I should point out that at the beginning and again near the end, there a couple theoretical sections that I suspect will not be of interest to many readers. In these sections, Cronon discusses various theories of city development and finds them wanting for explaining the astoundingly swift rise of Chicago from the 1830s to 1890s. Indeed, Cronon turns to his idea of a gateway city as an alternative explanation to these more standard theories. I take it that Cronon himself either conceived, or greatly advanced, this gateway theory.

But other than those sections, which can easily be skipped if a reader finds them too dry or irrelevant, this is an engrossing and insightful book, and I highly recommend it to any fan of urban history in general or of the history of the Midwest or Chicago in particular.