Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon presents a comprehensive analysis of Chicago's development during the 19th century, emphasizing its pivotal role as a Gateway City to the Great West. Cronon explores how Chicago's strategic location at the intersection of transportation routes facilitated the flow of goods from the hinterlands to urban markets.

Grains, lumber, and meat emerge as key commodities driving Chicago's growth. The Midwest's fertile prairies supplied grains that fueled the city's booming grain trade, earning Chicago the title of "breadbasket of the world." Simultaneously, the region's forests were harvested to meet the demand for lumber, supporting the city's construction industry. Meatpacking also played a significant role, with Chicago emerging as a hub for processing and distributing livestock from the Western plains. Innovations in refrigeration and transportation enabled Chicago to dominate the meat industry, supplying meat to consumers across the nation.

Cronon's meticulous research sheds light on the complex interplay between urbanization, environmental exploitation, and economic development. By examining Chicago's rise within the broader context of the Great West, Nature's Metropolis offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of human societies and the natural world, challenging conventional narratives of urban growth.




Favorite Passages:

"For [Louis] Sullivan, the wonder of Chicago was the wonder of nature transformed: the more nature had been reworked by an inspired human imagination, the more beautiful it became. It served as the vehicle and occasion for expressing human spirit.' - p. 14

We “moderns” believe, even in a postmodern age, that we have the power to control the earth, despite our deep ambivalence about whether we know ow to exercise that power wisely. On the other hand, our nostalgia for the more “natural” world of an earlier time when we were not so powerful, when the human landscape did not seem so omnipresent, encourages us to seek refuge in pastoral or wilderness landscapes that seem as yet unscarred by human action. Convinced of our human omnipotence, we can imagine nature retreating to small islands – “preserves” – in the midst of a landscape which otherwise belongs to us. And therein lies our dilemma: however we wish to “control” nature or “preserve” it – we unconsciously affirm our belief that we ourselves are unnatural. Nature is the place where we are not. - p. 18

“Chicago’s population exploded after 1833 without bothering much about a pastoral stage, a settlement of pioneering subsistence farmers, or even an agricultural community at all. The town’s speculators gambled on and urban future, staking fortunes on land they hoped would soon lie at the heart of a great city. Explaining their vision of Chicago’s ‘destiny’ means reading Turner backward, for their theory of frontier growth apparently began with the city instead of ending with it.” - p. 32

“The changes in Chicago’s markets suddenly made it possible for people to buy and sell grain not as the physical product of human labor on a particular tract of prairie earth but as an abstract claim on the golden stream flowing through the city’s elevators.” - p. 120

“The futures market was a market not in grain but in the price of grain. By entering into futures contracts, one bought and sold not wheat or corn or oats but the prices of those goods as they would exist at a future time. Speculators made and lost money by selling each other legally binding forecasts of how much grain prices would rise or fall.” - p. 125

"The land might have been taken from Indians, its profits might sometimes have been expropriated by absentee landlords, its small farmers might on occasion have suffocated beneath a burden of accumulating debt, but much of what made the land valuable in the first place had little to do with the exploitation of people. The exploitation of nature came first.” - p. 150

“Animals’ lives had been redistributed across regional space, for they were born in one place, fattened in another, and killed in still a third.” - p. 224

“The cattle that grazed on a Wyoming hillside, the corn that grew in an Iowa field, and the white pine that flourished in a Wisconsin forest would never ordinarily have shared the same landscape. All nonetheless came together in Chicago. There they were valued according to the demands and desires of people who for the most part had never even seen the landscapes from which they came. In an urban market, one could by goods from hinterlands halfway round the world without understanding much if anything about how the goods had come to be there. Those who bought plants and animals from so far away had little way of knowing the ecological consequences of such purchases, so the separation of production and consumption had moral as well as material implications.” - p. 226

“Once a product had been processed, packaged, advertised, sold, and shipped within the long chain of wholesale-retail relationships, its identity became more and more a creature of the market. The natural roots from which it had sprung and the human history that had created it faded as it passed from hand to hand. Wherever one bought it, that was where it came from.”- p. 340

"We are consumers all, whether we live in the city or the country. This is to say that the urban and the rural landscapes I have been describing are not two places but one. They created each other, they transformed each other's environments and economies, and they now depend on each other for their very survival. To see them separately is to misunderstand where they came from and where they might go in the future. Worse, to ignore the nearly infinite ways they affect one another is to miss our moral responsibility for the ways they shape each other's landscapes and alter the lives of people and organisms within their bounds. The city-country relations I have described in this book now involve the entire planet, in part because of what happened to Chicago and the Great West during the nineteenth century. We all live in the city. We all live in the country. Both are second nature to us." - p. 384-385

Recommended books: ( )

It is not possible to praise this book too much. It leaves the reader enriched in so many areas. As the title implies, it is a deep history of Chicago during the 19th century but it is also a history of how Chicago interacted with its hinterland, an area that encompassed much of the Western USA. Unlike many other histories of cities, it's emphasis is on the influence had on it's countryside and the influence of it's countryside on Chicago. The book is a must read for anyone interested in developing a deeper understanding of American history in the 19th century, the development of the Western USA, and evolution of the railroad networks, and the history of technology and business.

The book is very detailed without becoming mired down in boring details. Instead, the level of detail ensures that the reader is left with a deep understanding of each topic discussed in the book. The book begins with the early history of Chicago and the vision of early boosters of the city from the 1840s. It then covers the transportation networks that evolved to serve Chicago, particularly the railroads and the water transport on the Great Lakes.

The book then goes into the role that Chicago played in the market for wheat. Innovations that led to Chicago's success with this commodity included the use of Grain Elevators, the Chicago Board of Trade, standardization of wheat qualities, and futures contracts. The book then moves on to discuss the lumber industry and explains the cash flow challenges of this industry as a consequence of the need to transport the logs via rivers at a time when they had enough water in them and were not frozen over. The lumber industry eventually fell as a victim to it's own success when the countryside began to run out of trees. The book then shifts to a discussion of the meat packing industry and the many innovations used in Chicago. These included the use of refrigerator rail cars, kept cold using blocks of ice collected from frozen lakes in the winter, in order to transport beef and not the entire cow.

The book then continues with a mapping of capital and cash flows between Chicago and it's hinterland. This includes a deep dive into the challenges of wholesale and retail merchants in the hinterland. It also explains how their situation evolved with the increase in the rail network. Finally, this section discusses the implications of the catalog sales of Montgomery Wards and Sears.

The final section of the book looks at the Chicago Fair of 1893. In addition to discussing the fair, the section talks about the general attitude of rural society towards Chicago and how Chicago became a magnet that attracted young rural kids to the big city. There is also a discussion of vice in Chicago. Finally, the Epilogue of the book discusses how the hinterland evolved into an area that attracted tourists from Chicago. ( )

One of my favorite books. ( )

I've been really into economic histories lately, and this analysis of Chicago's development and its relationship to the Midwest it came to dominate was both staggeringly detailed and elegantly well-written. On the highest level, this is sort of a refutation and extension of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier hypothesis" (short version: the old countries of Europe never had the Wild West's unique conflict between the "individual freedom" of society's rejects on the frontier and the "law and order" back in the Eastern cities, which helped explain why America was so different than its transatlantic ancestors). Cronon's copiously researched opinion is that city and country, far from being opposed, critically depend on each other. For example, he explores how the holy trinity of the grain elevator, grade standardization (a pile of wheat became "no. 1 spring wheat"), and futures trading at the Board of Trade revolutionized how farmers sold their goods, to the extent that Chicago is a world center of commodities trading to this day and the Midwest is some of the most productive farmland on the planet. Without Chicago (and to a lesser extent similar cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Kansas City; the sections where he traces the rail and financial linkages between them are awesome), the settlers at the frontier never would have managed a living for want of markets; without the farmers producing goods for consumption and distribution, Chicago would have no reason for ever existing. Reading this book so soon after The Box brought home a lot of lessons on how miraculous our current standard of living is: in some ways the Industrial Revolution has never ended, and the great wave of commerce that stretches back to the early 1800s has only begun for most of the world. The book touches mainly grain, lumber, and meat out of the hundreds of goods that Chicago shipped, stored, refined, or revolutionized, but it does a fantastic job of showing not only why Chicago is one of the great cities of the world, but how America has evolved and innovated over time. Basically the only thing I didn't like about the book was that it could have been longer and included more insight from urban development economics. Cronon spends a great deal of time using Von Thünen's concentric circle model as a foil to show how cities don't just accrete in a vacuum but develop symbiotically with the hinterland they create, but it feels like he strawman's this very simple and very old model unnecessarily. If he had used some more modern work in urban development from someone like Ed Glaeser or Paul Krugman (who later wrote an excellent paper on this very book) I think readers would have benefited, but otherwise it was genius. ( )

If I was more into the Midwest I would have given this title another star. Even so, the perspective of the mid to late 19th century conversion of the Midwest from natural landscape to a completely extracted farm was enlightening. Excruciating, but enlightening. The prairies were plowed under on farms made possible by converting the great northern forests to lumber. Chicago markets and finance made it all possible.

The voraciousness of markets and the shortsighted lure of profits today spell doom and destruction for natural and wild landscapes. The 19th century mindset held no conception that the natural world was a limited resource. And one that is necessary to the maintenance of life.

How does the culture get changed to become aware and develop some reverence for the natural world? Books like this help. ( )

This is one of the best books on history I've read. The combination of natural, environmental, cultural, and urban history that forms this picture of the life of Chicago is just fantastic. ( )

This fascinating book explores the intricate interweaving of the City and the Country in American economic reality that simultaneously explains and belies a commonly-perceived distinction in the American mythos that presents the City as the epitome of all that is evil and the Country as the epitome of all that is wholesome. The economic tale, told in great detail through the story of three key natural resources' journeys to becoming commodities in Chicago markets (wheat, timber, and pork), is much more complicated than the mythic construction admits. City and Country are human constructs of what Cronon calls "second nature," and are interdependent rather than opposed. The issue with "second nature" (the human-created order imposed on the ecosystem; e.g., the railroad) is that, though it radically transforms both human and ecological existence, it does so in such a way as to be self-effacing.

In truth, I chose to read this book thinking it would be similar to Ian Frazier's "Great Plains" and Jonathan Raban's "Badlands" (a truly remarkable book!). That initial hunch was both right and wrong. I was wrong to think of the book as a work of "cultural geography" like Frazier's and Raban's work; it was far too focused on economics for that (though, in truth, it did tread some of the same ground). However, that in fact, became for me one of the more fascinating aspects of the book; Cronon's explanation especially of the development of the grain futures market (through the story of the development of the Chicago Board of Trade) was wonderfully written. However, toward the end of the book, when Cronon begins to map the competing "moral geographies" of City and Country present in late 19th-century literature, my hunch proves correct, for Cronon's work there very much connects with the unique cultural geography of American Western life.

Perhaps for me, the most intriguing aspect of Cronon's work was his exposition of the meaning of Chicago's Columbian World Exposition in 1893. He notes that the Exposition must be considered in relation to the Great Chicago Fire, representing an important "death/resurrection" sequence in Midwestern American self-understanding. The "White City," then, was much more than a grandiose display of American achievement but a grandiose vision of the world's future, an attempt to prophesy what humanity could and should become. However, observer Henry Adams, who visited Chicago twice, was not as impressed, saying: "Chicago, asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving." I find it interesting that Cronon's reflection on the relationship of City and Country concludes with an extended reflection on the relationship of Past and Future. And just as the prior relationship reveals itself to be complex, so also the promise of unending future Progress appeared already in 1893 to be ambiguously tenuous.

I suppose in this I am drawing lessons from Cronon that he never intended to teach, his focus being much more on correcting this false dichotomy between City and Country by explaining their economic interrelationships. Or, better, perhaps I am applying the lessons Cronon is teaching to my own particular interests in understanding the fundamental impact of modernity on the archetypal American psyche, most clearly manifested in a near-fanatical "rugged individualism" as well as an obstinate faith in unending progress. In some ways, Cronon's book offers an "economic" leg to the growing evidence that the myths of modernity have failed. Economic growth is not limitless; progress is not unending; and radical individualism is not psychologically nor sociologically sustainable. In the end, Mr. Adams was right; no matter the White City's beautiful electric glow, we didn't know where we were driving. And now we've ended up somewhere that wasn't on our map, lost in a world of our own finite and fallen creation. ( )

In Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon argues, “No city played a more important role in shaping the landscape and economy of the midcontinent during the second half of the nineteenth century than Chicago” (pg. xv). He writes with the ambition of exploring “century-old economic and ecological transformations that have continued to affect all of North America and the world besides” (pg. xvi). He argues, “City and country have a common history, so their stories are best told together” (pg. xvi). In his analysis, he uses the terms first and second nature, from Hegel and Marx, to denote the difference between prehuman nature and artificial, human-created nature. Cronon primarily focuses on commodity exchanges, such as with grain, timber, and meat, exploring how human modification changed their value and the landscape needed to produce and move them. He book “is a series of historical journeys between city and country in an effort to understand the city’s place in nature” (pg. 8). He concludes, “Nature’s Metropolis and the Great West are in fact different labels for a single region and the relationships that defined it. By erasing the false boundary between them, we can begin to recover their common past” (pg. 19).
Of the city, Cronon writes, “By the second half of the nineteenth century, Chicago would stand as the greatest metropolis in the continent’s interior, with all the Great West in some measure a part of its hinterland and empire” (pg. 26). In a lengthy passage, Cronon summarizes the difference in people’s understanding of Chicago’s significance before and after Turner’s frontier thesis. He writes,
"For Turner and his followers, frontier development had been slow and evolutionary, with cities appearing only after a long period of rural agricultural growth. Cities marked the end of the frontier. For the boosters, on the other hand, western cities could and did appear much more suddenly. They grew in tandem with the countryside and played crucial roles in encouraging settlement from a very early time. City and country formed a single commercial system, a single process of rural settlement and metropolitan economic growth. To speak of one without the other made little sense" (pg. 47).
As an alternative to Turner or the boosters’ model, Cronon uses the isolated state model of Johann Heinrich von Thünen, which created a series of zones radiating out from the city center, each based on the distance and cost of moving materials to the city. Based on this, “what the farmers found in Chicago was the western outpost of a metropolitan economy centered on the great cities of Europe and the American Northeast” (pg. 60). Eventually, Cronon argues “the railroad…became the chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West,” reducing distance to time (pg. 81). In this way, Cronon concludes, “Chicago this grew to metropolitan status less from being what the boosters called central than from being peripheral. By defining the boundary between two railroad systems that operated within radically different markets – even as both sought to meet the same fundamental problems of fixed costs and minimum income – Chicago became the link that bound the different worlds of east and west into a single system” (pg. 91). The commoditization and creation of new means of travel merged Cronon’s first and second natures. He writes, “The merging of first and second nature was thus a shift from local ecosystem to regional hinterland and global economy,” with a new focus on monocultures (pg. 267). He continues, “In economic and environmental terms, we should think of a city and its hinterland not as two clearly defined and easily recognizable places but as a multitude of overlapping market and resource regions” (pg. 278). By the end of the nineteenth century, “City and country were growing closer together. The diminishing distance separating them was measured not just in the similar products one could buy in their stores but in the information that passed between them,” including economic data sent via telegraph and telegram, which influenced the sale of commodities (pg. 332). ( )

Excerpted as "Railroads and the Reorganization of Nature and Time" in Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998)

To understand Chicago's relationship to the west, one must understand the railroad. At the same time as they came to constitute an infrastructure that enabled the national market, railroads also transform the way Americans perceived space and time. Doing away with localism, the railroads introduced "a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West." (p. 140)

Focusing on Railways in Chicago, Cronin explains that railroad promoters cast the technology as "natural" and described it variously as a "geographical power so irresistible that people must shape their lives according to its dictates." (p. 132) At times, railroads even assumed supernatural dimensions as ""talismanic wands" which magically transformed the landscape. Rhetorical excesses or not, these flights of fancy evoke the genuine awe which the railroads inspired. An awe which obscured the social and economic process taking place as the railroads crossed the great western lands.

Railroads transcended the limitations of geography like no other transportation system had before. Unlike the river transport systems of the past, railroads could be built to fit engineers' conceptions of efficient construction, thereby liberating the transport system from the limitations of geography in a way not possible in the past. For the farmers of the Midwest as producers, the greatest benefit was the freedom which rail transport allowed them from the constraints of muddy roads. From the perspective of consumption, the railroad brought the latest goods and fashions from New York and Paris year round. No longer did Chicago's consumers need to wait for the spring thaw.

In addition to overcoming geography, railroads transformed time and space in powerful ways. When railroads and telegraph lines reached Chicago in the early 1850s, a two week trip to NY now took two days and messages that had taken weeks to travel to Chicago now took seconds. With the increased efficiency of rail travel over traditional conveyances of wagons and boats, farmers began to value their own time more highly. Why take a wagon over bad roads and waste now precious time when rail transport was so much more efficient? With this new emphasis on the value of time, the mechanical clock came to replace natural cycles. Rail travel isolated the passenger from the weather and provided a safe and regular way to move people and goods.

The most powerful testament to the power of railroads over time and space is the adoption of standard time. By 1883, the railroad adopted standard time doing away with the local times along the rail routes. On November 18, 1883 the railroads established 4 time zones. This standardization brought greater safety by allowing improved coordination of rail traffic. With standardization of time just one of the daunting management tasks which the railroad owners faced, the management of railroads accelerated the concentration of capital and ownership of a wide range of infrastructure including "land, rails, locomotives, cars and stations, not to mention the labor and fuel that kept everything moving." (p. 139) Coordination of all of these assets required increasing professionalization of management and ultimately led to new hierarchies of power that impacted the entire US economy and shaped American society.

Further notes directly from the text:

In his "Preface" to the book, Cronon builds on the insight from his historiography of the Frontier thesis. He writes a history of the connections between the city of Chicago and the West, not a comprehensive history of either. He does this my looking at commodities as they flow from the producers on the periphery, through the metropolis of Chicago and on to the markets of the East and beyond. Chicago is in this sense the gateway to the Great American West. In his own words:

In Nature's Metropolis, I describe one aspect of the frontier experience on a very macro level: the expansion of a metropolitan economy into regions that had not previously been tightly bound to its markets, and the absorption of new peripheral areas into a capitalist orbit. Frontier areas lay on the periphery of the metropolitan economy, while cities like New York and London lay near its center. Chicago sat in between, on the boundary between East and West as those regions were defined in the nineteenth century. (p. xvi)

His claim that people might need to fight "mystification and boredom" to get through the book are hardly justified. He is an excellent narrator and the tale is fascinating.

In Part II of this book, entitled "Nature to Market," he talks about the commodification of three products -- grain, lumber and meat. The section "Annihilating Space: Meat" describes the industrialization of the commodification of meat. Starting with "The Great Bovine City of the World," he takes us to the stock yards of Chicago's South side. In the 1840s and 50s the yards were run by an assemblage of different owners in a more or less haphazard way with cattle and pig drives coming in from the hinterland. With the coming of the railroads, however, things changed.

The railroads could provide the means to escape these problems and transform Chicago's role in the meat trade. The solution -- the single unified stockyard would concentrate the city's livestock business at one location -- was proposed in the fall of 1864, when Chicago's nine largest railroads, in conjunction with members of the Chicago Pork Packers Association, issues a prospectus for what they called the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company. (p. 210)

In the Exchange Building that was erected next to the yard, men came to buy and sell the animals that were butchered in the yard. In its plush, even luxurious environs, they build an intricate network of trade that abstracted them from the killing happening right outside the door.

Starting in Illinois and Indiana, and moving west further in the country beyond the Missouri River, stood the high grass plains of Nebraska and Wyoming -- with a population in the 1860s of Native Americans and as many at 40 Million Bison. The "Slaughtering the Bison" began in earnest after the Civil War, with the arrival of the Union Pacific in Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1860s.

Suddenly it became possible for market and sport hunters alike to reach the herds with little effort, shipping back robes and tongues and occasional trophy heads as the only valuable parts of the animals they killed. Sport hunters in particular enjoyed the practice of shooting into the herds without ever leaving the trains. As they neared a herd, passengers flung open the windows of their cars, pointed their breechloaders, and fired randomly into the frightened beasts. Dozens might die within minutes, and rot where they fell after the train disappeared without stopping. (p. 216)

The slaughter reached its peak in Kansas in 1870-73 and move on to Texas between 1974-8. The white Americans moving westward were able to defeat the Native Sioux and others because they had destroyed the bison on which native life depended. The defeat of Custer at Little Big Horn was a minor victory on the road to defeat. As the Bison were slaughtered, "Open Range" was transformed into fenced grazing land for cattle ranchers. "Feeding Lots" in Illinois and Iowa fed beef on shocked corn and then shipped them via rail to the Stockyard in Chicago. The railway network allowed Chicago to extend its reach as far as a thousand miles into the hinterland.

The demand for packaged pork in the early 19th C was huge. Unlike cattle, which take well to being herded to a market and could thus be slaughtered near the place were they were to be eaten, hogs are less amenable to herding and were thus often slaughtered where raised and prepared there for shipment elsewhere. Pork packing was an early industry that sprung up on the frontier. As Buffalo rose to prominence in commerce in grain through the pioneering grain elevator system, so Cincinnati, Ohio (located at the confluence of rivers) developed an early dominance in the pork packing trade by pioneering the "disassembly line." As a result of the blockade of the southern Mississippi by the Confederacy Northern farmers had excess grain to feed the pigs, and the demand for packed pork from the Union Army caused a boom in pork packing in Cincinnati, which emerged from the war as the undisputed "Porkopolis."

The convergence of railway lines in Chicago also allowed it the steal the title of "Porkopolis" from Cincinnati, Ohio. The limitation on river based shipment of live hogs had restricted business in Cincinnati during the winter also affected the fledgling Chicago pork packing industry early on. In Chicago they invested in the infrastructure to build slaughter houses along the same lines as Cincinnati, and they started to use the rail lines to ship in ice to preserve pork and also beef. Combining ice harvesting with rail transport, Chicago meat packers gained the ability to "Store the Winter." Gustavus Swift, who moved to Chicago in 1875 experimented with the shipment of dressed beef on the rails, inventing a refrigeration rail car that made it possible to ship all the way to the East Coast. He also added icing stations along the rail lines to keep the beef in good condition.

"Triumph of the Packers" in Chicago was not foreordained when they solved the refrigeration problem. They also had the huge task of convincing people in the East, used to eating freshly slaughtered beef, that beef killed over a thousand miles away was appetizing and safe. The Chicago packers had a real price advantage with dressed beef over fresh, as they only had to ship the edible part of the steer (at first the railroads resisted this move because it would mean less tonnage shipped on their line, until Swift started shipping using the lesser used Grand Trunk Line that skirted the Great Lakes) . Also Swift was a pioneer in the marketing of dressed beef, cutting up the meat in attractive ways for display at the market. He was also brilliant at co-opting the local beef wholesale butcher, having his agents set up partnerships with them to win them over. When they encountered resistance, their economies of scale allowed them to sell at very low prices to establish a foothold in the market. The efficiency of these operations was abetted by the combinations which packers entered into to protect prices. Stock raisers who were hurt by economic slowdowns joined with the wholesale butchers in opposition to the packers.

The meat packers of Chicago were possessed by the same pursuit of efficiency that would animate the progressive reformers that followed them. They came up with uses for unused parts of the slaughtered animals, producing a wide variety of meat byproducts. Yet, this was not unalloyed "progress," since the pollution created by the packing plants and the dangers of adulterated product were ever present. Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle would drive this home in 1906, but the practices described by the muckraking journalist were going on long before his muckraking expose. Cronon points to the fact that if we are too caught up in the progressive revolt against the combinations that ran the packing business, we may forget that, as a congressional commission later pointed out,

Because of the Chicago packers, ranchers in Wyoming and feedlot farmers in Iowa regularly found a reliable market for their animals, and on average received better prices for the animals they sold there, At the same time and for the same reason, Americans of all classes found a greater variety of more and better meats on their tables, purchased on average at lower prices than ever before. Seen in this light, the packers "rigid system of economy" seemed a very good thing indeed. (p. 255)

This "progress" was achieved through the creation of massive vertically integrated corporations. The legacy of figures like Armor and Swift is not so much a personal one of entrepreneurial leadership, as one of large impersonal corporations they left behind, corporations managed by professional managers who, like the consumers, were dissociated from the acts of slaughtering animals. The legacy of the meat packers was one of "Unremembered Deaths" in the stockyards of the South side, which fell into disuse as the corporate form liberated the business from the geographic location in the city. By the 1930s, the rise of diesel fueled trucking made the economic advantage of the railroad concentration at Chicago less beneficial. As meat packing plants opened at other locations more strategically situated, the stockyard shut down all meatpacking in 1960 and then closed in 1970.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading. Cronon does not focus on the politics of Chicago or the industrialization. Rather, he shows how the development of the city was linked to the surrounding countryside. He argues that the rural and urban are not separate realms, but are intricately related to one another with the borders being extremely blurred.

He looks at how Chicago was one of many possible cites to serve as a the commercial center of the midwest for the 19th century. It's natural advantages were somewhat offset by other disadvantages, such as a shallow harbor, a high water table and surrounding marshes. The efforts of the leaders of the city to overcome those disadvantages, plus the massive expansion of railroads, allowed Chicago to emerge as the first city of the west.

After setting up the story of Chicago's rise through transportation, he spends the majority of the book discussing specific commodities, how they were produced, transported and traded. He looks at how the city developed as well as how it affected the surrounding areas. It is an odd mix of regretting the impact of the human intervention, being resigned to it, and admiring human ingenuity.

Cronon's work is both an environmental and an economic history. It does not discuss the politics of industrialization. The omission of the labor/capital split is particularly striking. Cronon intentionally omits that side of the story to bring the environment side to the forefront. It is a remarkable work, even with the limitations he puts on his work.

A great read. This book is about far more than Chicago. ( )

In Nature’s Metropolis William Cronon assigns himself not only the arduous task of detailing the rise of the city of Chicago but also interpreting what that rise meant to the shaping of western United States – and frontier cultures. Cronon directly challenged Jackson’s Western Frontier theory and placed the agency of growth of the west not with nature’s bounty but rather with man’s manipulation of nature’s bounty or what the author refers to as “first nature” and “second nature” respectively. It was man who remade natural advantages and harvested their potentials to his desires rather than nature remaking man. Although Cronon’s core chapters were well researched and offered insight into the changing economic market, there were moments in his analysis when Cronon the champion of nature overwhelmed Cronon the objective historian.
The prolog and first chapter laid out two main viewpoints of the author. In the former, the author not only staged the groundwork for connecting the rural hinterlands to the urban city blocks but also introduced his philosophy of nature. Cronon argued that although mankind claimed to be disconnected from nature “we must still understand that all people” share with all living and non-living things the “abstraction called nature” (p.19). This idea was fair enough but often pushed in later chapters to a resounding crescendo that exceeded the envelope of objective scholarship. In the latter chapter, Cronon explored Jackson’s frontier thesis. Jackson argued that cities arose only at the closing of the frontier and sprung into existence by the natural amenities inherent in a particular locale. Jackson viewed this process as rural country giving way to urban growth. Cronon introduced, or exhumed, Von Thünen’s Isolated State theory to counter Jackson’s arguments. Von Thünen’s theory stated that urban and rural were connected by a series of concentric circles dictated by economic needs of the two endpoints of the isolated state dynamic – city and country connected and augmenting each other.

Cronon used the next three chapters to explore how the Illinois landscape was changed by man’s “improvements” to build the city of Chicago. Although acknowledging a latent power of geographic location contributing to the rise of Chicago, Cronon placed the ultimate agency of growth with the interest of man in the city. Chicago may have been at the southern end of a large lake system with a river that offered the only protective harborage on the lake but it was man’s improvement on this harborage and his investment of capital that sparked the growth of the city. Eastern merchants needed to have a port of access to the frontier. Cronon placed Chicago’s growth in context of man’s agency to open those markets. Whether it was by transforming the port by dredging, building up the city to escape flooding, or building canals (first) and railways (later) to connect these markets, growth always hinged on man’s desire for capital.
The author’s detailed breakdown of three major industries (wheat or agriculture, lumber, and meat) was incredibly informative. In each he detailed how interests of producer and consumer intersected with nature to reshape nature to their vision and needs. For example, as the rail lines expanded farmers could deliver their agricultural products to market from farther away. Nature’s prairie landscape gave way to an organized farm landscape (first nature to second nature); this argumentative element was repeated for the other industries as Cronon explored the inter-connective aspects of the industry, mankind, nature and the city. It is in that exploration that Cronon often reads as if he was scolding mankind for the “shameless” exploitation of nature. For example, rather than simply detailing the massive slaughter of the meat market Cronon injected his musings on mankind’s “proper” relationship to the slaughter (p.208). This repeated chastisement blunts the brilliance of the core chapters of the work. Even so, Cronon’s interpretive skills made this a valuable addition to the study of urban growth. ( )

William Cronon describes his book Nature’s Metropolis as "a series of historical journeys between city and country in an effort to understand the city’s place in nature" (p. 8). He adds more complexity by asking: What is nature? What is not nature? For Cronon, the urban-rural and human-natural dichotomies are cultural categories, created by and infused in human activities and identities. City and country, nature and culture, first and second nature; neither can be properly understood without considering both sides of the coin. Put within this framework, Chicago becomes a lens that Cronon uses to explore economic and ecological transformations that have affected all of North America “and the rest of the world besides” (p. xvi). Nature’s Metropolis is well written, well researched and full of insights for the reader. It is one of those rare environmental histories that manage to make bold, yet profound statements about nature and culture without losing sight of the human element. ( )

After getting accepted to the Urban Design program at City College and deciding I would go there, I asked Michael Sorkin if he had any recommended reading to get myself in the right mindset before the start of the semester – some stimulating summer reading rather than fluffy fare that is the norm for the season. He sent me and my fellow students a top-ten list of books on urbanism (much the same list that can be found in Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books), and while I couldn't get into some of them (Raymond Williams's The Country and the City comes to mind), William Cronon's history of Chicago is a standout from the list. Voluminous research and an accessible writing style paint a picture of how Chicago rose through its interdependence with the land to the west. The relationship between the city and the country is the focus here (not one or the other), and Cronon tackles this connection better than Williams could do. This is a hefty book at 532 pages, but one I could see myself reading again because it is so good.