Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West Reviews

• 
  Aaron Arnold

  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.
• 
  Adam

  Cronon is an American treasure. He's written some of the most thoughtful, careful, and eloquent pieces I've read, and moreover things with great impact on how I see the world. I knew Nature's Metropolis would be a treat, and I was not disappointed. It contains a lot of the ideas he'd make classic in Trouble with Wilderness and other later essays. But since it's bigger and meatier than any of those essays and even Changes in the Land, he can really dig into the details and let the little nuggets of philosophy emerge from the data and the stories he's communicating. Cronon's writing here is also unusually personal, at times - he bookends the history with references to his personal experience growing up in the Chicago hinterland.
  
  Nature's Metropolis purports to be a history of Chicago, but it's really about the entire Midwest. Indeed, the story it tells could be exported to the entire country, a part of the creation myth of modern America (it comes pretty close to telling the story I think games like Banished and even Age of Empires are inspired by: wilderness to industry in a single lifetime). The emphasis on the flows and pools of capital and natural resources make undeniably clear the role developments in technical and financial complexity played in creating contemporary America. It seems so obvious when stated that way, but Cronon finds himself debunking ignorant anti-capitalist myths even during the 1800s (not to say he's pro-capitalist, necessarily. Just clarifying that capitalism did different bad things than 1800s farmers were trying to address). The Grange movement has its descendants in all the neo-agrarian, natural fallacy-peddling narratives of the contemporary local food movement (again, not necessarily wrong, but a community rich in ignorant prejudices).
  
  Among Cronon’s best points comes in his conclusion. The entire book details the nation-shaping interactions between city and hinterlands, a clear dichotomy that was quite clear to 19th century Midwesterns, though they defined it in tropes and narratives quite different from the ones Cronon’s analysis suggests. The book draws to a close as Chicago’s hegemony wanes, but also as the dichotomy is eroded by a new hybrid category: the suburb. The suburb combines the quality of life, the luxuries and access to market goods found in the city with the fresh air, tight-knit communities, and picturesque landscapes ascribed to rural America.
  
  It is the best of both worlds, and as Americans have obtained the wealth to do so, this vision has been applied to much of the country – like the “middle class” that nominally inhabited them, “suburbs” have become more of a core American identity lifestyle than a descriptive term for near-urban areas. Its ideas about landscape beauty, about the appropriate distance of one’s house from one’s neighbors, about the proximity of industry, have shaped our contemporary landscape we inhabit in profound ways. The same process created the rural tourism industry and the outdoor recreation movement – a process Greg Summers discusses in much more detail in
  Consuming Nature.
  
  The frame is explicitly economic, and much attention is paid to futures trading and loan debts; docks, stations, and mills. But this is an environmental history, and everything remains firmly grounded in the places being aggressively altered to feed the engines of commerce. He traces the production of wheat from prairie farm to New York mill, the transit of logs from old-growth forest to balloon-frame buildings (I had no idea people were building houses from mail order kits in the 1800s!). In tracing these routes, he focuses on the ways place informed the techniques used in resource extraction. The way loggers created ice trails to move logs in the winter, and floated them downriver in the spring floods (a seasonal bottleneck that caused vast and dangerous logjams). The way railroads stopped near Northern lakes to refill refrigerator cars with ice cut from lakes thawed months before.
  
  It is an economy of energy as much as capital. Once cattle could be moved to market using cheap coal calories instead of carefully shepherded beef calories, grazing could be done in arid rangelands formerly occupied by bison. This transition made it profitable for graziers to fence the short-grass prairie. The advent of coal-powered transportation was thus not simply an energy subsidy, but a qualitative change that enabled the imposition of a cultural land use ideal that brought serious changes to the ecology of the area. I think this kind of thing is so damn neat, and there is a ton of it in this book.
  
  It is not exactly his argument, but certainly an element of it, that Chicago grew because it existed at the intersection of several vastly different ecoregions, places with different productive capacities and complementary needs. The Manifest Destiny school of city-boosters asserts that Chicago must be great precisely because of this perfect distribution of resources and transit systems. From the city, the railroads and lake barges can reach out and grasp anything it needs (the RTS connection again - every level must have workable distributions of every important resource). Cronon argues instead that it was New York investors' capital that made Chicago so great - though their selection of the city was no doubt initially swayed by some of the transit possibilities its location offered (a wonderful and unusual example of the social construction of landscapes and how it affects the land itself).
• 
  Brad Lyerla

  NATURE’S METROPOLIS is the best non-fiction book about Chicago that I can recall. As a starting point, Cronon explains Chicago’s unique place in American history by describing its growth in relation to the natural advantages that it enjoyed economically being located at the touchpoint between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system.
  
  But there is much more too, of course. With the help of New York financiers, Chicago’s energetic promoters were faster and more sure-footed than their competitors to exploit the lumber, grain, meat, transportation, retail and related financial markets associated with the opening of what was then called the Great West.
  
  Economic histories are a special genre. Cronon seems unusually talented in this genre and NATURE’S METROPOLIS is an impressive achievement. It is one of my favorites and I recommend it highly.
• 
  Charles Haywood

  This is a fantastic book that well deserves its reputation as a classic. Part history, part sociological study, part economic analysis, and part ecological survey, William Cronon examines the growth of Chicago by studying the city’s 19th Century relationship to the larger “Great West” (more or less the once-sparsely settled regions between the Ohio River Valley and the Pacific). He does this by analyzing, in fascinating detail, the city and its surrounding territory in three areas: transportation (water and rail), physical commodities (grain, lumber, and meat), and capital. For each topic, he focuses both narrowly on how each developed and changed over time, and more broadly on how each affected the city and the larger Great West. I suppose to some this sounds boring—but as far as I’m concerned Cronon nearly magically retains the reader’s interest throughout.
  
  If Cronon has an overriding theme, it is that a sharp distinction between city and country, or between humans and nature, is an illusion, and a damaging one. Rather, they are all an interdependent whole, each continuously changing the other. This sounds like a cliché, but it is not one in Cronon’s hands. As he takes pains to make clear, Nature’s Metropolis is not a comprehensive history of the city or the Great West. Rather, it is a story about how the city shaped the Great West, while being shaped itself by the Great West. This shaping is primarily viewed through commodity flows, including the commodities themselves and how they were transported. Famous people are not the focus; culture and politics are only addressed in passing and where actually relevant; and, fortunately, ideology and political correctness make no appearance at all.
  
  Cronon repeatedly refers to, and reacts to, “central place theory”—attempts to systematize and base in mathematics the growth of urban-rural systems such as Chicago. Cronon clearly thinks that while the theory has value, central place theorists make claims of systematization that are inaccurate at best; the real world is a messier place than a mathematical theory allows for. And much of his book is an attempt to remove an artificial sharp distinction between rural and urban areas. Still, Cronon relies heavily on Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s concentric circle analysis, from 1826, of the zones that surround a city, from intensive agriculture closest to the city to wilderness at the farthest extent. Von Thünen, an economist, was focused on the economic viability of production, particularly as dictated by the cost of transport of different types of goods produced in different areas. Chronologically, Cronon demonstrates how over time the zones around Chicago developed and changed, from covering only a few miles from the city center to stretching, by the end of the 19th Century, all the way to the cities of the Pacific.
  
  Cronon begins at the very beginning, when Chicago was merely a minor gathering place for American Indians and European traders, distinguished mostly by abundant wild garlic (the name “Chicago” is a corruption of a Miami Indian word for garlic—just the first of many things I learned about Chicago from this book, even though I lived there for 12 years). The Chicago River existed, but was short, silted and access to it was blocked by a large sandbar (and, famously, it flowed the other way from what it does now). Commerce via large-scale transport was therefore minimal. But once the Indians “sold” the local land to the white man in the 1830s, speculators and their closely allied teammates, “boosters,” swept in. Boosters appear again and again in Cronon’s work, both in Chicago and in other cities—men who preached the gospel of the inevitability of a city’s rise, and thus the opportunities available both for commerce and land speculation. Without boosters, Chicago would not necessarily have grown as it did, or ultimately occupied the position it does. Advertising, in other words, was a crucial feature of the city’s growth.
  
  Not that the boosters were all that good at predictions—they mostly adjusted their hucksterism to fit what was happening around them, just projecting it into the future and giving it a hyper-optimistic gloss. Thus, they praised the inevitable rise of Chicago due to its proximity to water routes (the Great Lakes and, at first indirectly and then directly through canals, the Mississippi)—but failed to predict the supersession of water by rail. Nonetheless, when rail arrived, and with it increased dominance of Chicago over other contenders such as St. Louis, boosters quickly switched their tune and simply sang harder the praises of Chicago.
  
  As water gave way to rail, more goods could be produced in more locations and shipped more quickly to the city for sale. And, in reverse, the city could ship to its hinterland more goods, both those produced in the city and those produced farther east by the much more developed regions of the United States. Chicago’s role, and therefore its growth, was further enhanced by the Eastern rail systems terminating at Chicago and the Western rail systems originating at Chicago, requiring (at least initially) break-bulk trans-shipment through the city, which created all sorts of economic opportunities for local merchants and service providers, such as operators of grain elevators.
  
  So, after covering transport, Cronon turns to physical commodities, beginning with grain (primarily wheat). Much of his focus is on the diminishing costs of transport, but even more is on the fascinating development of standardization in grain grading and the consequent ability to create a liquid market in a truly fungible good. This, together with mass centralized storage through the new technology of grain elevators, which allowed vastly lower holding costs, meant that fungible grain was traded easily and quickly, rather than trade necessitating the use of sacks of grain identified to a specific farmer until their final sale to the end user. The Chicago Board of Trade was intimately involved with these developments, which further resulted in the creation of the allied futures market, with its ability to reduce risks for farmers and provide additional liquidity for the market—and, not incidentally, to make huge fortunes for speculators and those willing to risk trying to corner the market.
  
  The result was a backlash by farmers, most notably the Grange movement, who were incensed by what they saw as unproductive parasites profiting off the farmer’s labor. This ultimately resulted in state regulation of grain storage, transport and sale to curb the worst abuses. Cronon has sympathy for the Grange, but, as he points out, in any market governed by abstractions such as grain grades, opportunities for profit exist in the ambiguities contained in the boundaries, and middlemen, whether exploiting ambiguities or “merely” brokering, experience profit as well as loss. This is shown by the failure of the Grangers in their attempts to eliminate the middleman—they were not efficient or good at it, and mostly simply absorbed “the middleman’s loss,” rather than his gain.
  
  With grain, too, Cronon talks much about how the changing demand and structure of the grain market changed nature—this book is, after all, titled Nature’s Metropolis. What was once limitless prairie soon enough was plowed for grain, permanently changing, though always in shifting ways, the face of the land. This conversion from “first nature” to “second nature,” the latter often incorrectly viewed by city dwellers as “real nature,” is a theme Cronon returns to throughout his book.
  
  After grain, Cronon turns to two other commodities that are nearly as equally fascinating—lumber and meat. Who knew that vast areas of what constitute Chicago’s modern near west side were once covered with square miles of stacked lumber, or that Chicago took in billions of board feet of logs, turned them into lumber, and sold them throughout the states of the Great West? Not me, at least. Unlike grain, though, lumber never developed the same type of ultra-efficient market, in part because it was never possible to fully standardize and turn fungible. And soon enough, the wood near to Chicago (which mostly arrived cheaply by water, at least at the beginning) ran out, and the lumber trade was ceded to other regions of the country. When lumber ran out, it left behind vast despoiled regions in Wisconsin and Michigan, the “Cutover,” which contributed to vast forest fires, further destroying first nature—and killing lots of people, including (amazingly) something like 2,000 people at one time in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871. The regeneration of the area into what it is today, for recreation and wood pulp, only took place decades later.
  
  As far as meat, this history is better known than Chicago’s history of lumber, perhaps because it lasted much longer, into living memory, if only as a shadow of its former glory. Cronon covers how Chicago began with pork in competition with Cincinnati; moved into cattle as refrigeration technology, combined with the slaughter of the bison and the changing of western grazing land into range land, permitted greater trade in cattle; and ended, for a while, as meatpacker to the world. (I did not know that Hammond, Indiana, was named for a man who moved there to harvest vast quantities of ice, to refrigerate meat, from the Calumet River.) The meatpacking business was predatory, in the sense that the giant meatpackers like Armour deliberately destroyed the local butchers throughout the Great West, but they offered the best prices and quality, so that destruction was functionally inevitable.
  
  All these trades, especially railroads and meatpacking, required massive amounts of capital, so Cronon wisely covers capital separately and in detail, basically as another type of commodity. I found this section of the book less fascinating, but that’s probably personal preference, since tangible goods are more interesting to me than abstract money (I am very interested in tangible money, however). Not that this section is uninteresting—in particular, Cronon did extensive original research into bankruptcy filings, to analyze who owed money to whom at various points during Chicago’s rise, and in particular who provided financing to Chicago merchants and manufacturers, and how. Here he shows how Chicago’s capital net, the area from which it received financing, was much wider than cities that thought they were competing with Chicago, such as Milwaukee or Minneapolis, or even those that really were competing but ultimately came in second place, such as Cincinnati and St. Louis (the cause of whose ultimate second-place finish Cronon assign to the railroads, as well as the Civil War). In this section on capital, Cronon also examines the spread of the capital-intensive market for farm machinery, which relied heavily on the development of efficient credit markets.
  
  Finally, Cronon evaluates Chicago when it had clawed its way to the top, through the lens of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Cronon’s focus is less on the famous individual exhibitions and more on how the Exhibition concealed the dependence of the city on second nature, and furthermore broadly concealed the web of relationships between the city and the Great West. In a similar vein, the new suburbs were designed to offer a polished, sanitized version of the nature whose modification and production made the city possible. Cronon’s point is, again, that a sharp division between “urban” and “rural” is a fiction—any city is a dynamic system of constant interplay and exchange between the two, and Chicago is a particularly dramatic exemplar of that principle. Even less are they opposed to each other, whatever city slickers or the Grangers may think—they instead need each other, often in ways that are totally invisible to both.
• 
  Joseph Stieb

  The ideas in this book were really fascinating. Cronon argues that our society's strict dichotomy between nature and city overlooks their tangled histories. Focusing on Chicago, he shows how the rapid growth of this city fueled economic, social, and environmental changes in the Great West in the late 19th century. Chicago's rise depended largely on its position as a hub, transit point, and eventually a market for grain, lumber, meat, and other product flows. Boosters for Chicago touted its "natural advantages," but it actually had to be changed dramatically by human hands to serve these economic purposes. The Great West had to do the same thing Cronon calls these changes "second nature," or the imprints human settlement and resource extraction create on relatively untouched environments that still look ostensibly natural. A great example of this is the eradication of the buffalo and their replacement with longhorn cattle, or the growth of new types of wheat in the Midwest. We tend to think of these areas as more "natural," but they are deeply shaped by human hands, mostly to serve economic demands emanating from the big city. The settling of the West was not just about frontiersmen and women driving forward, but the largely urban economic forces pushing at their backs. Cronon also has some pretty interesting descriptions of how railroads worked business-wise and how the grain trade evolved.
  
  I give a lot credit to Cronon for making these topics pretty interesting. However, the long accounts of credit, lumber shipments, and other economic activities are more fun to think about than to read about. This book really made me think differently about environmental history and the expansion of human societies and economies into relatively unoccupied lands, but I didn't always enjoy the page by page reading. That has more to do with my general lack of interest in the topic than in Cronon's skill as a writer and historian.
• 
  Brenna

  Excellent and fascinating review of the environmental history of the city of Chicago and its economic hinterland from the 1850s to the 1893 World’s Fair. Provides a thorough review of the ways 1st nature (natural resources) and 2nd nature (capital) interact in the development of cities. Feel like I gained an understanding of the context of the Chicago-Detroit-Northern MI-WI landscapes and the history of my own family.
• 
  Jeanette

  This cores on the relationship between country / city. And especially the 19th century USA druthers and intersections. Disapproving some theories? Maybe just slanted them slightly?
  
  Others have said it better here in their reviews. Read them for more exact context to cause/effect. But I agree the most with the 3 star one which states in a much longer context for particulars that this book is Far more essential and crux core essence for fact and real purpose/cores of truth than it is fun to read about. (Yes, that is a long rambling overblown sentence.)
  
  Not fun to read with all of its dry credit, business, financials etc. But essential to rethink for the reasons cities ARE (in general but most in the USA especially). Particularly what Chicago was, became, is etc. When Chicago completely loses its grain and meat market roles especially? Thank God there are still some factories around. I was absolutely part of its heyday and peak. My entire paternal side would never have been here at all without Swift's meatpacking. Nor would any food supply chains in the USA be what they became / are.
  
  Not enough emphasis about the massive cookie, candy, baking products and why. But most of this book is 4 star exact.
• 
  Lauren Bradshaw

  In all of the books I’ve read about Chicago (2) this definitely ranks last. Needs more murder and less cow intestines in my opinion.
• 
  Andrew

  I love Chicago because it's not New York. New York has been fully postmodernized, but Chicago still is a city of sausage factories and scrap yards. Its industrial heart still beats strong.
  
  Cronon links the history of the city to its hinterland, and the way they are inextricably the same thing. We see the city as an assemblage of its commodities (wood, meat, and grain) and this is a pretty unique perspective. If you're at all interested in history or the environment, it's a great read. That goes double for you Midwesterners.
• 
  Jake Bittle

  This book has permanently altered how I see the world
• 
  Nick

  This is a very thought-provoking book. It seems limiting to place it in the context of the increasingly dysfunctional American political discussion, but even if you must do that there is a lot to chew on. The author has a view of the fake rural vs. urban dichotomy which strikes me as very Obama-first-term-acceptance-speech (it is about Chicago after all). It's not rural American or urban America, it's all of America. Still, the implications of his argument resonate. The description of how the "Great West" was rapidly converted into Chicago's hinterland (he uses that word a lot) reminded me a lot of the current idea of the Anthropocene Epoch (a comparison the author does not explicitly make). The argument made by free market and growth-oriented climate change contrarians that the activities of little old Man could never have such a strong impact on "nature" starts to look very pallid indeed.
  
  There's a lot of great historiography here - a solid explanation of how the Chicago Board of Trade (i.e., the commodities market) works, and a very impressive analysis of, wait for it, 19th century bankruptcy records. The discussion of the grain, meat, and timber industries is a little less abstract and forms (to me) the heart of the book.
  
  The author starts the reader on the storyline of how farming became more mechanized, thanks in part to Chicago's McCormick reaper. He touches on the rural radical movement (i.e., the Grange). I'd like to read more about that...by the time of The Grapes of Wrath the situation resembles the fully mechanized, depopulated oligarchies that many ag regions seem to be today. Many of the small farmers and laborers who were driven to the cities probably have exurban and suburban descendants for whom "Chicago" is still a dirty word, because of that city's (racialized) reputation for urban lawlessness...the idea that the city has a different morality than the country is a key theme of Nature's Metropolis.
• 
  UrbanPlanner_Shafaat

  Many environmental problems of today can find the explanation for their causes in history. These explanations can take examples from somewhat peculiar cases like commodity flows between a city and its country. Yet such linkages essentially explain the impacts that first nature takes from the interventions of second nature. Cronon (1991) takes on the project of explaining how first nature and second nature mutually shape each other in example of nineteenth century Chicago. In doing so, he remarkably contributes to the literature as he urges the readers to negate the imaginary city-country boundary and rather see the both as components of a single big process wherein both shape each other in reciprocity.
  While farmers in the hinterlands of Chicago plowed up the prairie, the merchants built the warehouses and later the elevators in the city. Likewise, as the lumberjacks cut the pine trees of the north woods, lumber factories developed their networks in the city. And while the hog and cattle were domesticated and slaughtered in the countryside, the city developed operations of meat processing and packing. In all these instances, the city and the country acted together and shaped each other. Yet in all these interventions of second nature upon first, the man was masculine, singular, active and all-encompassing, while the nature was feminine, singular, passive, and ever more controlled (Cronon 1991, 16).
  He draws reader’s attention to a strikingly odd dilemma that when humans today wish to ‘preserve’ nature, they unconsciously affirm an inherent belief that we ourselves are unnatural. Nature is the place where we are not (Cronon 1991, 18). Yet this is exactly what he problematizes in his work by asserting that city is part of nature. While a city usually is filled with stories of shaping the nature in controlling ways, the city is affected by the nature in return at many other instances. Therefore it is illogical to understand the city without considering it a part of the nature.
  Chicago boosters, the writers who envisioned the 1830s site on the south shore of Lake Michigan as a future metropolis, attributed resources of the region, transportation routes and climate forces as justifications to their claims. Chicago’s harbor and canal corridor were considered major resources for the future metropolis. But Cronon contests these arguments by asserting that there were other places with their own contextual natural resources but the major reason why Chicago superseded other competitors was the alignment of second nature – artificial nature made and induced by man – with first nature (Cronon 1991, 23–54).
  River and lake apparently refused to fulfill their destiny as a harbor and Chicagoans cut a deep new channel and built piers extending hundreds of feet out into the lake to make a decent harbor. Another natural feature of Chicago landscape was bad drainage to which the second nature responded by raising the city from four to fourteen feet. Similarly, while earlier linkages of the countryside to the city were seasonal and spanned over days, the making of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 followed by the railroads in 1850s changed the movement patterns, temporality, and speed which in turn changed the linkages between the city and the countryside. Yet important to note here is that the later development of railroads caused relative decline to the preceding Illinois and Michigan Canal. This offers the epochal evidence wherein unnatural instrument replaced a previously enhanced natural resource but still helped the city meet its natural destiny. This mutual dependency, enhancement and annihilation, compromise and conflict, and inherent linkages provide the overarching argument of how nature and man, or city and country work together (Cronon 1991, 55–93).
  Commodity flows become the instrument for telling the story of linkages. Wheat, the epochal example of the grain market, offers an astonishing example of the development and enhancement of a market over time. While a period of sacks prevailed in wheat market and was a seasonal work, the invention of steam-powered grain elevator caused a major shift in the patterns of the market. Yet this new invention could not possibly continue the practice of wheat sacks. The mixing of wheat from various farmers, on the other hand, produced challenges and conflicts. These tensions led to the making of Chicago Board of Trade, which though initially struggled to develop, turned out to be the major regulator of wheat market. The invention of the quality of the wheat classification by the Board of Trade was then another shift in the market which ensured the selling and buying of the receipts while the grain was the collateral. A new market of cash flow developed out of grain market but ended up with issues of frauds or market control and invited protests from farmers’ community. Issue had to be regulated through political involvement and legislation. These dynamics of the grain market itself show how both the city and country dynamics were strongly knit together and were depending on each other (Cronon 1991, 56–147).
  Cronon beautifully labels the resources that made Chicago as wealth of the nature which man could use, utilize, refine or even build a city from but could not produce it. This inherently hints the limit of the resources but Chicagoans of 1850s apparently did not consider that the nature could have any limits. This is evident from the story of lumber market in Chicago. The resource of Pine trees to the north were so gigantic that nobody could imagine that their cutting and extraction would ever cause a lack of timber. The white pine to the north had its key feature that unlike other hardwoods, it floated. Therefore, the task for the man was only to cut and put it to the river body and the shipment of the wood through miles would be the job done by water. Thus, water would carry the lumber to the mill and market. Since lake connected to the forest to the city, and city had railroads connecting to the East Coast and to the Rocky Mountains on the west, the lumber business flourished with its linkages to the forest, water, rail, mill and the city. But here again, one change in one of the elements in the change of the linkages affected whole chain. When the rail company started charging for the weight of the wood, the yard owners changed the priority from buying undried wood to only the dry wood and mill owners did not have the infrastructure to dry the wood before taking to Chicago. Moreover, same forests that once made fortune for Chicago started to work against it as railroads expanded to other cities in the west and found better locus for lumber forests (Cronon 1991, 148–222).
  Another commodity flow that highlight the linkages for Chicago and its hinterland is meat. While in the presence of Cincinnati which was leading in the meat market, Chicagoans managed to dominate the market by introducing the packed meat and transported especially through their iced refrigerators. This produced a complete cycle of economy wherein meat processing industry founded in the city while the ice harvesting became the business in Wisconsin and Minnesota and the standardized packed meat parts replaced the retail scale slaughter houses which had no option but to join Chicago style meat industry in a long run (Cronon 1991, 223–59).
  Taking its current form in 1830s, Chicago made a noteworthy mark in capital and credit flows in less than half a century. These linkages, as investigated through the legal records, offer insights into the industry specific flow and outreach. In this context, the Urban Hierarchy as theorized by Johann Heinrich von Thünen in 1826 as Central Place Theory seems to offer many tangents for insights. Though in one respect Chicago spatial patterns confirmed the economic uses of land over a factor of distance, the stark boundaries of the model now seem to be far more diffused into each other. The case of Chicago could not possibly be explained by Central Place Theory because it did not develop as like a gradual market evolution but rather through a gargantuan influence of second nature. A wholesale market that made its place in Chicago gave birth to a number of other inventions as mentioned before. Another example is the service industry of delivery of goods which seems too good to be true when it started. But it was the invention of the time and the quality of the service made its market (Cronon 1991, 260–340).
  These stories of the city which developed through conscious actions of human inventions have been shaped by nature sometimes through an opportunity and at other times in case of a challenge or crises. And each of these inventions have changed the natural systems in return. In doing so, the city and the country have both contributed to shape each other. Considering this, the hatred for city and the nostalgic love for the countryside is questionable. And it inherently hints that the city is considered an evil satanic force in opposition to a spiritual countryside. Yet once city and country are both seen as two sides of the same coin, the mutual history will be told and only then the inherent qualities of each will be appreciated alongside their limitations. And that is when the path will open for exchanging goods from both to each other because they are not two different entities but essentially one! (Cronon 1991, 341–85)
  
• 
  John

  So I have this short list of books that I plan on reading when I go to certain places, like how I read "Centennial" when I went to Colorado, I'm going to read Michener's "Texas" when I go to Texas someday, and I'm going to read that book "The Fatal Shore" that every used book store in America has two copies of, someday when I go to Australia.
  This was my planned Chicago book, even though I knew ahead of time that it isn't really a "history" of Chicago, per se. It is more of an interpretation of the explosive rise of Chicago, as Cronon puts it, "the rise and fall of the greatest gateway city of the Great West." Why did this place, of all the possible Western metropolises, become the big one? What were the forces that made Chicago? Cronon also argues that one cannot understand the history of the "rural" West without the history of the "urban" West...they arose together, and are inextricably linked. "They created each other, they transformed each other's environments and economies, and they now depend on each other for their very survival."
  This isn't really for the casual reader curious about the city, but it fit my purposes nicely, because I could justify reading it for my academic studies. I already liked Cronon, and this fit into my interest in environmental history and borderlands history, in addition to my general interest in western expansion and the 19th century. I am also fascinated by cities and why they rise and fall. Cronon's take on this is really interesting - it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eastern capitalists invested in Chicago because of the water trade routes through the lakes, and once they invested money there, that naturally led to more money being invested. Where are they going to invest in railways once they are invented? Chicago, naturally, they already have investments to protect there. Money draws more money. Because they bet on Chicago to become the metropolis of the west, it became the metropolis of the west.
• 
  Sean Munger

  This book is quite deservedly a classic in environmental and economic history. I loved it.
  
  Chicago was a regionally dominant urban center in the 19th century, but it could only become so because of its close relationships with the countryside, which defined every significant aspect of Chicago’s importance. It became a place where markets of various sorts connected with each other, were reorganized, consolidated and reimagined, and where maximum economic benefit (at least for some) was squeezed out of natural resources that came from the countryside. Cronon makes this clear through numerous examples, including how country grains were harvested, shipped, delivered and ultimately commoditized into not just farm produce but financial products. Lumber and meats are also singled out for in-depth analysis. The relationships that bound Chicago to its hinterlands were made possible through technological means (railroads, machinery, etc.), legal means (the evolution of commercial law), financial ones (development of sophisticated financial markets, availability of credit) and ultimately cultural developments (the World’s Fair, changing attitudes toward urbanism, etc.).
  
  This is not really an environmental history, though it does touch many environmental subjects. Ultimately it is an economic history, and one of extremely broad scope but also minute and fascinating detail. The work Cronon does with bankruptcy records is especially impressive, and I would never have imagined that even a historian as gifted as Cronon could make a discussion of grain elevators in 1854 almost riveting. This is one of the best history books I’ve read so far and I totally understand why it received all the awards and praise.
  
• 
  Moses

  This is an engaging work of history that uses the rise of Chicago and its agricultural hinterland not as two separate regions that happened to be next to each other, but as integral to the growth of the others.
  
  Basic example: Chicago outgrew St. Louis because its numerous westward rail spurs gave it easy access to western farmers, while its eastward rail links gave it easy access to eastern markets.
  
  More fun example: Chicago's market dominance in the railway era led to the peculiar fact that Iowa, an area with rich agricultural land and a burgeoning population, never developed a large population center to market its goods - by the time of Iowa's growth, rail links to Chicago stretched across the entire state and any merchandise from wheat to live hogs could be in Chicago within 18 hours.
  
  Cronon's writing is clear and convincing. He hailed, as I did, from Wisconsin, and as he mentions in the epilogue, he didn't understand as a child that he lived in Chicago's hinterland. I didn't either. The breadth of my understanding has now increased. More books like this, please!
• 
  James

  Explanation of the relationship between the "frontier" and the boom of Chicago in the 19th century. Chicago changed previous resources into commodities and was heavily financed by eastern financial interests. It came to dominate grain, lumber, and meat industries and not only surpassed the previous "gateway" city, St. Louis, but also Philadelphia in total population to become the second largest city by the end of the century. Good book for people looking to connect how modern cities altered the relationship between humans and land.
• 
  Jordan

  I know this book took a decade to write but I wish it was longer
• 
  Michael

  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.
• 
  Jeffrey

  Very interesting book, although at times it could get boring. I suppose if you are reallyinterested in economic history then it you may like it better. Here's the paper I wrote for class on it:
  
  In Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, author William Cronon presents the reader with a new way of looking at the historical relationship between urban and rural society. As opposed to the “persistent rural bias of western history” (xv) that has usually focused on the distinct separation of rural and urban communities, Cronon contends that the relationship between a metropolitan city and the vast rural area that surrounds it are, in fact, so interdependent that it is impossible to separate the two. As evidence, he offers an extensive look at the simultaneous rise of the western United States and the city of Chicago during the 19th century. Focusing mostly on economic routes between Chicago and the farming communities of states like Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, Cronon seeks to “tell the city-country story as a unified narrative” (xvi) and show that the city could not exist without the countryside and vice versa.
  Cronon’s main argument is that the rise of a great metropolitan city like Chicago cannot happen without the support of a vast, tributary rural empire feeding resources and services into the city, an area he calls the “hinterland”. At the same time, however, all the small rural, farming communities of that make up that hinterland could never exist without a great metropolitan city in which to sell their goods. In essence, the whole idea that a city and the rural communities around it could exist as separate, individual entities is wrong. They are all part of a single, economic system in which both parts are vital. “A rural landscape which omits the city and an urban landscape which omits the country are radically incomplete as portraits of their shared world.” (51) To prove his point, the author focuses on the economic commodities of grain, lumber, and meat, as well as lines of credit. The flow of these commodities between Chicago and its hinterland show how interconnected and, ultimately, how reliant all these communities were on each other.
  Before Chicago was even considered a town, people began touting its location as a perfect spot for a city that could connect the Eastern seaboard with farmland in the interior of the continent. Despite several other cities claiming themselves as a better location, and despite several real estate booms and bust in Chicago, it was eventually established as a prime market for shipping goods between the large cities of the East and the population of the Great West. Initially using waterways, and later an extensive system of railroads, Chicago positioned itself to be the primary collection point for grain and crops traveling from western farms to eastern cities, for lumber traveling from northern forests to western towns and farms, and for cattle and pigs to be butchered, dressed, and packed to places all over the country. By staying on top of the latest innovations, like grain elevators and refrigerated rail cars, and organizing systems to maintain quality, like establishing uniform grades of grain and the Chicago Board of Exchange, Chicago was able to beat out other major western cities vying for control of those same western lands.
  Beyond just these physical commodities, Chicago was also able to gain a large amount of influence over financial and intellectual matters throughout its hinterland. Chicago banks were the main source of lines of credit for many farmers and business owners all across the western U.S. Through the study of bankruptcy records, Cronon points out that even in communities closer to cities like St. Louis and Minneapolis, Chicago banks owned the majority of debt. Eastern cities like New York and Boston had such a vested interest in Chicago, that they opened their lines of credit to investors in the city thus ensuring its success.
  Another of Cronon’s major themes is a look at the perception of what is “natural” when it comes to man’s relationship with the world around him. For centuries, western thinkers had viewed cities as an unnatural place and “the ultimate symbol of ‘man’s’ conquest of ‘nature’” (18) while viewing rural areas as being more in touch with the nature around them. Cronon disputes this idea by claiming that the distinction between “first nature” – the landscape and environment as it existed before human intervention – and “second nature” – the product of humans trying to improve the land around them to better suit their needs – are rather arbitrary. In the case of Chicago, “boosters” claimed aspects of first nature (i.e. Lake Michigan, the Chicago River) and second nature (i.e. dredging the mouth of the river, the Illinois and Michigan Canal) were natural advantages of Chicago’s location. Much like the perceived urban/rural barrier, the “artificial mental wall between nature and un-nature” (18) was based less on fact than people opinions.
  Cronon makes an important point in comparing his view of an interdependent city/country system against those of Frederick Jackson Turner and Johann Heinrich von Thunen. Compared to von Thunen’s central place theory, Chicago seems to offer a rather convincing real-world case study. Von Thunen’s ideas of specialized, zoned areas seems to hold up pretty well, with the obvious exception of the areas’ location being affected by rivers and other access points. A community’s main export crop is shown to be largely affected by its vicinity to Chicago, both in distance and time. In many ways, however, Cronon’s theory is in direct contradiction to Turner’s. While Turner viewed the west as an empty, primitive area ready to be conquered by civilization, Cronon takes a much subtler view of the Great West’s connection to the established “civilization” of the east. He stresses that cities, no matter big and industrious, are still products of the natural world they inhabit. Rather than untouched nature and concrete-filled cities being opposites, they are merely different points on the same spectrum. I think one of the most important ideas to come out of Cronon’s work is the possibility of an entire paradigm shift away from the views of Turner and towards a more holistic view of the city/country split. I think I agree with Cronon when he calls it a “hybrid system, at least as artificial as it was natural.… At the heart of this new system was the twin birth of city and hinterland. Neither was possible without the other.” (264)
  
• 
  Dylan

  Takeaway: Buy and read, but don't be afraid to flip ahead or put it down a little early.
  
  Pros: Chapters 2-5 (the middle 70% of the book) are absolutely wonderful, nearly perfect. A must read for anyone interested in economic history, agriculture, animal studies, or infrastructure studies.
  
  Cons: The end of the book loses the thread of the book's overall thesis and sort of drags to a stop. The lumber chapter could have been trimmed.
• 
  Jane Henningsen

  A well-researched economic history of the city of Chicago and its hinterlands.
  
  This book illustrates the interdependent relationship between urban and rural areas through case studies of Chicago’s commodities trade: corn, grain, lumber, and meat.
  
  Highly recommend if you are a fan of the city of Chicago, if you’re interested in economics, or if you love a good illustrative chart or map. Some amazing exhibits in here!
  
  It also helped me understand the mutual dependence and distrust between urban and rural populations, which has been a signature of American culture for as long as we’ve had cities.
• 
  Jeff

  Excellent. One of the best historical books on Chicago I've ever read.
• 
  Alan Haynie

  One of my all time favorites.
• 
  Mark Peacock

  Living in Chicago, I never quite understood what made it one of the fastest growing cities of the 19th century, growing from 200 people when it was founded in 1833 to the 5th-largest city in the world at the end of the century. Cronon does an excellent job of explaining the economics and the industries that drove that growth, and in the last chapters, suggests where this success fed into Chicago's late 20th-century decline.
• 
  JC

  Read for class. Cronon is a brilliant writer. I find his writing tremendously enjoyable to read. A classmate called it charming, and I think that’s accurate. There are so many things that I’ve been thinking about regarding the history of deforestation and sawmills, rivers and capitalism, and it appears Cronon already said so much of what I’ve wanted to say, only far better than I would have ever known how to.
  
  While Cronon is not known for economic history as much as environmental history, I found his account of capitalism endlessly illuminating. It shares that longue durree flair that I’ve come to enjoy in Hobsbawm, but it reads very differently also. Both excellent writers, but each very distinctive. I’ve read critiques that call Cronon’s writing smug and self-indulgent, and all I can say is if this is what it means to write self-indulgently, please continue, because it feels very indulgent for me as a reader also. I actually only first heard of Cronon last semester when my advisor recommended him as we were working together on a grant application. And I started reading Changes in the Land that semester, but never finished. I actually enjoyed Nature’s Metropolis much more than the portion I’ve read of Changes, but I look forward to returning to it sometime soon.
  
  There are many critiques of Cronon that I think are very valid, but I’m still amazed at how durable his work has remained. For example, there are critiques that Cronon does not adequately deal with questions of labour. This is true, but when labour does enter his narrative it does so in very interesting ways. You can see the intimate ways in which capitalism is connected with deforestation in very concrete details but only by getting a ground’s eye view of the way the lumber industry was undercapitalized, not in terms of fixed capital like sawmills, but in terms of liquid capital that could furnish adequate supplies and labour. An example excerpt:
  
  “Mears, who was more conservative about credit than many, regularly dealt with cash-flow problems by ordering his managers, “Send us every dollar you can spare. . .” The Chicago partner of the Holt Company responded to its capital crisis in 1877 by writing his Wisconsin mill, “I will send you what money I can,” but telling his partners, “You will have to pay out money as sparingly as possible. We have a large amt of paper falling due the 1st of the month and we are getting in almost nothing to meet it.”
  
  “The same shortage of liquid capital that led lumbermen to fear the winter months threatened catastrophe when the economy jolted into a financial panic. In years like 1857, 1873, and their lesser cousins, many lumber companies found themselves caught in a trap of their own making. Not only had they incurred debts with their suppliers, but more often than not they had also extended credit to their own customers, who were now unable to pay. Under such circumstances, the long chain of debts and credits broke at its weakest links, and firms had to scramble to avoid becoming one more victim in the ensuing series of defaults. Declaring in October 1859 that “these are the hardest times for the lumber trade I have ever seen,” Mears wrote one of his managers, “I . . . have hardly been able to attend to any thing but money matters and have hardly been able to collect enough to pay expenses.” ”
  
  These cash-flow problems led to the common strategy of coercing workers to accepting payments in kind instead of in cash, and these would result in occasional upwellings of discontent that could sometimes get a little confrontational, violent, and insurrectionary. All this was within the context of a highly unstable commodity market in Chicago, that Cronon depicts in wonderful detail. As market prices fell, they would need to extract even more lumber just to keep afloat and repay debts and its precisely this volatility of commodity markets and downward price pressure that pushed deforestation to such a frenzied pace:
  
  “The manufacturers’ acute seasonal need for short-term credit drove them to the one market where they knew they could get quick cash, even if it meant that they were forever selling lumber at lower prices than they liked. Under such circumstances, the only way they could keep up with costs was to cut more trees, contributing still further to the overproduction and saturated markets that had created low prices in the first place. Chicago thus became the focal point of a vicious circle: undercapitalization caused overproduction, which in turn kept prices low and accelerated the destruction of the northern forest. The Lumberman summed up the problem by attributing it to “so many men . . . striving to carry on a larger business than their capital will warrant” and, as a result, having to turn natural capital into liquid capital merely to survive. “The only reasonable explanation of this paradoxical state of affairs . . . ,” the Lumberman’s editors wrote, “is that the mill men . . . are using up their capital, as it exists in the form of stumpage, for no other end than to simply keep themselves in business.”
  
  I can’t think of a more mundane yet brilliant depiction of the Sisyphean senselessness of the capitalist mode of production than this simple yet elegant example that Cronon details here.
  
  My friend lent me a copy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and I felt very compelled to read it soon after reading Cronon’s description of cattle markets and slaughterhouses. You also get brilliant descriptions of how living animals became commodified in very particular ways, almost as signifying concentrated stocks of corn, that could more efficiently be sent to market and converted into cash. But not all in the same way. For example, you have a popularly developed taste for preserved pork products, salted and smoked, that allows pig ‘processing’ do be done in the same place they are raised. But you have a norm surrounding a desire for fresh beef (think fresh steaks) such that the slaughter of cattle would be done as close to the site of consumption as possible. Hence you have the stock imagery of the American cow boy, people hired to herd cattle across vast landscapes to get them to market still alive and slaughtered in the urban metropolis in which they are consumed. In many ways, this is a similar distinction I observed myself with tea and coffee production. Tea processing is most frequently done on site, partially because it’s a highly skilled process (though it most often done by machines now), and it is most often best to process or oxidize the tea as soon as it is picked. Whereas coffee, though processed through pulping and processing operations, is almost always roasted closest to where it is consumed, because there is a popularly developed taste for freshly roasted coffee.
  
  There are also wonderful examples in this book about how capitalism as a universalizing project works towards the diminution of local particularities. This is the case of how grain categories came to be developed or timezones practically adopted. But I was most fascinated by railways which most often popped up to follow the embankments of nearby rivers, which were the principle means of getting commodities to market in the past. However, railways increasingly became the predominant mode of transportation precisely because it created a parallel world less subject to the contingencies and peculiarities of the local environment. When rivers froze, or roads washed out, or a snow storm or some other bad weather struck, the railways were the most reliable way of transporting commodities to market.
  
  I’ve left this to the end but this is maybe the most important aspect of the book, which is Cronon’s adoption of Marxist categories of first nature (pre-human) and second nature (modified by humans) to address both issues of human agency, but also to brilliantly examine the commonly accepted dichotomy of urban and rural. For Cronon, they are mutually dependent upon each other. The city relied upon its rural hinterlands in the same way those rural sites came to depend on their urban center in Chicago. The bucolic romanticized rolling farmland is in innumerable ways entangled with the modern metropolis. As are humans with the rest of the environment. First nature and second nature are intermingled in ways that are impossible to fully separate. It's what Haraway calls naturecultures, easy to dismiss as impatience with poststructuralism grows, but I myself find it a very generative way of thinking about whatever it is we are trying to talk about when we talk about 'nature'.
• 
  David Fulmer

  This is an academic book which describes in great detail the rise of Chicago from a fur trading post to a major metropolis capable of putting on a World’s Fair of great beauty, attracting visitors from around the world. The author, William Cronon, has a thorough knowledge of his subject and the footnotes and bibliography collect an exhaustive list of sources for every possible angle on the development of Chicago in the nineteenth century.
  
  His thesis that the history of a city and its surrounding countryside cannot be told separately leads him to an exploration of many of the important industries which shaped the environment of the midwest during the nineteenth century. There’s an excellent account of the development of the grain trade and its far-reaching effects as farmers split up the land into plots on which to grow their crops and the the skyline of Chicago was reshaped with the construction of numerous grain elevators to store and distribute the crops from the west both locally and in eastern markets via the railroad. Another chapter describes the lumber industry which was almost a city within the city and inspired loggers in Wisconsin and Michigan to reduce numerous pine forests to vast cutover districts.
  
  Sections on the meat packing industry and the mail order catalog businesses of Montgomery Ward and Sears are enriched with many details that demonstrate both the effect the city had on its more sparsely populated hinterland and the way in which the ecology of the region drove changes in the area and was changed by the development of the concentrated settlement of people. Cronon enlivens what can at times be dry historical material with stories about the inventions and the technology that accelerated change in the American west like the the refrigerated railroad car, barbed wire, and the balloon frame house.
  
  Another focus of the book is the capital flows that promoted and supported the development of Chicago and the west. From real estate speculation in the 1830s to the coming of the railroads a few decades later, many of the changes to Chicago were financed by investors in the east. Cronon also did extensive research into the credit and debt of bankrupts in the 1870s to illustrate the extent of the commercial connections that played such an important role in the growth of Chicago.
  
  This is an important, fascinating history of Chicago and the west, of its businesses and industries, its ecologies and environments. Cronon has succeeded in making the history of Chicago during the nineteenth century both historically interesting and fascinating on a more personal level by describing the rise and decline of industries and corporations as well as the stories of individuals including entrepreneurs, farmers, and workers who both caused and reacted to, sometimes unsuccessfully, the changes brought on by the growth of Chicago. It’s detailed, engrossing, and full of interesting, provocative ideas.