Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West Paperback – May 17, 1992

The genius of this book is that it explains how the world works. It takes on the big picture, with uncommon elegance and assurance. This is how history should be done, or, at least, how more history should be done. Yes, it's about a particular time and place. I first encountered it in a college course about Chicago history, which I took because I'm from there. But it transcends parochial interest. That particular time and place is key to understanding the growth of the nation. And, more than that, in explaining how economic growth happened there and then, in charting the large forces at work, it provides a sense of how economic growth happens, how a civilization that happens to be our own develops. It's economic history. It's financial history. You'll learn just what futures are, how commodities trading works. You'll get a feel for financial innovation. That might sound dry. But it's an entertaining and engrossing narrative, with a touch of personal reflection, and it's layperson-friendly. In telling the story of how vast natural resources were wrangled in Chicago in the second half of the 19th Century, it tells the story of the growth of America and the development of modern civilization.

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.

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.

Nature's Metropolis is an economic and business history of the Great West and the key role that the city of Chicago played in the development of the west. At times, Cronon does a good job of for making the topics pretty interesting. However, the overly long accounts of farm life, finance/ credit, and lumber shipments were far less enjoyable. While I learned a lot from the book, I suspect many people would find this book intensely boring.