Thomas Ray's Reviews > Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon (1954-. Retired as University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor, 2020.) 1991, 530 pages (and 32 unnumbered pages of pictures), ISBN 0393308731

How Chicago shaped (and was shaped by) the midcontinent landscape and economy, 1833-1900. pp. xv, 53. City needs country to survive; country needs city to go beyond subsistence. p. 369. Urban and rural created each other. p. 384. For much of the 19th Century, the West began in Chicago. p. xviii.

Chicago marketed the grain, timber, and meat of the midcontinent.

Once /the/ trading hub to half the continental U.S., many cities now serve that role in their regions. Yet Chicago remains the chief metropolis of (not only Illinois but also) Iowa to this day. p. 309.

By "Nature's Metropolis," he means that Chicago exists due to the abundant natural resources that funneled there, /and/ that the prairies and forests were destroyed in creating Chicago.

Thorough to a fault.



In pre-rail days, Chicago did no eastern business between November and May, as ice and storms closed Great Lakes shipping. p. 57. [But see graph showing Chicago harbor arrivals, April through November, 1851, p. 75. Some of these would not have been from the east coast.] Roads were mud, impassable except when frozen in winter or dust in summer. p. 57. Chicago would flood in spring when the lake was high. The water table was almost at the surface. From 1849 through 1869, Chicagoans raised their city on 14 feet of fill. p. 58. September through November, harvests came in to town. p. 59.

SHIPPING

Cheap lake transport east gave Chicago its price advantage: farmers could sell their produce at higher prices, and buy supplies at lower prices, in Chicago than in river towns in the area. pp. 60-61.

The Illinois-River-to-Lake-Michigan canal opened in 1848.

ST. LOUIS

The water level of the Mississippi at St. Louis rose and fell more than 40 feet from low to high season. Where to put a grain elevator along the sloping levee was a problem. p. 113.

The Mississippi River upstream from St. Louis was plagued with shoals, reefs, rocks, and rapids. Freight rates were high. Railroads from the river to Chicago solved the problem, taking what had been St. Louis business to Chicago instead. pp. 296-297.

RAIL

Chicago gained rail connection to New York in 1852, reducing a more-than-two-week trip to less than two days. pp. 70, 76-77. By 1861, a web of rail lines infused Illinois and surrounding states, focusing on Chicago. pp. ii, iii, 69. By 1869, Chicago was rail-connected to the west coast. p. 70. Time zones came in 1883. p. 79. By 1893, there were 30 million people to whom Chicago was the largest city easily accessible. p. 92.

No single railroad company operated both east and west of Chicago. Chicago was the terminus of the western fan of feeder lines and of the eastern trunk lines. The West began at Chicago, 1848-1900. pp. 83, 86, 90-91.

A railroad car held 325 bushels of grain, in loose bulk, shifted by elevator. pp. 110-111. (A barge or steamboat might hold 4,000-10,000 bushels, all in sacks moved by laborers. p. 415.) Chicago got its first steam-powered grain elevator in 1848. p. 111. The Illinois Central elevator could simultaneously unload 12 rail cars and load two ships, at 24,000 bushels per hour. p. 113.

FREIGHT RATES

Long- and short-haul rate making: Railroads charged monopoly prices where there was only one line, such as most agricultural areas. The price to a more distant place that had more than one railroad was lower for the whole, long trip, than for a shorter section of the same trip. p. 85.

The Interstate Commerce Commission, established 1887, outlawed collusion among railroads. p. 241.

October through April, when lake shipping was fully loaded (October) or impossible (November-April), Chicago-to-New-York rail rates were around 60¢ per 100 lb. of grain; May to September, with lake-transport competition, rates were around 50¢ per 100 lb. of grain. 1871-1873. p. 88.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

The telegraph came in 1848. p. 76.

TIMBER

A board foot is 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 inch = 144 cubic inches.

A single log jam on the Menominee River in 1888 backed up 15 miles of logs, up to 30 feet deep: 500 million board feet (1.5 million cubic yards) of timber. p. 157.

Chicago lumberyards took in 3 million board-feet per day, 7 months of the year, as of 1874. Twelve miles of dockage were for lumber ships alone. p. 175.

Chicago yards held 400 million board feet (1.2 million cubic yards, or 765 acre feet) of lumber, 1879.01. pp. 173, 183. They shipped over a billion board feet per year by 1880. p. 181.

After 1882, Chicago's lumber business declined. Railroads had penetrated to the sawmills, which then stacked their own lumber to dry, and sold direct to retailers. More lumber was coming from the upper Mississippi River valley, and from the South, bypassing Chicago. pp. 184, 195-197, 204.

Rail, instead of water, transport of logs meant that now hardwoods too--which do not float--could be harvested and brought to market. p. 198.

The white pine had been logged off. p. 201.

FIRE

Farmers burned the dry debris of the cutover forests, to prepare for plowing. 1,500 people died in the 1871 fire at Peshtigo, Wisconsin. p. 202. The denuded forest land proved poor soil for crops. p. 203.

RISE FROM ASHES

A 4-mile-by-two-thirds-of-a-mile swath of downtown Chicago burned, 1871.10.08-09, in a fire started in the O'Leary barn at 137 De Koven Street. 100,000 people were left homeless. p. 345. Rebuilding raised land values and led to steel-and-masonry skyscrapers. p. 346. Residences moved out: workers to the west and south sides surrounding their workplaces, bosses to the north in leafy, workplace-free suburbs. pp. 347-349.

MEAT

A hog is 15 or 20 bushels of corn on 4 legs. p. 222.

Pork is easy to cure using salt and saltpeter. p. 227. People were more amenable to eating salty ham, bacon, and sausage than salty beef. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potas... (Such processed meats are a cancer risk.)

Chicago in 1850 packed 20,000 hogs; Cincinnati packed 334,000. p. 229. In 1858, Chicago began using winter-harvested ice, to enable year-round meat processing. p. 231. Rail and the Civil War gave Chicago its dominance in hogs: Chicago processed over 1,000,000 hogs per year by the early 1870s. p. 230. Each rail car of refrigerated beef needed 1,000 pounds of ice, replenished at each icing station on a 4-day trip east. p. 235.

In 1888, Swift built a meat-packing plant in Kansas City. pp. 257-258. Chicago's advantages were no longer unique. Trucking finally killed the Chicago stockyards, which closed in 1970. p. 259.

Joseph Glidden invented barbed wire in 1873, as bison were being exterminated and the arid plains filling with cattle. p. 221. Corn became animal feed. p. 222.

THE URBAN HIERARCHY

U.S., 1890 p. 279.
Cities, pop. > 1,000,000: 3 (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia)
Cities, 100,000 < pop. < 1,000,000: 25
Cities, 10,000 < pop. < 100,000: 326
Towns, 2,500 < pop. < 10,000: 994
Villages, pop. < 2,500: 6,490

[Notice that there are on the order of 3,000 counties in the U.S., so that most counties had only a village or two, if any. World population
1812 1 billion
1928 2 billion
1960 3 billion
1974 4 billion
1987 5 billion
1999 6 billion
2011 7 billion
2023 8 billion
still rising by 1 billion per 12 years.
List: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=... Graph: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=... ]

Small towns had only general stores, drawing customers from within a day's round-trip by horse, say 25 miles. p. 280.

Medium cities had specialized stores, such as of shoes, books, jewelry, stoves, agricultural equipment; also doctors, lawyers, photographers. p. 280.

Great cities are centers of /wholesale/ trade. Only great cities can sustain the largest financial institutions, publishing houses, professional orchestras, theatres, art galleries, libraries. p. 281.

MAIL ORDER

Aaron Montgomery Ward launched America's first general mail-order company in Chicago in 1872. He sold at shockingly-low prices: he bought for cash, in bulk; he had no retail-store expenses; he sold for cash, directly to the customer. p. 334. Huge mail-order demand prompted the Post Office to start Rural Free Delivery in 1896. p. 338.

DARK SIDE

Slums of want, misery, crime, poverty, vice, overcharging. p. 351. Chicago had 900+ brothels in 1893. p. 354.

FARMERS

Urban culture rested on the backs of rural farmers. p. 360.

To be effective, farm-produce selling cooperatives had to hold farm produce off the market to escape the low prices that always came with harvest season, and this required a larger capital investment than farm organizations could muster. p. 362.

RESEARCH

All scholarship rests on the labors of librarians and archivists, without whose work historical research would be almost impossible. p. xx. The author mined documents no one had looked at for over a century. p. xxi.

ERRATA

"Locomotives were not more efficient than horses." p. 80. Yes they were, because they were on wheels and rails.

William Cronon's wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi...

Cronon's homepage: https://www.williamcronon.net