Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

Abstract

Book Reviews Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. By William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Pp. xxiii + 530; illustrations, maps, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $27.50. Chicago was incorporated as a city under the laws of Illinois in 1837, when the population was little more than 3,000. It was located at the lowermost end of Lake Michigan at the point of the deepest penetration of the Great Lakes into the continental United States, but there was no means of transportation other than horse-drawn wagons on crude dirt roads to connect it with the vast area of land to the west. The two short branches of the narrow, shallow, sluggish Chicago River were all the flowing water that nature provided, but the South Branch lay so close to the Des Plaines River and the Mississippi drainage basin that in periods of high water the intervening land was flooded. If it was not much to start with, there was the promise of great potential wealth, and a few far-sighted citizens, filled with almost mystical dreams of economic destiny, were aware of it. They proved to be right: during the thirty-four years between incorporation and the Great Fire of 1871, the population of the city expanded from a paltry village to a flourishing commercial and industrial city of 300,000. The story of this unparalleled expansion in size, wealth, and power has been told with varying emphases many times, most recently by William Cronon, a professor of history at Yale University. His version is told in terms of the economic interaction of the city with the physiography, geology, and soil fertility of its hinterland, which extended from the Great Lakes westward a thousand miles to the Rocky Mountains. A series of economic and technological processes developed sideby -side in the years after the establishment of the human community. First and above all was the transformation of the tail-grass prairie, with its immense herds of bison, into an ordered agricultural domain, given mainly to the growing of wheat and corn and the raising of hogs and cattle. The natural resources were a seemingly limitless area of fertile ground and a precipitation exactly suited to an agriculture equally suited to human needs. The Native Americans who previously occupied the land were forcefully driven into scattered enclaves and the bison soon exterminated. To the north of the prairie lands in the Great Lakes region stood the forests, where every kind of useful wood grew in what again seemed unlimited abundance. White pine was the Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 591 592 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE most valuable structural timber, and by the turn of the century it was so thoroughly cut that it was largely gone. Over the prairies, the high plains to the west of them, and the former forestlands, the raising of livestock took the place of bison and other native fauna. By the end of the century the physiography and ecology of the immense region had been so completely transformed that the only vestiges of its original character survived in a few state parks and national forests. At the same time Chicago, beneficiary of the conquering spirit, had grown into the major financial, mercantile, and manufacturing city of the midnation. The account of this transformation and an analysis of how it came about form the substance of Cronon’s narrative, the essential theme being that the city of Chicago and the open lands that spread around it grew together in a natural-cultural symbiosis of prairie agriculture, forest lumbering, city enterprises, canals, and railroads. The human and civic world could not have grown without the natural, and the latter could not have been transformed to useful ends without human intervention. The book is thus a long, intricately detailed illustration of the main theme of Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development, which establishes the thesis that the growth of cities over millennia could not have occurred without the simultaneous growth of agricul­ ture. Chicago is in no way unique in this respect; what sets it apart from other cities is the immensity of...