Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

The story of Chicago’s rise as a western metropolis is a narrative of contrasts. Americans’ understanding of the city’s economic success in the second half of the 19th century is heavily influenced by historical narratives of a booming population, a healthy real-estate market, and the promise of a robust social scene. However, none of these characteristics are effectively articulated without the narratives of the surrounding rural landscape’s rich natural resources, the struggles of the prairie farmers, the building of small-town lumber mills, the evolution of the frontier livestock industry, and the rise of the railroads that connected city and country. Without these contrasting narratives, the city and its economic empire would not exist: “Though hardly as elegant as the department stores on State Street or the millionaires’ mansions on Prairie Avenue,” Cronon argues, “Chicago’s elevators, lumberyards, and stockyards were the most basic symbols of the city’s wealth and power” (386). Cronon’s statement paints the contrasting images of this narrative: On one hand, Chicago boasts the luxuries and conveniences of a stylish modern city, but on the other, the power and wealth of the city is built on the backs of the labor-intensive rural industries that transform raw natural resources into products exchanged for cash and goods in urban commodity markets.

The narrative of contrasts, then, requires Cronon to blend the physical and intellectual perspectives of the city with those of the country so that only one narrative emerges. Cronon’s thesis asserts that no other city played as significant a role as Chicago in developing the mid-continent during the second half of the 19th century. However, the support for Cronon’s thesis relies on positioning the city of Chicago as both the vision of the economic future as well as the link to the history and culture that built America. To achieve this end, Cronon organizes his book in a way that mirrors the evolution of this relationship. He first incites a cultural awakening among his readers, much like his own awakening upon first moving to the city at a young age. Second, Cronon demonstrates how Chicago’s reach to rural geographical areas allowed the city and country to merge into one powerful economic entity.

Using his own experiences as a case study, Cronon first looks at Chicago from the perspective of someone who has grown up and lived in the country. He plays up the perspectives of country and city life as he knows them from reading and his limited visits to the city. The narrative of a dark, dingy, sinful city is juxtaposed with the fresh, untamed beauty of the plains. In the preface and prologue, Cronon uses his own perceptions of “the dark city”—the vivid smokestacks, grey landscape, litter, and tall buildings—to come to the realization that these characteristics are as much a work of a “human” hand as the cleared and plowed farmland with which he is accustomed. He concludes that the city landscape is as much a narrative about its natural history as the plains are to Wisconsin. Although Cronon reveals that he still prefers the country to the city, this cultural awakening leads him to question how a rural area has any more right to be considered “natural” than an urban area that has been developed.

Parts 1 and 2 of Nature’s Metropolis, “To Be the Central City” and “Nature to Market,” respectively, shift Cronon’s narrative from one that examines the personal response he has to the new urban environment to one that posits Chicago as a central marketplace for the survival of the country. Cronon argues that “changing ecosystems and economies were much more the product of the urban-rural system as a whole than of any single place, including Chicago” (389). These sections of the book examine the development of the central city and its reliance on natural resources. This reliance is based partly on Chicago’s geographic position close to the frontier, waterways, eventual train routes, and eastern markets. However, the reliance rests on the city’s dependence on what these surrounding areas provide: farms, lumber yards, and meat. Transportation, first by boat then by train, flourished because of the markets available in Chicago. The country could easily get to the city to sell goods, and the city could easily access the country to acquire those goods. Small hinterland towns grew economically because their location made it ideal to send and trade goods. Goods coming from the East could now use Chicago as a destination point for disbursement to the developing towns and cities in the West.

Lastly, the book’s third section, “The Geography of Capital,” brings the various narratives together into one story. Cronon uses the 1893 “World’s Fair” as a metaphor to represent this singular narrative. He writes,

The paradox of nineteenth-century Chicago was that the same market that brought city and country ever closer together, giving them a common culture and fostering ever more intimate communication between them, also concealed the very linkages it was creating (493).

The fair provided exhibitions of the many industries that Chicago would boast by the end of the 19th century. A small city within itself, the fair made just about any product available to consumers, and it symbolized the achievement that Chicago had set out the realize nearly a century earlier: It had become the central city of the West. However, underneath the representations of wealth and power, Cronon points out the hidden links to the farms, mills, factories, and industries that make this achievement possible. “Chicago,” Henry Adams said, “was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there” (500).

Throughout Nature’s Metropolis, Cronon traces the role of communication and rhetoric on the relationship between Chicago and its hinterlands. Arguably, Cronon’s narrative is as much an exploration of the growth and popularity of emerging forms of narrative in the 19th century as it is a history of the emerging American West.

The development of American literature as a “national literature” in the 19th century depended on the transition from journals of settlers and explorers to more romantic forms of storytelling represented by authors like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perceptions of nature, and more importantly its sublime qualities and opposition to the emergence of the American city, are most notably illustrated in works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. These writers suggest that boundaries between city and country lie in that which is natural and unnatural. In the 19th century, Americans learned these distinctions from these writers, who earlier developed their own perceptions of nature from English pastoral poets. To them, the wilderness and the city are at opposite poles, “the one pristine and unfallen, the other corrupt and unredeemed” (33).

Another form of communication that became popular in the 19th century were the stories of the city published by “boosters.” The boosters, as a group of writers and philosophers, had great interest in the development of urban areas, partly because some of them stood to profit from the growing markets. While romantic writers of the time glorified rural living and painted the city as dark and uninviting, Boosters promoted the city as a place to grow economically and socially. The city promised leisure, wealth, opportunity, and connections between people, as well as invoking awe and wonderment. The texts written by boosters were designed to entice people, particularly industrialists, to move their businesses to the city.

Complimenting the goals of the boosters, the growth of newspapers and trade publications marked a transformation in how people received information. While the boosters were promoting the city’s interests, papers like The Daily Tribune and The Daily Democratic Press offered readers regular reports on daily markets and the frequency of sales for the futures contracts. These publications also touted the success of the railroad and the various ways the city could benefit from them (120). In addition to promoting the city, these papers intensified tensions between farmers and markets by publishing pieces that exposed corruption within the grain elevator practices.

Cronon concludes, “Crucial to the success of all the new linkages among factories, wholesalers, retailers, and final customers was the ability of each to communicate with the others” (481-82). This conclusion is perhaps best exemplified in the popularity of direct advertising and sales catalogs. With the invention of labor and time saving equipment such as the McCormack reaper, advertising catalogs that could reach consumers away from the city became an important part of the marketing industry. Mail order catalogs, such as those produced and distributed by Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck, allowed farmers and manufacturers to purchase goods without having to come into the city. The city, in a way, would come to them. As Cronon concludes, “[I]t needn’t really matter whether one lived in city or country, for the good life could be purchased by mail wherever one made one’s home” (491).