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).

Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon's highly original ecological history of the city of Chicago, covers the most explosive period of its growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it morphed from a prairie trading post into a vital, sprawling metropolis at the center of an industrial empire. He emphasizes the ecological interdependence of the city and frontier hinterlands, and the manner in which the dramatic spectacle of urban transformation often came at the cost of the depredation of the landscape and its wildlife. 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. WC: One of the things I actually love about the discipline of history is that historians are narrators. I honestly think we are the last explicitly narrative discipline left in the American academy (with the journalists, as well). Storytelling is no longer, in most disciplines, regarded as a serious undertaking. I believe that storytelling is inherently a moral activity. It’s about organizing events and characters and landscapes and settings so that a series of events becomes explicable in the sequence of relationships that are unfolding over the course of the narrative. And almost always the narrative has some lesson in mind. One of the beauties of history is that, although there have been moments in which historians have argued with each other about whether they are objective or not, objectivity is actually not the phrase most historians use the describe what they do. Our goal, it seems to me, is to be fair to the people whose lives we narrate. That means trying to see the world through their eyes. 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:

How will the colour really look in your home?

It is about Chicago as the most visible embodiment of a city-country system that, even as it succeeded, hid its connections. It was — and still is — possible, he notes, to buy a piece of lumber in Chicago without considering the forest it came from. To eat a steak without thinking of it as once in the body of a steer. Together, those three cities traced the string of lakes, canals, and rivers that would channel the flow of information and resources between Chicago and the East. This is a suggestive but not entirely new way of looking at cities. Lewis Mumford, one of the founders of urban history, insisted that cities could be understood only as part of an interdependent regional economy and ecosystem. City and country have "a common life," he wrote in a largely ignored essay of 1956. They are "one thing, not two things." By studying the city and its region as an organic unit, Mumford argued, we would come to a closer appreciation of the environmental consequences of urbanization. Mumford called this then unnamed field of study "the natural history of urbanization" and predicted its development would reorient the way we interpret the world.

Lccn 90040835 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL1880327M Openlibrary_edition This means of death for cattle and pigs, Cronon writes, were filled with pain and terror. He notes: Yet, in likely the most memorable passage in this book, drawn from its prologue, the author offers a more balanced statement of his ecological message than some might have expected:It never actually reached Chicago, except, in a way, through a later agreement with the Illinois Central. But Cronon notes that, like the canal, the Galena and Chicago and the other railways that followed had an immediate impact on the way people in the city and its trading region lived and how they did business.

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). 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. An eastern-oriented economy “naturally” looked across the lakes to Chicago as the westernmost point of cheap water access to the agricultural heartland of the interior. Just as “naturally,” easterners saw Chicago as the logical place in which to invest funds for encouraging the flow of trade in their direction.An intoxicating piece of scholarship and enterprise…It is really a work of biography: a look at the life of Chicago." Wall Street Journal - David Shribman Agents of the French government who came through this area — Louis Jolliet in 1673 and Robert Cavelier de La Salle in 1682 — recognized the significance of Mud Lake, as well as the clumsiness of those six miles of portage. Their solution: a canal cut through the marsh to link the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, and, through them, the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. 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. 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.