Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon (1991)

Nature’s Metropolis has been on my to-read list for years, and since I’ll be moving to Chicago in a few months now seemed like a good time to dig into it. William Cronon’s animating idea is to tell the history of Chicago’s rise as the gateway city to the American West not through individuals or even groups of people, but through flows of natural resources and the wealth they generated – that is, through nature turned into capital – and the way these flows inextricably connect city and country. It’s an incredibly ambitious historiography that has much to say about how American cities grew in the 19th century.

The land around Chicago was controlled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the Potawatomis, who traded freely with other native peoples and European immigrants from Canada and the Eastern states. In the 1770s a fur trading post was established there, and in 1803 the US Army built Fort Dearborn. From 1804, when a treaty of questionable legality supposedly gave the US Government the right to buy and sell land in the vicinity, to 1833, when the Potawatomis, in dire circumstances, more officially signed over their lands, Chicago was a site of bitter conflict. After the treaties were signed, the area was flooded with westward-moving speculators and others who wanted in at the outset on what looked to be a major metropolis in the making. Like Milwaukee to the north, Chicago was an obvious port for boats sailing west from New York via the Erie Canal. Unlike Milwaukee, it would eventually connect itself to downstate farmers via the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and to Southern and Western markets through quickly expanding railroad networks.

Cronon chronicles the boosterism that helped sell investment in the newly developing city. As early as the 1830s, boosters talked about Chicago as proof that the US was a benevolent empire based on commerce freely entered into rather than on the exploitative taxation associated with Old World powers. Explaining booster logic, Cronon says, “Commerce was a two-way street in a manner that imperial taxes could never be, so city and country in America need not reproduce their ancient enmity. The booster vision of imperial destiny presupposed no exploitation” (44).

But enmity and exploitation, of course, were part of the equation from the beginning. Cronon is an environmental historian (hist first book, Changes in the Land, is a history of ecological change in colonial New England as Europeans took control of it from Native Americans), so the exploitation he describes most fully is of the natural world. A third of the book tells the story of Chicago’s growth through three key resources – grain, lumber, and meat – and all three show how technological innovation turned the tangible products of nature into fungible, abstract commodities in a complex economy.

They also show Cronon’s gift for spinning the seemingly mundane into fascinating histories of connection. When grain, for example, was transported on boats, it traveled in burlap sacks. This meant that from the time corn or wheat left its home farm to the time it reached its ultimate destination, the grain was identifiable with the farmer who had grown it, so growers’ primary incentive was to produce a high-quality product. But the sack system also required workers to load the grain from field to wagon to boat and back to wagon, adding costs at every step, so it was ripe for innovation. When the railroads replaced all this, sacks became unnecessary as streams of undifferentiated grains were poured into railcars, calling a grain grading system into being that incentivized uniformity rather than quality. The grains were sorted by grade into Chicago’s newly constructed steam-powered grain elevators. For a deposit of wheat or corn, an elevator would issue a receipt, and these receipts were soon traded like stocks or spent like cash. As Cronon explains, the receipts trade was not so much a market in grain as a market in grain prices – a futures market in which traders placed bets on whether prices would rise or fall. The futures market was so large that by 1875 it exceeded the cash value of grain itself tenfold – so while the actual grain moving in and out of Chicago was valued at around $200 million, the futures market sat at $2 billion. It’s a story that repeats itself in various ways throughout the book: technological and economic innovations transform physical nature into abstract capital. In Cronon’s words:

“The elevators effectively created a new form of money, secured not by gold but by grain. Elevator receipts, as traded on the floor of [the Chicago Grain Exchange], accomplished the transmutation of one of humanity’s oldest foods, obscuring its physical identity and displacing it into the symbolic world of capital” (120). (In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan draws heavily on Cronon’s grain history to explain how corn has become the fuel that powers our industrial food system.)

With its lakeside port, river connections, railroad centrality, and its proximity to the great northern forests of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Chicago also became a natural market for timber, and the white pine, until it was almost entirely cut over in the 1890s, was uniquely suited for that market. White pine grows tall and straight and has relatively few branches, its wood is light and pliable but strong, and, importantly, it floats:

“In a northern landscape that still lacked railroads, only water could move so large and heavy an object as a sawlog for any great distance. Fortunately, the same climate, glaciers, and impermeable bedrocks that had created soil conditions favorable to forest growth had also left the north woods with an intricate network of lakes, rivers, and streams. If one could only get the trunk of a pine tree to the bank of a major stream, water would do the work of carrying it to mill and market.” (152-3)

It seemed inconceivable to the immigrants first seeing these forests that they could ever be exhausted, but they supplied the wood not only for Chicago, but for the houses, furniture, and fences being built on the treeless prairies of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. “[S]ettlingthe western prairies,” says Cronon, “meant cutting the northern forests” (154).

But the drive to deforestation was, in Cronon’s telling, also inevitable because of “the logic of capital” – the deterministic forces of a market economy at full throttle. The timber business was risky, involving huge outlays of capital to build or use mills, pay workers, and transport wood, and while it paid well in spring and summer, it didn’t pay at all in fall and winter when Lake Michigan and its river system were frozen over. Because Chicago always had buyers, timber merchants could hardly afford to go elsewhere, but because of the spring and summer supply glut they often got far less for their lumber than they might have gotten in another market. And because they knew they had to sell more just to break even, they cut more too, driving a vicious cycle of overextension and untenable clear-cutting. The logic by which the market abides became an engine for quick and massive changes in the US landscape. 

To so thoroughly commodify and take possession of the elements of an ecosystem shows, at best, a lack of reverence, and, at worst, a measure of cruelty. Nowhere is this clearer in Nature’s Metropolis than in Cronon’s descriptions of the Chicago meat markets. Turning grains and trees into abstract, undifferentiated, marketable objects called forth a new, disconnected way of thinking about nature, but performing the same trick on animals required us to actively turn off deep-seated feelings of empathy. We hardly think of it now because for most of us, cows, hogs, and chickens aren’t living beings occupying a place on a farm as much as they’re food occupying space on a shelf (a cognitive move – or a lack of one – that I’m as guilty of as the next carnivore). But there was, of course, a historical moment when, as a culture, we separated the act of eating from the act of killing.

For Cronon, the best single physical representation of this moment was the Union Stockyard, a 100-acre plot in south Chicago that “concentrate[d] the city’s livestock business at one location.” It was “capable of handling 21,000 head of cattle, 75,000 hogs, 22,000 sheep, and 200 horses, all at the same time” (210). Also necessary at the stockyard were accommodations for the human owners and traders of these animals, so beside it stood a six-story hotel with 200+ rooms, a dining hall, barbershop, game room, and an “‘elegant Exchange room’” (212) for trade. Cronon’s description of the juxtaposition of stockyard and hotel is worth quoting at length:

“Here, then, was the whole point of the stockyard, the ultimate meeting place of country and city, West and East, producer and consumer – of animals and their killers. Its polished wood surfaces and plush upholstery offered an odd contrast to the wet muck and noisy, fecund air in the pens just outside its doors. The Exchange Building seemed somehow at a distance from the animals in whose flesh it dealt, as if to deny the bloody consequences of the transactions that went on within it. For some, this was a sign of civilization, whereby ‘a repulsive and barbarizing business is lifted out of the mire, and rendered clean, easy, respectable, and pleasant.’ Those who handled the animals in their pens had little to do with those who bought and sold them, and vice versa. ‘The controlling minds’ – the large traders and meat-packers – were thereby ‘left free to work at the arithmetic and book-keeping of the business,’ undisturbed by manure or blood or the screams of dying animals.” (212) 

Centralizing the trade of animals also brought about the centralization of slaughter and new ways of looking at transport. When animals were seen as food products, moving their living bodies in rail cars made little sense for two simple reasons: first, much of the live animal was essentially useless on the market, and second, packing live animals into cars makes for an extremely inefficient use of space. “Dressed” meat – chopped and ready for sale – includes only the profitable parts of the animal and can be stacked and arranged to maximize the limited space in train cars. But consumers were not accustomed to eating animals that had been killed hundreds of miles away, nor were butchers accustomed to selling them, so dressed meat was sold at steep discounts until people overcame their skepticism.

Railroad companies were also resistant to the dressed beef revolution. Charging as they did by weight, they actually made more money moving live animals, which were heavier and took up more space. Further, dressed beef required refrigerated rail cars, a new technology that these companies had no incentive to develop. But Chicago companies like Swift and Armour did invest heavily in these technologies and also in powerful new marketing techniques, so that before long “Chicago dressed beef” was in high demand. In Cronon’s language of the relationships between city and country, meat supply chains, even more than markets in grain or lumber, “brought the entire nation – and Great Britain as well – into Chicago’s hinterland” (238).

It is these ecologies of place and capital that most interest Cronon, but giving detailed accounts of such relationships creates serious difficulties for historians, who must extrapolate large societal trends from individual stories, or try to tell individual stories from trends calculated from piles of data. Cronon’s innovation for weaving the narratives of people, businesses, and flows of capital between 19th-century Chicago and its hinterland was to use bankruptcy records to create maps of economic and ecological connection. Not surprisingly, 19th-century businesses were no more eager than today’s to reveal to their competitors or tax collectors exactly how much they were worth or how much they owed to whom. But a bankruptcy provides a snapshot of credits and debts, because to file for bankruptcy one is required to disclose such things to the state. When the bankruptcy is the result of a market crash or other calamity affecting nearly every business equally, rather than from a company that is just badly managed, the resulting picture is, at least in theory, typical rather than extraordinary, revealing what many business ledgers must have looked like at the time. Studying the records of bankrupt sawmills, lumber dealers, piano merchants, shoe manufacturers, hardware merchants, and others, Cronon sketches maps and narratives that show the relationships that the markets in grain, wood, and animals had created around what was then one of the world’s largest and most connected cities.

Though Cronon does not lean heavily on this point, Nature’s Metropolis shows in specific terms why success in a capitalist economy has meant a massive and destructive shift in the way humans relate to the natural world. A person or small group running a sawmill, or a railroad, or a dairy farm, or a grocery store in the 19th century had to behave in ways that were at least as profitable or efficient as their competitors, or they risked losing substantial investments. The most economically sustainable options were also the ones that were least environmentally sustainable, and of course economic logic triumphed and continues to do so. This state of affairs also shows the paradoxical futility and necessity of thinking in terms of individual behavior when contemplating more sustainable ways of living. If being part of a capitalist economy means giving up the ability to impact the natural world below a certain, highly destructive threshold, how can we imagine that recycling or buying organic or going solar can make a meaningful difference in the world? And yet, if part of the logic of capital is that suppliers must respond to the demands of consumers, don’t we have the collective power to change the system? Cronon, of course, cannot answer these questions, and he doesn’t try to. But he does flesh out an incredibly detailed and valuable narrative of how we’ve gotten where we are.