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

(New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. xxiii, 530 pp. $19.95).

What are boundaries? What separates one region of America from another, and if they are separate were they once connected? If they were connected, how did these connections create growth without stymieing one another? These are just a few of the questions that William Cronon tries to answer in Nature’s Metropolis. In what best could be described as a combined economic and environmental history that borders on an autobiography of the author’s childhood, Cronon plants himself and his research in Chicago. Nineteenth-century Chicago, for Cronon, was the central player in creating the economy and the landscape of what is currently considered the Mid-West. Most importantly, and repeatedly, throughout Nature’s Metropolis, Cronon wants to drive home the fact that city and country, urban and rural are linked and one cannot exist without the other. He argues that the city of Chicago or its outlying regions, the hinterlands, cannot be historically understood independent of each other. “Their isolation is an illusion, for the world of civilized humanity is very nearly created in the continuing moment of their encounter. They need each other, just as they need the larger natural world which sustains them both” (18).

Cronon uses boundaries to set the stage of what would become Nineteenth Century metropolis Chicago. He examines the boundaries between Native American tribes, boundaries the Blackhawk War created, which transformed the city from trade outpost to an emerging cosmopolitan center. Railroads and waterways are the most vivid examples of boundaries that Cronon uses and two of the best examples that aid in his contention that city and country are united. His greatest insight into the way boundaries affected Chicago and its hinterlands may be in his description and definition of nature.

Cronon uses two distinct terms to depict nature, “First Nature” and “Second Nature”.

First Nature, as Cronon explains, is more centered on geography, environmentalism, ecology, in other words the actual natural world around us. Second Nature is Cronon’s term for geographically changed landscapes through an increased economy. It is the later term, Second Nature that Cronon uses to build a compelling, structured, albeit broad, account of how the market economy, production, and trade united Chicago to the outlying territories. From the Chicago Board of Trade to the Chicago meat packers and stockyards, Cronon widens and builds upon other historians of urban history. He examines the rail system in depth, showing not only the ease of transporting local commodities to the hinterland but also as a storage system for meat and pork. Spare rail cars packed with ice enabled beef and pork producers to store meat throughout the year, turning the business from seasonal to year-round. Grain elevators and new technology in milling grain gave way to a greater demand the wheat produced and the grain being stored and transported. As commercial commodities grew so did Chicago and so did their neighboring towns and states. And while some of the towns in these states would definitely be defined as rural or country, it is hard to ignore the impact Chicago (The City) had on their social and cultural but most importantly economic history.

It is these commodity flows of grain, lumber, meat, etc. that frame Nature’s Metropolis (xvi). It is Cronon’s desire to show that he is not against progress, as some might think. He “writes of commodity markets not from some perverse private fascination, but from the conviction that few economic institutions more powerfully affect human communities and natural ecosystems in the modern capitalist world” (xvii). Cronon may reveal his true thesis, if not his true self within this statement. Nature’s Metropolis is a study of many things— agriculture, environment, urban history—but laced throughout the book is an analysis of

capitalism and the creation of a capitalist market. Cronon has more success showing how capitalism, the market, and the economy linked the environment and ecology rather than regions and boundaries although it cannot be said that boundaries do not matter in his book.
Nature’s Metropolis has a very distinctive readability. Cronon not only uses historical analysis of environments, economies, boundaries, and landscapes to cement his argument, he also uses himself. Building off his childhood memories of travels with family from New England to his grandparents’ home in Wisconsin, Cronon reveals how and why his obsession with Chicago turned from curiosity to historical scholarship. However, in doing this he puts himself and his memories square into the narrative of his book. Some traditional historians may find this troubling, but for the story Cronon is telling and the argument he is trying to make, it works.
Cronon would be what Karen Halttunen has classified as a “Barefoot Historian.” In the article “Self, Subject, and the ‘Barefoot Historian’” (Journal of American History 89, no. 1 [2002]: 20- 24), Halttunen draws off of landscape historian John R. Stilgoe’s essay Alongshore. Stilgoe describes someone who has a close connection to the subject they are researching as a “Barefoot Historian.” This practice of inserting one’s own voice into the historical narrative is relatively new but becoming more commonplace in historical studies of place. Nature’s Metropolis is just such a historical study, centralized on Chicago and the influence the city had throughout the Mid-West. Cronon’s inserting his voice into the narrative speaks volumes. It echoes his passion about his subject and while criticized by some, he should be applauded by the masses for standing up for his beliefs and creating solid historical research along the way. And for the most part, Cronon, as Halttunen suggests, leaves his personal opinions in the introduction and backs up his findings in a more scholarly fashion.

There are some valid concerns with Cronon’s book. One would be: Who is his audience? He says he hopes an attentive reader would be familiar with some of his terminology, like his use of Nature (xix). But what of the armchair historian, the AP high school student, or the urban city manager trying to gain a background knowledge of Chicago’s past; would they fit within Cronon’s label of attentive reader? I say they would, but would still be left confused and longing for a narrower and deeper meaning of nature in Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. Another worry or concern would be his childhood memory of Chicago itself, painting a pretty bleak and grim portrait. Could it be he had clouded and confused his own memory of Chicago with Gary, Indiana? Gary is such a place, a bleak and depressing outlying suburb of Chicago. These are concerns that do not affect the narrative or the argument of his book and Nature’s Metropolis as a whole should be praised for Cronon’s sources, research, passion and as direction for future scholarship. It leaves the reader wondering what other “Gateway” city could be researched, could Atlanta or Charlotte, NC be the next Chicago of the future? The growth of each city’s hinterland is undisputed and the economic influence into the surrounding regions of each city is profound. Nature’s Metropolis gives future historians a good starting point to reference if indeed there are other gateway cities to be researched.

Shane Hamby
Western Carolina University