“City and country might be separate places, but they were hardly isolated. Chicago had become “urban,” spawning belching smokestacks and crowded streets, at the same time that the lands around it became “rural,” yielding not grass and red-winged blackbirds but wheat, corn, and hogs. Chicago’s merchants and workers had built their warehouses and factories in the same decades that farmers had plowed up the prairie sod and lumberjacks had cut the great pine trees of the north woods.”
“I began to see that the word “city” depended for its meaning on its opposition to the word “country,” and vice versa. Unpleasant as it might be to admit, the city helped define—might even be essential to—what I and others felt about the country. My passion for rural and wild landscapes would have lost at least some of its focus without my dislike for Chicago to serve as counterpoint. The city was what the country was not: in loving the one, I expressed a certain contempt, but also a certain need, for the other.”
“Especially in the years following the devastating fire of 1871, when it seemed that the city had miraculously resurrected itself from its own ashes, Chicago came to represent the triumph of the human will over natural adversity. It was a reminder that America’s seemingly inexhaustible natural resources destined it for greatness, and that nothing could prevent the citizens of this favored nation from remaking the land after their own image.”
(Garland’s metaphor) “The city was the great ocean, to which all fresh streams must flow and become salt. It was the magnet, projecting invisible lines of force that determined the dance of atoms. By so massing the combined energies of destinies of hundreds of thousands of people, the city, despite its human origins, seemed to express a natural power.”
“We alter (the wild) with our presence, and even with the ways we think about it. Just as our own lives continue to be embedded in a web of natural relationships, nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of human relationships that constitute our common history. And in that fact lies the measure of our moral responsibility for each other and for the world, whether urban or rural, human or natural. We are in this together.”
“However we draw the boundary between the abstraction called city and the abstraction called country, we must still understand that all people, rural or urban, share with each other and with all living and unliving things a single earthly home which we identify as the abstraction called nature.”
Originally “Chigagou”, the wild-garlic place
Potawatomi and Black Hawk fought or bought of land surrounding city, leading to rampant real estate speculation in 1830s before 1837 crash
Business district south of the river and residential north, with rope-drawn ferries between
“The forced migration of the Potawatomi was the product not of natural progress but of political choice, supported by the organized violence of an expansionist society.”
“A kind of ‘second nature,’ designed by people and ‘improved’ toward human ends, gradually emerged atop the original landscape that nature—‘first nature’—had created as such an inconvenient jumble.”
Lake Michigan ice and storms kept eastern business between May and November; mud clogged roads in spring
Bad drainage (it being a swamp) led to 1849 ordinances for raising city 4-14 feet over two decades: “another overlay of second nature in Chicago.”
“Chicago’s advantage in selling such merchandise derived from its favorable price structure. Its merchants could buy goods at eastern wholesale prices in ship-sized quantities with no markup for expensive land transport. For the same reasons, they could also offer the best prices in the region for farm produce moving east. Low prices for eastern goods, and high prices for western ones: the combination was a sure recipe for success.”
“The railroad left almost nothing unchanged. That was its magic. To those whose lives it touched, it seemed at once so ordinary and so extraordinary—so second nature—that the landscape became unimaginable without it. The railroad would replace the waterways of first nature with the myriad complexities of its own geography, thereby becoming the unnatural instrument of a supposedly ‘natural’ destiny.”
Railroads divided continent into four time zones and synchronized time, November 1883 – wasn’t officially recognized by government until 1918
Railroad companies vertically integrated, unlike canal boats and stagecoach companies, so incurred risks and responsibilities of management along with benefits
“Because investments and costs were enormous, everything that moved by railroad—and every place through which the railroad ran—became linked to the imperatives of corporate capital. The railroad thus became the chief device for introducing the new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West.”
No single railroad company operated trains both east and west of Chicago; it was the terminus from both ways
High fixed costs meant trying to get a minimal income, even if losing company money: “rate setters tried to maintain the highest possible ratio of traffic volume to fixed costs in order to earn the maximum amount from each station along the route.”
Ships less expensive to maintain, but slower overall; didn’t matter for certain things until railroads improved
Grain first transferred in sacks, then made more efficient with multistory steam-powered grain elevators in 1840s
Chicago Board of Trade founded in 1848 as self-regulating group of commercial interests; slow at first until Crimean war demand for grain spurred collective action
BOT established weight-based grain grading system, but bad grains earned bad rep
BOT got legal charter in 1859, became “quasi-judicial entity with substantial legal powers to regulate the city’s trade”
Telegraph arrived in 1848, uniting previously more isolated economies
“Given its strength, plasticity, and ease of use, wood was second only to soil in its importance to the farm economy. … Wood was the foundation of all previous American prosperity, and of no tree was this more true than the white pine. If prairie was to become farmland, its inhabitants would have to have pine.”
“The railroads made Chicago, a city located in one of the nation’s most treeless landscapes, the greatest lumber center in the world. In consequence, customers could often buy wood from Chicago more cheaply than from towns whose ‘natural’ advantages—nearness to the pine forests or nearness to prairie customers—seemed superior to Chicago’s.” … “The geography of capital had once again insinuated itself so successfully into the geography of nature that the primacy of the city’s wholesale lumberyards came to seem inevitable—in Bogue’s word, ‘natural.’”
1870s-90s lumber market declined as white pine forests vanished and new forested regions began competing
In 1876 railroad started charging lumber shipments by weight instead of volume; since fresh green wood weighed more than dry, this negated the need to wait to send all the way to Chicago
By 1880s Mississippi Valley and South started offering yellow pine due to railroad expansion
“Chicago’s unique role in the lumber trade had been possible only at the intersection of lake and rail, where the products of the first met the needs of the prairie. Now that lumber was leaving the lake, the reasons for Chicago’s dominance were disappearing as well.”
Demise of bison the result of railroads and perfection of tanning techniques for bison hides
Like lumber, buffalo industry was destined to collapse from its own self-perpetuating drive
Glidden’s invention of barbed-wire fencing “hastened the transition from prairie to pasture”
Meat-packing system a “disassembly line”, forerunner to mass production of the Industrial Age
Ability to ship and store ice starting in 1860s allowed increased summer hog production, which reduced seasonal variation and allowed factories to use fixed capital expenses more efficiently
Refrigerated railroad car, like grain elevator, was simple technology with far-reaching implications
Steep growth in beef-packing in 1870s; change to “meat packing”
Consumers wary of packed beef due to disease, but cheaper because only beef, not full cattle, had to be shipped
Chicago packers would try to partner with town butchers to sell dressed beef, but butchers didn’t want competition (chopped themselves), so packers created own market at cut-rate prices to weaken butchers, who would eventually cave
By 1880s, Chicago packers dominated meat supply by retailing with local butchers
“As the expanding market economy sheared hinterlands away from the gateway city that had helped create them, Nature’s Metropolis and the Great West both passed into oblivion, joining the ghost landscapes of tallgrass prairie, white pine forest, and shortgrass bison range as past places no longer a part of living memory. But before these things disappeared, they created a good share of the world we inhabit today.”