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Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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Once cattle could be moved to market using cheap coal calories instead of carefully shepherded beef calories, grazing could be done in arid rangelands formerly occupied by bison. Technologies of abstraction and production were not located exclusively in the metropolis but also in peripheral landscapes popularly characterized as “closer” to nature.

What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier – and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Additionally, no other city can effectively serve as the vantage point for understanding its relationships to regions in the West.This go-round, one word cuts right to the heart of what I most admire about Bill Cronon’s magnum opus: clarity.

It is no exaggeration to say that Nature’s Metropolis changed the way that I comprehend the world, revealing the layers of fictions that sit on top of, and shape, labor, nature, and economic relationships in the past, in the present, and in possible futures.

For example, aggressive and rangy “long-horned” cattle did well on cattle drives, but they were disasters in confined railcars. But Cronon also highlights how these relationships were dynamic and ever-changing and how Chicago’s rise as a gateway city for national and European markets muddles the city’s status as a central place. Even less are they opposed to each other, whatever city slickers or the Grangers may think—they instead need each other, often in ways that are totally invisible to both. The settling of the West was not just about frontiersmen and women driving forward, but the largely urban economic forces pushing at their backs.

The Chicago Board of Trade was intimately involved with these developments, which further resulted in the creation of the allied futures market, with its ability to reduce risks for farmers and provide additional liquidity for the market—and, not incidentally, to make huge fortunes for speculators and those willing to risk trying to corner the market. He discusses how the booming success of the grain, lumber, and meat industries in Chicago came about because of how natural resources were harvested in outlying rural areas.Among environmental historians, Nature’s Metropolis is regarded as a towering and field-defining work.

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