William Cronon: I think it was part of a number of works that began to break down the boundaries between city–nature and rural, or wild, nature. I’m of the conviction that one of the wonders of environmental history is that it opens up a space of exploration where anything and everything in the human past can be looked at in terms of how human actions are embedded in a material world that is only partly of human making, and that nature doesn’t end at the Bob Marshall Wilderness. It doesn’t end in a wheat field in southeastern Washington state. It’s right here. It’s right inside my body. Nature’s Metropolis looks at the city–country, human–nature interface at a particular regional scale, which is both its strength and its weakness. There are almost no people in Nature’s Metropolis. And almost no lived, textured reality of classed, gendered, raced people. They’re just not in there. J. M. D. Burrows with his potatoes going down the Mississippi River is probably the most poignant human being in that entire book.

So how does this apply to Cronon’s work? Nature’s Metropolis seeks to undermine the difference between “urban” and “rural”, instead showing how through painstaking economic history the city of Chicago operated as a central hub that shaped the natural world. He distinguishes between “first nature” and “second nature” to show how trees become lumber and wheat becomes grain. Cronon emphasizes the connectedness between all things - that neither Chicago nor the “West” could exist without each other. Chicago exploded onto the world in the mid-19th century, rising in a few decades from a lonely frontier outpost to an economic behemoth that, except for New York, exerted more influence and flexed more power by far than any other American city.I had an economic historian on my dissertation committee, a wonderful historian named Bill Parker, who said you really can’t do just Chicago, you need to do six cities so you can compare them, because otherwise you can’t make causal claims. You’re only making narrative, descriptive claims. (And that was OK with me; I’m OK with narrative, descriptive claims.) But I was very conscious that the story I wanted to tell about Chicago has analogs all over the world today. So the idea that there is a city that is serving as the interface between a much larger globalizing economy, a kind of colonial outpost with a set of emerging connections with a periphery, and that city is coordinating the transformation of the periphery on behalf of capital and power, that’s the story of modernity. And Chicago is an amazing example. But it’s not at all hard to see on the Pearl River Delta right now that story is unfolding. That story has unfolded in Brazil. It’s unfolded in many, many other parts of the world.

WC: I never got that [criticism] from my editor, who was very tolerant of all sorts of things about this particular book. One of my passions as a writer, and as a scholar and a teacher, is taking boring things that people pay no attention to that matter enormously in their lives but go unnoticedand trying to figure out how we can narrate those things, embedding them in a series of natural and geographical contexts (as well as time contexts) so that things that you’ve been walking by your entire life without ever seeing come alive. And although telling stories about people is one way of doing that, I’m actually more intrigued more often than not—at least in this book—by how you take dead, inert stuff and make it become really intriguing. One of my missions in life is to take boring stuff and make it un-boring. His claim that people might need to fight "mystification and boredom" to get through the book are hardly justified. He is an excellent narrator and the tale is fascinating. 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).Investors, settlers and boosters took advantage of these boundaries by cutting the canal, linking the Chicago River with the Illinois River (another tributary of the Mississippi) and suddenly turning Chicago into the corridor — or gateway — between the two sides. Among Cronon’s best points comes in his conclusion. The entire book details the nation-shaping interactions between city and hinterlands, a clear dichotomy that was quite clear to 19th century Midwesterns, though they defined it in tropes and narratives quite different from the ones Cronon’s analysis suggests. The book draws to a close as Chicago’s hegemony wanes, but also as the dichotomy is eroded by a new hybrid category: the suburb. The suburb combines the quality of life, the luxuries and access to market goods found in the city with the fresh air, tight-knit communities, and picturesque landscapes ascribed to rural America. Beyond just these physical commodities, Chicago was also able to gain a large amount of influence over financial and intellectual matters throughout its hinterland. Chicago banks were the main source of lines of credit for many farmers and business owners all across the western U.S. Through the study of bankruptcy records, Cronon points out that even in communities closer to cities like St. Louis and Minneapolis, Chicago banks owned the majority of debt. Eastern cities like New York and Boston had such a vested interest in Chicago, that they opened their lines of credit to investors in the city thus ensuring its success. 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. Focusing on Railways in Chicago, Cronin explains that railroad promoters cast the technology as "natural" and described it variously as a "geographical power so irresistible that people must shape their lives according to its dictates." (p. 132) At times, railroads even assumed supernatural dimensions as ""talismanic wands" which magically transformed the landscape. Rhetorical excesses or not, these flights of fancy evoke the genuine awe which the railroads inspired. An awe which obscured the social and economic process taking place as the railroads crossed the great western lands.

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. Chicago seemed an over-awing presence. It seemed a new kind of city, one that had arisen out of nothing — like magic — to wield immense influence across the midcontinent, across the entire nation, even across the oceans. By defining the boundary between two railroad systems that operated within radically different markets — even as both sought to meet the same fundamental problems of fixed costs and minimum income — Chicago became the link that bound the different worlds of east and west into a single system….Chicago became the principal wholesale market for the entire midcontinent. For a half century, Chicago played a unique role in vast changes in the food Americans ate, in the ways they shipped and traveled, in the types of goods they bought and sold, in the sorts of homes they built, in the methods they used to communicate and in the systems and schemes they developed to make money. 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:It is a reminder to us today that we are in the same partnership with nature. That our actions have consequences. That our relationship with the natural world is, at heart, a moral one. Yet, at the same time, those people were also manipulating nature in an even more momentous way that would bring together East and West at Chicago — the crossroads and the gateway. Railroads transcended the limitations of geography like no other transportation system had before. Unlike the river transport systems of the past, railroads could be built to fit engineers' conceptions of efficient construction, thereby liberating the transport system from the limitations of geography in a way not possible in the past. For the farmers of the Midwest as producers, the greatest benefit was the freedom which rail transport allowed them from the constraints of muddy roads. From the perspective of consumption, the railroad brought the latest goods and fashions from New York and Paris year round. No longer did Chicago's consumers need to wait for the spring thaw.

Watching the “slaying” of squealing, jerking pigs there, British writer Rudyard Kipling described how the animals “were so excessively alive…And then they were so excessively dead….” 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.

Basic example: Chicago outgrew St. Louis because its numerous westward rail spurs gave it easy access to western farmers, while its eastward rail links gave it easy access to eastern markets. Then came American settlers and investors who put this sunshine to use in ways that went far beyond subsistence. They tapped into this wealth not only to live but, even more, to make money. It was this process that settled the Great West and built Chicago. 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. So, clearly, the deus ex machina of the book is the railroad. Remember the railroad is not a technology, it’s a cultural system. It’s a set of human relations, a set of power relationships that get articulated through what seems like a machine but is in fact an enormous social system. So one answer to your question is you’d have to look for other places that had the potential, through the railroad, to control larger areas of hinterland space. And that did in fact happen: that’s Atlanta. It emerges as the railroad hub of the American Southeast and had nothing like the significance prior to the railroad that it did after. In Canada, it’s very clear to me that Winnipeg is the Chicago equivalent for Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In many ways, the Winnipeg story is the Chicago story for that very rich grain-producing region of Canada.