Fredrick Cronon Frontier Thesis

One of the biggest premises of Cronon’s argument is that the city and the country share a common history, therefore their stories are told together. The book begins with a discussion of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis/argument. He stated that open land was the source of American advancement in terms of settlement and culture. Without it, he believed that dominant individualism that was created by expansion would be gone. Frontier is described as areas in the periphery of the metropolitan economy, therefore rural and unclaimed land. Turner believed that untamed land was slowly disappearing in stages due to increasing rural settlements. Instead, Cronon argues that western development of city and country occurs together and continuously.

For Turner, the appearance of cities marked the end of the frontier and Chicago rose to power at the end of the frontier. Meanwhile boosters, those who believed in symbiotic relationships between cities and surrounding areas and countryside.

They believed that urban markets made rural development possible and that Chicago was important from the beginning. In this theory, regional resources, natural transportation routes and climatic forces (temperate zones) are what create this symbiotic relationship. The city needs the country and the country needs the city in order to thrive. In fact, the countryside needs the city in order to contrast. Without it, there would be no rural ideal for people to escape from the city to and romanticize living in. Suburbs grew from flight from cities and ties with the city. Finally, rural retreats would have no economic influx without their hinterland status. Then, Goodin’s gravitational theory states that cities had root in “natural phenomena”, but grew because people chose to migrate to them from rural areas. This could be for economic reasons, for better job opportunities and educational maximization, or to create better social networks with groups who share their identities. For Cronon, rural and urban landscapes created each other. They are not separate and depend on each other to survive socially, economically, and

politically.
In 1833, Chicago’s metropolitan history began and Chicago doubled in population. The most interesting thing from the readings for me was the growth of the railroads. Railroads led to four innovations in the region. First, it created a radical break in geography with direct lines from economic centers, opposed to having to travel in relation with rough terrain. Next, it was able to operate independently of climatic factors and weather, making it more productive to travel and move goods. Then, it shrunk distances, therefore the time it took to travel for not only people and goods, but also information. It also led to the need for standardized time zones. Finally, it broke the restrictive relationship between biological energy and movement, where animal labor was no longer relied on in order to pull carriages and wagons. Instead, the switch was towards fossil fuels (namely, coal). Chicago’s growth was encouraged by these linkages to states out east that had greater capital. It is situated were the breaking point of east and west railroad companies were. Therefore, Chicago’s railroads bounded the East and West into one system. This was important in Chicago not being recognize as a “central city’, but instead a gateway to “The Great West.
Railroads, in all were a quick and efficient way to access new areas, lowered costs to transport, and allowed people to settle in areas that weren’t directly by water. This was important because it allowed more freedom of growth and settlements could live in places without significant resources due to their accessibility by railroad. Another innovation that added to that of the railroad was the telegraph. The telegraph allowed for communication ahead of train shipments and allowed for better coordination of travel and trade. The telegraph and railroad also brought city and country closer together. The telegraph, for communication about anything from personal messages, warnings about weather, or updates about events within areas. Railroads expanded access to the country from the city and vice-versa. It was a more dependable mode of transportation due to its strict timing and its non-dependence on weather.
Lastly, I’d like to consider Chicago as a “gateway city”.

In the shift of what Cronon describes as “first nature” to “second nature”, there was a radical change from a local ecosystem to a regional and global economy. What he means by “first nature” is an original, unconstructed world, while “second nature” refers to artificial, manmade structures built on top of “first nature”. You could consider second nature as the commercialized in the processing of non-human resources into commodities. For example, the commodities of lumber and grain, or the transformation of natural terrain into railroads. This shift allowed for investors from far away cities to be interested in Chicago, as well as other cities. It also separated production and consumption in that products were no longer produced to be used mainly in the area it was created, but instead could be moved to other areas with greater ease. This allowed for a diversified economy where a city could focus on certain elements of industry instead of having to be able to provide all its citizens need. These ideas are summed up in the end of the seventh chapter, “The geography of capital was about connecting people to make new markets and remake old landscapes” (Cronon 339). In the end, though, Chicago became a victim in its own success because of the opening of a large market that created large levels of human migration, environmental changes, and economic development that created other big cities nearby. Each gateway city in

the American frontier (Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Albany, etc) ended in similar ways: due to self-induced limits of growth. They were all bound by market expansion, environmental segregation, and self-induced competition that could never be sustaining forever.
In all, Cronon describes the arbitrary and abstract nature of commodities and the moral and ecological “distancing” in their production and consumption. While I was reading this book, I continuously thought about rise of Chicago and its connections to how capitalism impacts social structures. How this separation of production and consumption not only created more jobs, but also put strain on the people on the lowest rung who made it happen, as well as the social and health effects of this movement into the city and the establishing of the railroad. Lastly, I grappled with what it means to colonize space. When considering what the American “frontier” meant, I was immediate critical of this idea of “unclaimed” land because of the institutional erasure of the indigenous people who inhabited those places. For me, it makes me think, what horribly land-entitlement ideals was Chicago built on? And what does that mean for the city now, especially as a “Gateway to the West” and expansion of the railroad that allowed even more stolen lands to be “claimed”.