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.

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

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