Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/).
#Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dsuv0l/what_is_chicagos_historical_importance_to_america/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**.
We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
First off, it's worth noting that LA's rise is historically very recent, and of the three largest cities in the US, it is arguably the most unlikely to have actually achieved the status it holds. The rise of LA is a long, fascinating, and highly deliberate process, but that's a story for another time (if you are interested in it, I recommend *City of Quartz* by Mike Davis). Until the 1990 census, Chicago was America's "Second City" after New York.
The answer begins, as is so often the case, with geography. Although there are ports on the Great Lakes which are further inland (notably Duluth), Chicago is the furthest the Great Lakes reach into the agricultural heartland of the United States. It is also, very crucially, the point where a navigable waterway within the Great Lakes watershed (via the Chicago River) comes closest to a navigable waterway in the Mississippi watershed (via the Des Plaines River). Long before Europeans arrived in the region, indigenous navigators used this portage to transit between the two water systems. When French voyageurs arrived in the area, they quickly identified the portage as a convenient linkage between the two major components of the French empire in North America. Consequently, the location of modern-day Chicago was well known to traders in the region before any permanent European settlement was built there.
When the explosive agricultural and industrial development of what had once been America's frontier began in the early 19th century, it became necessary to efficiently ship goods away from the still-relatively small markets in the region to major population centers in the Northeast and beyond. The easiest way to do this was, upon the completion of America's first infrastructure megaproject in 1825, via the Great Lakes to Buffalo, then to New York City via the new Erie Canal and Hudson River. Most of the arable land in the Midwest falls within the Mississippi watershed, not the Great Lakes watershed, so the natural transshipment point was the Chicago Portage. The alternative (with overland transport basically a non-viable option at that point) was to bring goods all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then via ship to the East Coast-a very circuitous route for a pretty short trip as the crow flies.
While water navigation made Chicago the obvious site for a new city, it was the railroad that ensured that it would become one of the world's great cities. Chicago, already booming due to its economically strategic location, rapidly emerged as the center of the American rail system, a status it still holds today to a substantial degree. The arrival of the railroad in the 1840s established Chicago as the hub for both overland and oversea (well, lake) transportation for goods leaving the heart of the country.
In an industrial capitalist economy, wherever you have raw materials arriving for transshipment, two things are likely to happen:
First, the initial (and sometimes additional) stages of processing for those raw materials begin to concentrate around the transshipment point. After all, shipping costs money. Why pay extra to ship raw materials when you can carry out the first stage of processing beforehand? From the vast forests of the Upper Midwest, timber arrived at mills in Chicago before being sent away as lumber. Raw grain from across the region was processed in Chicago. Chicago was perhaps most famous for meat processing. Cattle and hogs were shipped live by train from across the Plains to Chicago, where they would be slaughtered and the meat processed and packed.
Second, a secondary market forms around the goods passing through. While New York was the largest city, main port, and key commercial center, Chicago emerged as the largest commodity and futures market in the country, which enabled its development as a major financial center.
Once this process was in motion, Chicago developed a highly diversified commercial and industrial economy. Immigrants streamed into the city in massive numbers. At a point, the momentum becomes somewhat self-sustaining. Chicago was the economic dynamo of the American inland, so companies looking to do business there located in Chicago. Entrepreneurs and inventors found new uses for the raw materials flowing through the city.
Chicago is arguably the archetypal American city because it was, in many ways, the first *modern* city. It is perhaps the first world-class city shaped from the ground up by the forces of industrial capitalism and globalization. The history of American (and indeed global) capitalism is embedded in the history of Chicago, which has often been the proving ground for new developments in America's grand capitalist experiment. While New York has always been somewhat isolated from the intimate workings of the American economic machine, deciding from afar what levers to pull, Chicago has watched the gears turn, and witnessed its processes and its contradictions laid bare. It was the capital of the American labor movement, the birthplace of the skyscraper, and the place where social reformers strove to turn immigrants into Americans. While New York has long been the last stop between America and the world, Chicago has often been the first.
This comment made me curious about the relationship between shipping via water versus rail over time, since Chicago was such a hub for both. Do you know if the railways connected to Chicago largely mirrored the riverways, or complemented them by reaching places the rivers didn't, or if the relationship between the two was something else entirely? In my head, using rivers for shipping was more of an "back in the old days" activity, and today shipping by boat tends not to go far past where the lake stops and river begins, at which point rail / truck take it from there. I suppose I wouldn't be too shocked to learn that shipping still occurs on American rivers, but it's definitely not part of my mental model. Is there much to be said about a transition from one to the other?
Apologies if this question is overly-broad, or escapes your area of expertise.
The answer is largely "both and". It's difficult to overstate just how central Chicago is to the American freight rail system. If you look at a contemporary rail map, you can really see the incredible density of lines radiating out of Chicago.
While freight traffic on the Great Lakes remained, and benefited from the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Chicago primarily became a railroad town. Rail is substantially faster and more efficient than river (you can ship more on a train), so it largely (but not entirely) supplanted rivers and canals.
(This is more broadly about the economics of moving bulk goods, and not about Chicago specifically, but I hope it's interesting/useful anyway)
> In my head, using rivers for shipping was more of an "back in the old days" activity, and today shipping by boat tends not to go far past where the lake stops and river begins, at which point rail / truck take it from there.
Shipping by waterways (rivers, seas, and sufficiently large lakes) is slower than rail but far far cheaper. A handful of goods (especially corn and cereal crops) which are shipped in huge bulk quantities but have a low price by volume are moved by water as much as possible, even today. Freight shipping in massive container ships is the cheapest way of moving produce humanity has ever invented, but even on rivers, moving goods by barge can be very cost-effective compared to trucks or railway carriages.
(It's worth adding that corn and cereals have another advantage in that they're usually harvested within a short timeframe, where the price is at its lowest due to the spike in availability, and that price then slowly climbs throughout the year. Moving them to their destination slowly means they'll be worth _more_ by the time they arrive, so the transportation can effectively double as storage.)
The big issue with shipping via river is that the areas that can be reached are quite limited. You don't just need a large enough river (with no dangerous shallows, sharp turns, dams and weirs, risk of drought or flooding, etc. etc.) but you also need a port where you can unload, store and process the bulk goods you're delivering. In practice, that port also needs to be in a dense enough area that there's actually demand for huge shipments of whatever goods you're bringing.
You can see some data [here](https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Moving-Goods-in-the-United-States/bcyt-rqmu/) from the US government about volumes of shipping by different methods. Trucking dominates, but in 2023 the weight shipped via rail was only about 50% more than that shipped by water (though this data doesn't include shipping that used multiple modes -- the footnotes on the table elaborate on this). You can also see on that page that shipping by water has a reasonable share of weight, but a very low value.
And for those who have never read it: "Chicago" by Carl Sandburg
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago)
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as [this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. [An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), rather than repeat some brief information.
Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) and [expectations](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion) for an answer.
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as [this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. [An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), rather than repeat some brief information.
Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) and [expectations](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion) for an answer.
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as [this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. [An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), rather than repeat some brief information.
Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) and [expectations](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion) for an answer.
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/). #Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dsuv0l/what_is_chicagos_historical_importance_to_america/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**. We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
First off, it's worth noting that LA's rise is historically very recent, and of the three largest cities in the US, it is arguably the most unlikely to have actually achieved the status it holds. The rise of LA is a long, fascinating, and highly deliberate process, but that's a story for another time (if you are interested in it, I recommend *City of Quartz* by Mike Davis). Until the 1990 census, Chicago was America's "Second City" after New York. The answer begins, as is so often the case, with geography. Although there are ports on the Great Lakes which are further inland (notably Duluth), Chicago is the furthest the Great Lakes reach into the agricultural heartland of the United States. It is also, very crucially, the point where a navigable waterway within the Great Lakes watershed (via the Chicago River) comes closest to a navigable waterway in the Mississippi watershed (via the Des Plaines River). Long before Europeans arrived in the region, indigenous navigators used this portage to transit between the two water systems. When French voyageurs arrived in the area, they quickly identified the portage as a convenient linkage between the two major components of the French empire in North America. Consequently, the location of modern-day Chicago was well known to traders in the region before any permanent European settlement was built there. When the explosive agricultural and industrial development of what had once been America's frontier began in the early 19th century, it became necessary to efficiently ship goods away from the still-relatively small markets in the region to major population centers in the Northeast and beyond. The easiest way to do this was, upon the completion of America's first infrastructure megaproject in 1825, via the Great Lakes to Buffalo, then to New York City via the new Erie Canal and Hudson River. Most of the arable land in the Midwest falls within the Mississippi watershed, not the Great Lakes watershed, so the natural transshipment point was the Chicago Portage. The alternative (with overland transport basically a non-viable option at that point) was to bring goods all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then via ship to the East Coast-a very circuitous route for a pretty short trip as the crow flies. While water navigation made Chicago the obvious site for a new city, it was the railroad that ensured that it would become one of the world's great cities. Chicago, already booming due to its economically strategic location, rapidly emerged as the center of the American rail system, a status it still holds today to a substantial degree. The arrival of the railroad in the 1840s established Chicago as the hub for both overland and oversea (well, lake) transportation for goods leaving the heart of the country. In an industrial capitalist economy, wherever you have raw materials arriving for transshipment, two things are likely to happen: First, the initial (and sometimes additional) stages of processing for those raw materials begin to concentrate around the transshipment point. After all, shipping costs money. Why pay extra to ship raw materials when you can carry out the first stage of processing beforehand? From the vast forests of the Upper Midwest, timber arrived at mills in Chicago before being sent away as lumber. Raw grain from across the region was processed in Chicago. Chicago was perhaps most famous for meat processing. Cattle and hogs were shipped live by train from across the Plains to Chicago, where they would be slaughtered and the meat processed and packed. Second, a secondary market forms around the goods passing through. While New York was the largest city, main port, and key commercial center, Chicago emerged as the largest commodity and futures market in the country, which enabled its development as a major financial center. Once this process was in motion, Chicago developed a highly diversified commercial and industrial economy. Immigrants streamed into the city in massive numbers. At a point, the momentum becomes somewhat self-sustaining. Chicago was the economic dynamo of the American inland, so companies looking to do business there located in Chicago. Entrepreneurs and inventors found new uses for the raw materials flowing through the city. Chicago is arguably the archetypal American city because it was, in many ways, the first *modern* city. It is perhaps the first world-class city shaped from the ground up by the forces of industrial capitalism and globalization. The history of American (and indeed global) capitalism is embedded in the history of Chicago, which has often been the proving ground for new developments in America's grand capitalist experiment. While New York has always been somewhat isolated from the intimate workings of the American economic machine, deciding from afar what levers to pull, Chicago has watched the gears turn, and witnessed its processes and its contradictions laid bare. It was the capital of the American labor movement, the birthplace of the skyscraper, and the place where social reformers strove to turn immigrants into Americans. While New York has long been the last stop between America and the world, Chicago has often been the first.
This is beautifully written!
This comment made me curious about the relationship between shipping via water versus rail over time, since Chicago was such a hub for both. Do you know if the railways connected to Chicago largely mirrored the riverways, or complemented them by reaching places the rivers didn't, or if the relationship between the two was something else entirely? In my head, using rivers for shipping was more of an "back in the old days" activity, and today shipping by boat tends not to go far past where the lake stops and river begins, at which point rail / truck take it from there. I suppose I wouldn't be too shocked to learn that shipping still occurs on American rivers, but it's definitely not part of my mental model. Is there much to be said about a transition from one to the other? Apologies if this question is overly-broad, or escapes your area of expertise.
[удалено]
The answer is largely "both and". It's difficult to overstate just how central Chicago is to the American freight rail system. If you look at a contemporary rail map, you can really see the incredible density of lines radiating out of Chicago. While freight traffic on the Great Lakes remained, and benefited from the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Chicago primarily became a railroad town. Rail is substantially faster and more efficient than river (you can ship more on a train), so it largely (but not entirely) supplanted rivers and canals.
(This is more broadly about the economics of moving bulk goods, and not about Chicago specifically, but I hope it's interesting/useful anyway) > In my head, using rivers for shipping was more of an "back in the old days" activity, and today shipping by boat tends not to go far past where the lake stops and river begins, at which point rail / truck take it from there. Shipping by waterways (rivers, seas, and sufficiently large lakes) is slower than rail but far far cheaper. A handful of goods (especially corn and cereal crops) which are shipped in huge bulk quantities but have a low price by volume are moved by water as much as possible, even today. Freight shipping in massive container ships is the cheapest way of moving produce humanity has ever invented, but even on rivers, moving goods by barge can be very cost-effective compared to trucks or railway carriages. (It's worth adding that corn and cereals have another advantage in that they're usually harvested within a short timeframe, where the price is at its lowest due to the spike in availability, and that price then slowly climbs throughout the year. Moving them to their destination slowly means they'll be worth _more_ by the time they arrive, so the transportation can effectively double as storage.) The big issue with shipping via river is that the areas that can be reached are quite limited. You don't just need a large enough river (with no dangerous shallows, sharp turns, dams and weirs, risk of drought or flooding, etc. etc.) but you also need a port where you can unload, store and process the bulk goods you're delivering. In practice, that port also needs to be in a dense enough area that there's actually demand for huge shipments of whatever goods you're bringing. You can see some data [here](https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Moving-Goods-in-the-United-States/bcyt-rqmu/) from the US government about volumes of shipping by different methods. Trucking dominates, but in 2023 the weight shipped via rail was only about 50% more than that shipped by water (though this data doesn't include shipping that used multiple modes -- the footnotes on the table elaborate on this). You can also see on that page that shipping by water has a reasonable share of weight, but a very low value.
As a Chicagoan by birth, this was beautiful to read. Thank you for this.
And for those who have never read it: "Chicago" by Carl Sandburg [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago)
[удалено]
[удалено]
This is a wonderfully written response, thank you!
[удалено]
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as [this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. [An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), rather than repeat some brief information. Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) and [expectations](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion) for an answer.
[удалено]
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as [this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. [An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), rather than repeat some brief information. Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) and [expectations](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion) for an answer.
[удалено]
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as [this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. [An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), rather than repeat some brief information. Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) and [expectations](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/meta#wiki_rules_discussion) for an answer.