Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.
In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east. Indeed, as one historian noted,
“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]
In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.
But by 1880, when St. Louis had grown to 350,158 people, Chicago’s population had galloped ahead to 503,185.[2]
What happened? Most agree that St. Louis lost out because it failed to build a sufficient railroad network, while Chicago tied its railroads to the Great Lakes and New York City.
But why couldn’t St. Louis compete?
A popular argument used to be that St. Louis boosters just didn’t have the determination that Chicago’s boosters did. (Chicago is called the “Windy City” not because of its weather but because of its boosters.) “The innate conservatism of St. Louis made it more difficult for the city to face realistically the transportation problem brought about by the construction of railroads,” wrote historian Wyatt W. Belcher in 1947.[3]
Another argument was that the city didn’t have sufficient private capital to build railroads, and the state legislature was reluctant to fill the breach or to ask for help from the federal government. Not only was the legislature fiscally conservative, its rural constituents were not eager to spend money on Missouri’s big city. So, although St. Louisans began studying the possibility of a railroad as early as 1836, it didn’t have a railroad that went across the state until 1855. Chicago was building a network by then.
These are plausible reasons, but they were blown out of the water in 1991 when William Cronon came out with his book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.[4]
Cronon explained that Chicago overcame St. Louis because it used capitalism and the “geography of capital'” to replace the traditional “natural” geography based on reliance on waterway transport. .[5]
St. Louis lost out, says Cronon, “because the fastest and easiest route between east and west was no longer by water but by rail.” The geography of capital had overcome “natural” geography, and Chicago had bested the gateway city.[6]
Not only did railroads diminish the value of waterways, but grain replaced the prairie’s tall grass, cattle replaced bison, and lumber replaced forests. Grain became a standardized commodity traded on a futures market, refrigerated cars transformed the way Americans bought meat, and timber from the northern woods enabled the prairie farmer to build and furnish his farm. Cronon’s meticulous data and persuasive argument are almost impossible to challenge.
But, wait! That may not be the full story. The year Cronon’s book appeared, 1991, also saw the publication of Jeffrey S. Adler’s Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis. [7]
The decline of St. Louis, Adler says, came about because the city was so dependent on Yankee traders, especially those from New York and Boston. They invested their capital into dry goods and warehouse businesses but they did not develop the institutions—the banks and other sources of capital—that would make St. Louis self-sufficient. As a result, the city was always underfunded.
Then, in the 1850s, just as Chicago began to show its muscle, the nation was caught up in sectional strife over slavery. Missouri was a slave state, and St. Louis became increasingly viewed as part of the South. This turned off the Northerners, who, in Adler’s view, had been key to St. Louis’s success. They invested their capital in Chicago instead.
Adler’s story is complicated and drastically simplified here, and it doesn’t resonate with historians as well as Cronon’s does. But there may be something to it. One reviewer called Adler’s book an “essential companion to William Cronon’s sweeping study.”
Or perhaps historians will come up with other ideas.
Image above is the clock tower of St. Louis’s Union Terminal, now a Double Tree hotel. Photographer is Onasill – Bill Badzo, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Notes
[1] A. Theodore Brown, Frontier Community: Kansas City to 1870 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963), 10.
[2] Chicago figures come from “Chicago, Illinois Population History 1840– 2019.” Biggest U.S. Cities, https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/chicago-illinois. St. Louis figures come from Joe Beine, “Saint Louis Population Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau,” Genealogy Branches website, https://www.genealogybranches.com/stlouispopulation.html. While not official, both appear to be unbiased sources.
[3] Wyatt W. Belcher, The Economic Rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), 15.
[4] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
[5] He called this the shift from “first” to second” nature. Cronon, 266,
[6] Cronon, 307.
[7] Jeffrey S. Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).