“Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a man’s pants aren’t pressed, he’s a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming.”
“I know! That’s what hurts. Life seems so hard for them—these lonely farms and this gritty train.”
“Oh, they don’t mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they’re bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. . . . It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year.”
—from Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
Although the story of the Midwest is primarily a tale of farms spreading toward the horizon, two other elements were absolutely essential to the growth and sustaining of the Midwest. People did not make the difficult decision to leave their homes, and then make the difficult journey to the new territories, in order to simply subsist. As Jamestown’s John Smith had envisioned more than two hundred years earlier, this was a land where ordinary people—the commoners of aristocratic Europe—could own land and work for themselves. He wrote that the promise of America, in its abundance of land, was that people “by their labour may live exceeding well.”1 To do that, they needed more than farms; they needed markets. Farm families might survive on their own, out there on the prairie, but to prosper, they needed someone to buy what they produced.2 Small towns would be a step up, but only cities could really make a difference economically. However, this went both ways. While farmers needed cities in order to move beyond subsistence farming, the cities couldn’t exist at all without the farms. A great metropolis must be fed, and the larger the city, the larger the agricultural base needed to support it.3
Reaching those markets required transportation. Swift transportation. Spending weeks in a wagon wasn’t good for humans or crops. As a result, until other options emerged, farms clung to rivers and streams. Spreading outward, away from the nation’s waterways, would require other, human-made transportation “streams”—canals, railways, and roads. As these began to sprawl across the landscape, they became the new focus of settlements. They also became the new means of settlement, carrying people west almost as often as they carried crops east.
Never before has a region developed so rapidly. It may have seemed slow to start, but once it got going, it roared into existence. The frontier vanished in less than a generation. (As proof, consider that Dorothy, Toto, Auntie Em, and endless fields of corn were accepted stereotypes of Kansas culture when they first appeared in L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, published in 1900—but that was only twenty-four years after Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were lawmen in Dodge City, Kansas.)
If the development of the frontier was rapid, the development of Chicago was explosive—no other American city had ever grown so quickly.4 While there were other cities across the region, all of them contributing in some way to the development of the region, Chicago was to become the juggernaut of the plains, the hub for all east–west train traffic, the center of trade, and the source of changes that would affect the nation and the world—all of it connected to corn.
At the beginning of the region’s development, almost all of the grain in the region was corn, because the earliest settlers had come from the East or South, where they had a couple hundred years of corn culture behind them. Settlers needed corn, yes, but they also preferred it. However, as more Europeans began to arrive, wheat joined corn on the plains, because Europeans had not developed a taste for “yellow bread.” They wanted white bread. White bread meant wealth, and it couldn’t be made with corn. As more Europeans arrived, while most also grew corn, the amount of wheat surged impressively. Far more corn was grown than wheat, but much of the corn being grown was kept locally to feed livestock and farm families. By the 1860s, however, even those who loved wheat began to realize that corn was the stronger cash crop, and cash-corn farming grew, even replacing some of the wheat.5 So wheat became part of the torrent of grain that poured into Chicago, but corn still reigned.
Today, most consider Chicago the unofficial capital of the Midwest.6 However, in the early 1800s, it seemed an unlikely choice for survival, let alone greatness. The Mississippi River made St. Louis seem the likelier choice for connecting the Midwest to the world. In 1833, when land was purchased from the Potawatomi people and Chicago was officially founded, the settlement was home to only about three hundred people. The earlier, even smaller population, made up primarily of French, Native American, and mixed-blood traders and trappers, had been swollen by migrants who had heard tales of rich farmland from soldiers who had served during the recent Black Hawk War (1832). Still, Chicago could barely be called a village. However, almost immediately, land speculation began. Investors from the East were told that Chicago had a good harbor and a river, and would be the nation’s next great metropolis. Speculators believed the stories, and vacant lots were selling for stunning amounts by 1836.7
Of course, Chicago wasn’t the only city where speculators were snatching up land, and it was certainly not the only city to participate in the region’s economic growth. Every city in the growing Midwest had its boosters and its buyers. Settlements and towns grew initially along tributaries of the Mississippi, so that farmers and merchants could have access to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to New Orleans and the world.8 Omaha, Nebraska, founded in 1854, would build stockyards that would for nearly one hundred years challenge those of Chicago (as livestock was such a big part of the corn story).9
Other towns would grow and play important roles in the nation and within their states, but Chicago would become the giant. It would become the river of trade for which other Midwest towns were tributaries. However, transportation was only part of what would make Chicago the economic hub of the sprawling hinterland. The other factors would not only affect Chicago; they would change the world.
The grain elevator presents a blank face to the outside world, hiding the internal workings that make it the game changer it truly was. Before the grain elevator, every farmer stitched up his grain in a two-bushel sack,10 and that sack had to be carried by a worker and loaded onto whatever wagon, cart, train, or boat was being used to transport it. The sacks would be carried into and out of warehouses. It was labor-intensive. This was not just how it was done in the Midwest; this was how it was done everywhere in the world. Then, in 1842, Joseph Dart introduced an automated system that could move corn and other grains without the sacks: the grain elevator.11
Essentially, the grain elevator was a vertical warehouse. Inside, a long conveyor belt of buckets scooped up grain delivered by wagons or train cars and lifted it to the top of a series of vertical bins, where it was poured in with all the other grain of the same type already in the warehouse. One needed a source of power to raise the grain—horses for much of the 1840s, then steam engines starting in 1848—but gravity took care of emptying the grain elevators, as grain rushed down chutes into waiting train cars or ships.12 Huge amounts of grain could now be weighed, unloaded, stored, and distributed by two or three people, instead of hundreds of laborers. While adopted in other places across the country, the steam-powered grain elevator was perfected in Illinois in the 1850s. Soon, Chicago’s massive grain elevators were storing millions of bushels of grain.13 A really large grain elevator could move grain—in, out, or both at the same time—at a rate of 24,000 bushels per hour.14 This one invention would transform the way grain was handled—but it was also going to transform everything else about the grain market.
With sacks, buyers knew whose grain they were buying. The farmer’s name would be on the sack—and the farmer’s reputation along with it. Now there was an ocean of grain. Different wagons or train cars held different amounts of grain. Buying grain by the wagonful wasn’t practical, because there was no way to know how many bushels of grain had been put in the wagon. So the first major change was buying and selling grain by weight, not by volume.
The next key change was providing for what used to be taken care of by the farmer’s good name: a guarantee of quality. That problem would be addressed by a private membership organization founded in 1848—the Chicago Board of Trade. The board understood that, without a specific farmer to trust, people would have to come to trust a system or standard. They worked to establish grading systems for grains, so that grains of similar quality were stored and sold together. The start was a bit rough—for a while, the uneven quality of inspections resulted in folks in the East avoiding Chicago grain, buying instead “Milwaukee Club,” the top grade from Wisconsin, even though it sold at higher prices. The board realized it needed to make some reforms. It took a few years to get everything established, but members of the Chicago Board of Trade were able to develop universally recognized grades and had independent inspectors grade the grain, to eliminate bias.
With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, foreign demand for grain surged. Europeans wanted primarily wheat, but with the dramatic increase in grain exports, the Chicago Board of Trade suddenly found itself very popular. Everyone wanted to join. In five years, the organization had gone from a small group with big ideas to a rapidly growing powerhouse with a huge amount of leverage. Grain was no longer being sold on farms or near train platforms and docks. It was being traded on the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade.15
This was revolutionary stuff. By 1856, this growing frontier town had changed the way the entire world traded grain. It had also changed the way people thought about grain. It was no longer a product of nature associated with a farm and a specific grower. It had become a commodity. It was capital, and it could be traded like stocks and bonds. But it was about to get stranger. The Chicago Board of Trade was about to begin trading grain that hadn’t yet reached the city and might not even have been harvested yet—it was grain they would get in the future. Traders were connected to markets and suppliers by the telegraph, over which prices and offers would come. No longer did a buyer need to see the grain ahead of time—they knew what grade it was because it had been (or would be) inspected. Now, instead of just trading corn and wheat, they were trading “futures.”16
Within ten years, the whole world of grain marketing had been turned upside down. However, lying ahead was something that would tear the country apart—the Civil War. While many focus on the industrial superiority of the North in winning the conflict, it was equally the amount of food (and the trains that moved it) that helped the North succeed. A well-fed army is a more effective army.
As the Civil War drew to a close, Chicago was poised to explode economically. The city grew at an almost unimaginable rate. In eighty years, it grew from three hundred people to more than 3 million, making it second in size only to New York City.17
While agriculture was still a key factor in the local economy, by 1870, there were almost as many jobs in manufacturing as in agriculture. However, many of those manufacturing jobs involved making agricultural implements. Cyrus McCormick moved to Chicago in 1847, because he realized that the Midwest was the ideal place for selling his harvesting machines, which worked best on large farms and on fairly level ground. So even as it became an industrial giant, Chicago was still tied to the farm.18
In fact, the rise of manufacturing in some ways made the connection between Chicago and the countryside even stronger. A young man named Aaron Montgomery Ward envisioned a business that would benefit the vast number of people living on farms or in rural communities, a business that would cut out the middleman and make everything this sprawling but isolated market needed more affordable—mail order. Ward started his business in 1872, and his mail-order catalogs transformed the lives of farmers and their families. No longer did they have to make everything themselves or wait all year for someone to go to town. Everything they needed would now come to them.19 If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Ward was surely flattered when Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck started up their own mail-order operation in 1893. Agriculture made life possible in the city, and then the city, in return, began to make life nicer on the farms.20
Of course, manufacturing was not limited to Chicago—almost especially not the manufacturing related to agriculture. John Deere moved to Moline, Illinois, in 1848, and by 1869 the company had grown enough to have a branch in Kansas City, Missouri.21 All across the Midwest, people were experimenting with early corn-shelling equipment, gas-powered tractors, and various other implements. Every step made farming easier. So even much of manufacturing was still connected to agriculture.
Among the most significant markets for corn were the great stockyards, which had a major role not only in the economy, but also in how people ate. Feeding corn to livestock was already well established, even if just during the winter, when grass or forage was covered in snow. Pork had long been the number-one source of meat, not just because pigs were smaller and easier to keep, but also because beef at the time, before breeds were improved, was often stringy and difficult to chew.22 More importantly for farmers, commercial cattle raising was not profitable before stockyards came into use.23
Even moderately large cities didn’t have the access to livestock that a farmer would. If cities wanted meat, the critters had to be moved—and they needed somewhere to stay once they reached town. The period right after the Civil War was the era during which the great trail drives began to switch from pigs to cattle. The era of the cattle drive was short-lived, and herds would soon be moved by train, rather than moving across the open range. But regardless of how they reached the cities, the animals had to be accommodated.
To help bring order to the meat industry, the Illinois General Assembly created Chicago’s Union Stock Yards in 1865. It is hard to imagine today the scope and size of the Union Stock Yards. The facility covered a hundred acres. When it first opened, its 2,300 pens could hold 21,000 head of cattle, 75,000 hogs, 22,000 sheep, and 200 horses—and it continued to grow in coming years. Bordering this ocean of livestock was a bustling area that became known as Packingtown—as in meatpacking. All the key players in meat processing converged on Chicago, including Swift and Armour. Nowhere else could a company have such ideal access both to animals and to railways for shipping the final processed meats. Chicago became the country’s top meat-processing center.24
But how does one feed tens of thousands of animals once they are brought from the open plains to the stockyards, whether in Chicago, Nebraska (where the stockyards long rivaled Chicago’s), or elsewhere? Most of the time, the answer to that question has been corn.
To accommodate the stunning amounts of corn being shipped into the city, whether for processing, for livestock feed, or for shipment eastward, transportation and storage facilities were continually improved and enlarged.
Fortunately, the grain elevators, railroad facilities, and Union Stock Yards, along with all the companies associated with the yards, were hardly touched by the Great Chicago Fire, which leveled almost all of the city’s downtown area in October 1871.25 So while the city rebuilt, the money kept pouring in—which was important, because the country needed Chicago. As Frank Norris wrote in his 1903 novel The Pit, about Chicago and the Board of Trade, “Here, mid-most in the land, beat the Heart of the Nation, whence inevitably must come its immeasurable power, its infinite, infinite, inexhaustible vitality.”
However, it was not just the grain, or even the grain and livestock, that really “built” the Midwest. Advances in transportation burst open the door to both expanding the rural landscape and growing the cities.
Pioneers trudging through trackless wilderness or slogging along rugged trails to reach the Wild West were very much a part of the picture during the early days of the Midwest. However, it was not the whole picture. The early years were rough going, but transportation was changing rapidly, and as it changed, it changed everything around it.
The National Road, planned during Jefferson’s presidency and begun in 1811, received renewed attention after the War of 1812. The ambitious highway, which was thirty-two feet wide, stretched westward from Cumberland, Maryland, across Pennsylvania and into Ohio and Indiana. By 1839, it had reached Vandalia, Illinois.26 Thousands of wagons rolled down this wide, macadamized road, carrying new migrants to the Midwest.27 However, while there was a road to reach the easternmost parts of the region, once people reached the Midwest, they found that progress again slowed.
Transportation was often seasonal in the early 1800s. In the Midwest, roads were all dirt until the 1830s—dirt that became a quagmire during heavy rainfalls or spring thaws. When frozen during the winter or dry for a few months in late summer, these roads were passable, but there were no guarantees travelers could get through during the rest of the year.
Macadamized roads began to appear near St. Louis in the 1830s, and in the 1840s plank roads were built leading from Chicago—roads built of eight-foot wooden planks. Tolls helped pay for some of these wood-paved roads, and shipping companies paid for others. By 1851, six hundred miles of plank roads had been created. But these roads were expensive to build and difficult to maintain, so water remained the key form of transportation.28
Traveling by water was easier and faster than traveling by land, so the growing prairie population generally stayed near water, so they had access to towns and markets.29 If a farmer lived a reasonably short distance from a tributary of the Mississippi River, he could float his crops to St. Louis and then to New Orleans—though even that was not really an easy alternative before steamships became available. Sacks of dried corn and barrels of corn whiskey, salt pork, and salt beef were loaded onto flatboats, which could carry up to a hundred tons. Hundreds of flatboats made their ways downstream, propelled by the current, but there was no way to return. So once they reached New Orleans, the boats were broken down and the timber was sold, and passengers would have to find a different way back north.30
Steamboats offered the Midwest a solution to this problem. The first steamboat to successfully negotiate the Mississippi from New Orleans as far north as the Ohio River was the Zebulon Pike, which pulled into St. Louis on August 2, 1817. It would be a few more years before steamships became common, but by 1820, steamboats were regular visitors, and within two decades thousands of steamships were docking in St. Louis.31 Because steamboats had the power to go upstream, shipping could now move in both directions. Even if a farmer still used a raft or flatboat to get his goods to market, he could catch a steamboat back upriver.32 St. Louis became an important river port, offering comparatively easy shipping to New Orleans.33 Burlap sacks full of grain soon lined the wharves, and hundreds of dockworkers spent endless hours carrying those sacks from wagon to wharf, and from wharf to boat. It was not more work than loading a flatboat—but suddenly there were so many more boats to load. The population of dockworkers increased in proportion to the increased river traffic, and St. Louis grew to accommodate the new trade.34
However, while natural water resources, such as the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois Rivers, were great assets, artificial waterways would throw the Midwest wide open.35 In 1825, the Erie Canal was completed. Stretching 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo, the canal connected Lake Erie to the Hudson River, which meant the Great Lakes were now connected to eastern markets. This created tremendous opportunities for midwestern farmers. Previously, even when farmers were able to get their crops to Chicago, the Great Lakes gave shippers access only to Canada. Now boats could reach New York.36 While St. Louis still drew farmers from southern Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa, those in northern Illinois and Indiana now had the option of going to Chicago or Milwaukee, both of which were soon busy shipping ports. Detroit, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio, also benefited from the opening of the Erie Canal—but the change wasn’t quite so dramatic, as they weren’t as far from the East—and they were no longer the outer edge of the frontier.
The Erie Canal–Great Lakes water route was also favored by those who had no stomach for the discomforts of traveling by land. And boat travel was a much faster way to cross the continent than was riding in a wagon.37 Clearly, canals were a good idea.
In the early 1820s, Chicago’s boosters realized that French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet had been right when they pointed out, back in the mid-1600s, that it really wasn’t all that far from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River, if someone could just build a canal. After considerable negotiating, planning, and gathering of funds, the project began in 1836. Building the Illinois and Michigan Canal (or I&M—named for the bodies of water they connected, not the states) proved difficult, not just because of the physical labor, but also because of financial speed bumps. But it finally opened in 1848.38 A boat could now sail from the East Coast through the Erie Canal, across the Great Lakes, into the Illinois and Michigan Canal, to the Illinois River and then the Mississippi River, and south to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. As the boosters had hoped, the completion of the canal caused explosive growth in Chicago.
The canal was immediately busy. Corn shipments into Chicago increased dramatically, with 90 percent of the corn coming into the city now arriving by the I&M Canal. Not only did the canal increase the amount of corn coming into Chicago, it also increased the number of farm families coming to town. Chicago offered more than just the opportunity to ship crops; it gave them access to more of the manufactured goods they needed. Shopping became a big part of a trip to the city.39
But the I&M Canal was not limited to commerce. Once again, improvement in the ease and speed of travel led to a surge in immigration. New towns and farms were begun all along the route of the canal. Soon, corn, corn-fed animals, and corn products (especially whiskey) were flooding into Chicago from farms and towns that, made possible by the canal, had come into existence only a few years earlier.
In Ohio, similar success was experienced with the building of the Ohio Canal, which connected the Scioto Valley with Lake Erie at Cleveland and was completed in 1832. The Miami and Erie Canal, opened in 1845, connected Toledo with Cincinnati.40 Canals, with their systems of locks, were the top transportation technology of the time.
Traffic on the I&M reached its peak in the 1870s, and it remained a key form of transportation until the beginning of the twentieth century. Its continued importance is underscored by the fact that Congress began another canal project in Illinois in 1892. This new waterway, the Hennepin Canal, connected Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River. However, trains were increasing in number and importance, and the Hennepin was obsolete before it opened.41 The I&M Canal was retired in 1933, when the Illinois Waterway was opened.42 The Ohio canals were also abandoned as railroads began to take their place.
The first trains to be constructed west of Chicago were “Granger” railroads, train lines designed solely for bringing produce from the farm (or grange) to market.43 People in Illinois and Wisconsin were enthusiastic about the idea of building a new “transportation corridor,” but raising money for the project was difficult. Folks back east weren’t going to bankroll the project, so banker J. Young Scammon and Chicago mayor William B. Ogden decided to ask those who would benefit from the proposed railroad to invest. It worked. Farmers all along the proposed Chicago-to-Galena route pitched in what they could manage, some even borrowing money to invest in the train line. So while the city managed the project, the countryside bankrolled it.44
Construction on this railroad didn’t start until 1848, and while it progressed slowly, the roads were so bad that trains were an instant success as soon as individual sections were finished. The proposed Galena & Chicago Union never actually reached Galena, but it had proven successful enough that other train lines were soon under construction.45
In the 1850s, the Irish immigrants who had built the I&M Canal were working on the Illinois Central Railroad. This would be the first great route of a sprawling railway network proposed in 1837 by members of the Illinois Whig Party, which included Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to see the state become competitive with eastern markets.46 Unlike the Granger railroads, this would be a premium line that would be far more ambitious than the small, local lines. Begun in 1851, it ran south from Galena to the Mississippi River, and when it was completed in 1856, its seven hundred miles of track made it the longest railroad in the world.47
More Granger lines were built heading west, while at the same time major trunk lines were reaching Chicago from the East. However, no network was being created, because the train lines were incompatible, due to varying rail gauges. In addition, the Granger lines could not compete with the eastern railroads, and the eastern railroads chose not to compete with the Granger lines. As a result, rather than a city trains passed through, Chicago became a city where trains stopped. It was a city of terminals—which was absolutely fine with the Chicago boosters and politicians who wanted Chicago to be a hub. While St. Louis, Missouri, and Sandusky, Ohio, had both been contenders for becoming top railroad cities, and would remain important,48 by the start of the Civil War, Chicago was the rail capital of the United States.49
Many of the railroad companies had their headquarters in and around Chicago. Companies arose to supply the needs of the railroads, building freight cars, passenger cars, and later locomotives. In the 1870s, George Pullman devised sleeping cars and dining cars for passengers, all built in an area of Chicago still known as the Pullman District. Travel was no longer focused entirely on moving farm produce.50
The growing spiderweb of steel spread outward across the Midwest. By 1860, train lines connected Chicago to towns and rural areas in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin.51 Farming communities embraced this new form of transportation wholeheartedly. The Weekly Pantagraph, the local paper for corn-rich Bloomington, Illinois, reported on August 21, 1861, “The Illinois Central Rail Road shipped to Chicago in 6 days, 28 thousand bushels of corn.”52
Through the 1850s, populations had still tended to cluster around key waterways, but the railroads changed that. The train lines became the new “rivers,” and farms and towns spread along the railway corridors, as they had once spread along rivers. This process accelerated after the Civil War, with railways soon sprawling across the Great Plains and by 1869 connecting the system to the West Coast, with the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad.
The Great Plains, though previously explored, hadn’t been extensively settled prior to this railway expansion. With a way to get to and from markets now measured in days instead of weeks and months, farmers spread as the railways did. However, the railroad companies were not passive about this process. They built train lines into the wilderness, in anticipation of increased settlement. Railroad officials determined the locations of most of the towns on the Great Plains, dotting them along the train lines at approximately eight-to ten-mile intervals.53 With railroads built and towns planned, the railroad companies needed passengers and freight to be profitable, and that meant they needed to increase their customer base. The railroad companies began to actively recruit settlers to the area. They ran publicity campaigns across the settled parts of the United States, but they also advertised in foreign papers and magazines, and they even had speakers travel overseas, to attract immigrants to this newly opened farmland. On top of that, the railroads owned the land around the rail lines, which they could now sell to new settlers. The railroad companies in essence created the Wild West that grew up on the Great Plains, and then, in a generation, they tamed it.54
FIGURE 1. Grain elevators and train tracks became the key feature of rural towns all across the heartland. In this Nebraska town, an older grain elevator (far left), still in use but too small to hold current yields, is dwarfed by the newer elevator. Train cars on the tracks behind the elevators accept grain from both facilities. Photo by Cynthia Clampitt.
The relationship between the settlers/farmers and the railroad companies was not always the love affair one might expect. Trains carried people out to these remote lands, but the cost of shipping produce to market was high, sometimes due to the distance to these more remote areas, but also sometimes because the people running the railroads knew that many farmers had no alternative to shipping by their railroads. (Prices were lower where there were other transportation options.) This led to protest movements, including the Grange and the Farmers Alliance. Both of these groups had some success, and government regulation of railroads was instituted in the 1870s and 1880s.55 (Today, these movements live on in the National Grange, which continues to address legislation that affects the agricultural sector.)
Even these conflicts underscored the impact of the trains. Farmers depended on the railways for shipping—but cities also depended on the railways. The amounts of corn being shipped were stunning—a river of gold that was making Chicago rich and powerful.
The railroads certainly changed the way people moved goods. They also dramatically changed the speed of shipping and travel. In 1830, it took more than three weeks to travel from New York to Chicago. By 1857, the trip could be made in two days.56 Now people could fit a round trip within a week, versus nearly two months. This would change the world. However, speed of travel was not the only change rendered by the steel rails.
Towns grew as they were reached by trains, but they also diversified. Often, specific groups of people, held together by religion, ethnicity, or simply the same neighborhood back east, had traveled west together and created a settlement. Now anyone with train fare could move in. Folks arrived from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South, but immigrants also flooded in from Scandinavia, Germany, and Ireland. Soon, even in small rural towns, such as Bloomington, Illinois, people were enjoying food that ranged from Wiener schnitzel to corned beef and cabbage.57
Speedy travel created a new problem. When people stay in one place, they can tell time or set their clocks by the sun. When it’s directly overhead, it’s noon. If traveling across the prairie takes weeks, one can still rely on the sun to know the time. However, when railroad companies were trying to schedule train service, they really couldn’t have people all along the route deciding the time by where the sun was—because it would be different for everyone. So the next huge change wrought by railways was time zones. In 1883, the railroad companies divided the continent into four regions. Regardless of where the sun was in the sky, the time would be the same for everyone across a region. They called it Standard Time. At noon on November 18, 1883, everyone in the central zone changed all the clocks to reflect the time at the 90th meridian—which was almost identical to the time in St. Louis. For Chicago, this meant moving clocks back by nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. Other time zones were determined from the central zone moving outward. One wonders if everyone appreciated how significant this change was—but whether they did or not, they quickly adopted the plan, because everyone was using the railroads. Now schedules could be published and have meaning. (Interestingly, the government didn’t actually get on board with this concept and make it official until 1918.)58
Not everything changed, of course. The Great Lakes remained important—because ships still held more than trains, and they used less fuel to move those greater loads. So the millions of bushels of corn now pouring through Chicago generally moved from the trains that brought it from the hinterland through the grain elevators and into the ships that waited to carry it eastward.
St. Louis remained important, as well. The Mississippi River was still busy for all the same reasons the Great Lakes were. St. Louis was also a nearer destination than Chicago for many of the Midwest’s farmers. Plus there were growing markets in the West, and St. Louis could ship corn and corn-based goods westward, as Chicago focused eastward.
Trains brought about one additional big change, and that was a dramatic increase in tourism. If a trip took a day or two, instead of months, one could actually consider going somewhere other than to the neighbor’s house for rest and relaxation. It also meant people didn’t have to be independently wealthy to travel—because who but the wealthy could abandon work for months at a time? So not only were more people on the move, people from more levels of society were getting out and about.
The Midwest had been settled with stunning speed. That settlement had led to a tremendous number of other changes. However, change was about to accelerate even more, with farming soon altering more dramatically than in thousands of years previous.