River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870 (review)

280CIVIL WAR HISTORY War historians may want to take note of the boatmen's definition of gunboat as "a floating house of prostitution" (238). Allen, who conducted some of his research in the wheelhouses of the Mississippi River towboats on which he worked for three years, has a great eye for the apt illustration, a good ear for the telling quotation, and a refreshingly mature skepticism toward his multiple sources. Iconoclastic in the best sense, this book was more than ten years in the making, and the end product justifies the extraordinary labors that have gone into it. Allen makes only an occasional slip, misstating the length of the Ohio River and mislocating the state capital of Ohio, but Western Rivermen is an outstanding first book. It belongs in the library of all who would better understand the social history of antebellum America. Ralph D. Gray Indiana University-Indianapolis River Towns in the Great West: The Structure ofProvincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870. By Timothy R. Mahoney. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 319. $39.50.) A generation ago scholars as different as George Rogers Taylor, Allen Pred, and Richard Wade introduced historians to the possibilities of thinking in terms of regional systems of trade, communication, and town building. Most work since has nonetheless focused on individual towns or single economic activities, providing broader contexts, of course, but giving readers very particularistic views of nineteenth-century American history. Timothy R. Mahoney tries something different. Rather than focus on a single locality he analyzes a region. Indeed, he asserts that a regional context is more important than a local or national context in understanding fundamental changes in antebellum America. Mahoney focuses on the origin and evolution of the urban economic system of the Upper Mississippi, from St. Louis north to Galena, Illinois. He begins with an insightful discussion of the natural environment and then moves to the process of human settlement. Using Edmund Dana's 1819 western guide as a basis, Mahoney sorts out the factors that caused pioneers to choose a particular place to make a home. Even for the earliest settlers, Mahoney argues, access to markets was a primary force. In the 183Os and 1840s this meant access to the rivers. Mahoney provides an excellent analysis of the Ohio and Mississippi river systems, showing how the Mississippi differed from the Ohio in such matters as the patterns of flood and low water. He convinces the reader that this pioneer generation indeed held to cognitive maps of the region that were rivercentric . Economic life thus adjusted to the seasons of river transport. In suggesting the complex patterns that resulted, Mahoney expertly details the differences in the wheat and corn trades and the different spatial BOOK REVIEWS281 arrangements that each produced. While he focuses on the larger regional patterns, the author carefully considers individual places within the region, particularly St. Louis, which dominated the steamboat trade of the Upper Mississippi and thereby took on entrepôt functions, and Davenport and Galena, two towns that assumed very different roles in their interactions with the region. There are two aspects of River Towns in the Great West that deserve special comment. First, Mahoney provides an excellent analysis of the creation and functioning of this particular urban system in the 183Os and 1840s. He does far less in analyzing its evolution after the 185Os, however, even though he selected 1870 as the closing date for the book's subtitle. Mahoney does show that the panic of 1857 played a critical part in hardening and centralizing the regional system and thereby making for less diversity among the dozens of small towns, all of which became increasingly dependent on large metropolitan centers. He pays scant attention, however, to the coming of the railroads and to the advent of a vastly reoriented urban system, one that in this particular region began to focus increasingly on Chicago rather than St. Louis. A second aspect of Mahoney's incomplete achievement has to do with the social, political, and cultural history of the region. He suggests intriguing lines of inquiry in these areas, particularly in an epilogue he titles "Toward a Regional Social History," but his own research...