Review of Great Lakes Lumber on the Great Plains: The Laird, Norton Lumber Company in South Dakota By John N. Vogel

Authors

John E. Miller, South Dakota State University

Date of this Version

1995

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

The publication in 1991 of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West established a useful model for blending economic and environmental history. The book focused on three commodities grain, lumber, and meat-as they were harvested, transported and channeled through Chicago, processed, and marketed to consumers in the hinterlands. Looking at a different locale, Vogel takes the second of these commodities and shows how it was transformed from the abundant white pine stands of Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley to sawed boards ready for sale in lumber yards along the railroad in a dozen-and-a-half towns in Dakota Territory that sprang up overnight during the Great Dakota Boom of 1878 to 1886.