ABOUT THIS BOOKThroughout the nineteenth century, the southern shores of Lake Superior held great promise for developers imagining the next great metropolis. These new territories were seen as expansesto be filled, first with romantic visions, then with scientific images, and later with vistas designed to entice settlement and economic development. TheFuture City on the Inland Sea describes the attempts of explorers under government, commercial, or scientific sponsorship to project their imaginativevisions on a region where the future did not happen as planned.Author Eric D. Olmanson takes a fresh look at the settlements in the vicinity of Chequamegon Bay and the Apostle Islands by analyzing the texts andimages left by the missionaries, geologists, ordinance surveyors, newspaper editors, and boosters. The Future City on the Inland Sea shows how new visions of the place absorbed and replaced the old ones, eventually producing what might be called for the first time “a region.”More than a regional geography, The Future City on the Inland Sea is an appraisal of these early efforts to meld geographies of physical nature with those of human ideals, a demonstration of how thoroughly and paradoxically those two realms are entangled.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Illustrations 000
Acknowledgments 000
Prologue: Lake Superior as the "Evil One's Empire" 1
Introduction: Imaginative Geographies 000
Part One: Poets, Bedrock, and Chains
Chapter 1 Reconnaissance 000
Chapter 2 Through the Poets' Eyes 000
Chapter 3 Ordering the Landscape 000
Part Two: Variations on a Scene
Chapter 4 Cities in the Wilderness 000
Chapter 5 The Frontier, the Future City, and the Wild West. 000
Chapter 6 Northern Exposures 000
Epilogue: Pageantry, Memory, and Place 000
Notes 000
Selected Bibliography 000
Index 000