A natural history of the Chicago Region
"If you had canoed in July of 1673 with Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet - the first Europeans known to have visited the Chicago region - you would have passed through a landscape harboring a biological richness in some ways unsurpassed anywhere else on the planet. Poised on the fertile borderlands where hardwood forests met tallgrass prairies, and rivers and streams meandered through expansive wetlands and into varied lakes, the area teemed with wildlife. And if you were a nineteenth-century visitor in what is now - and was then - the heart of downtown Chicago, you might have been overtaken by a group of men with guns and knives hunting an errant bear who had wandered into the city from the prairie to the west. While Chicago may be known today as a city of "wild life," from Al Capone to the Playboy headquarters. Joe Greenberg dazzles readers with the story of Chicago's true and enduring wildlife." "In A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Greenberg takes you on a journey that begins with European explorers and settlers and hasn't ended yet. Along the way he introduces you to the physical forces that have shaped the area from southeastern Wisconsin to northern Indiana and Berrien County in Michigan; the various habitat types present in the region and how European settlement has affected them; and the insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, and mammals found in presettlement times, then amid the settlers and now amid the skyscrappers. In all, Greenberg chronicles the development of nineteen counties in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin across centuries of ecological, technological, and social transformations."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2002
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, ©2002