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One of the things I enjoy while I leisure is a video game centered on creating a civilization from the ground up called Civilization V. As this game centers around founding cities, I constantly look for a great site and location that brings benefits to my civilization so I can make my civilization prosper by placing a city there. Yet once I found a city, I immediately work on connecting it to my internal trade network with roads, harbor, and much later on, a railroad. So just like I would do in centering my focus on connecting my city to the rest of my land, so did the New York and local Chicago investors did in real life with the city of Chicago in connecting it to the East Coast of the United States as mentioned by Cronon. Chicago, despite being a rising star on the stage of Illinois, had various problems with transportation in the 1830s and 1840s best summed up by Cronon stating, “Too much water on land mired wagons; too little water in harbors stranded ships” (57). So with these issues and the fact local farmers preferred Chicago as it was more profitable and accessible to the East Coast, it can be seen why a railroad was necessary (60). If a region is providing a lot of income but there are occasional difficulties in gaining those resources, a strong connection that is able to ignore the affects of nature, most of the time, is needed and the rail road, as evident from this chapter, was the main answer. Geography major mvanderdussen states that, “By observing and studying this relationship [between the city and its geography] we can gain a very good understanding of the city itself” and I cannot agree more. If a railroad was never constructed to Chicago, it would be likely that the city’s history would be a lot more focused on maritime trade and that it would of grown slower in size than it did due to the railroad. Thus without the railroad, there would be no Chicago metropolis that exists in the present day.