You could see it in the cities the settlers built. Cincinnati, a village in 1810, had a nine-story steam-powered mill by 1815 and a fleet of 150 steamboats by 1830. Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.
