3 space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other.” People live their lives in places, going to school, working, flirting, committing crimes, having children, creating art, and consuming goods all the while. Places are tangible and definable entities on a map. Spaces, however, are nonconcrete by nature and much more challenging to describe. For Tuan, “open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed.” When humans impress their own needs, wants, and desires on a space—such as a river—they create a uniquely human landscape.2 According to historian Dan Flores, the term “bioregion” is “a precise and highly useful term of art for environmental historians.” Bioregional history is deceptively easy to imagine. A bioregion is delineated by environmental and topographical borders and not political lines on a map. The Fox River is a definable bioregion—a watershed that covers 202 miles from boggy headwaters to concluding confluence, draining 2,658 square miles in the process. The fact that this bioregion cuts through two states, eight counties, and numerous towns and cities is of secondary importance to the definition of this particular place. Flores’ builds off Tuan’s equation and posits that the “narrative line of bioregional history is essentially imagining the stories of different but sequential cultures occupying the same space and creating their own succession of ‘places’ on the same piece of ground.”3 Applying this maxim to the Fox River allows historians to visualize the distinct places created by human beings in the valley over the course of 10,000 years or more. The river traversed by Black Hawk and thousands of indigenous peoples prior to and during the early nineteenth century was not the same waterway dammed by industrialists in the early twentieth century nor the 2 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977): 3, 6, 12, 18, 54; and Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 12. 3 United States Geological Survey, “Fox River,” Feature ID 408636, January 15, 1980, https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/408636; and Dan L. Flores, “Place: Thinking About Bioregional History,” The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001): 102-103.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjg3OTMy