In their struggles against time and space to produce and exchange goods and services across the breadth of the upper Mississippi River valley, merchants, farmers, miners, and entrepreneurs forged the structure of a regional economic system. Fernand Braudel reminds us that such systems are not simply impersonal structures in space. They are composed of living, working, interacting groups of people among whom the actions of any member elicits a response from the other members. The existence and character of such interactions are easily discerned in diaries, record books, newspaper reports, and steamboat-traffic data, as we have already seen. But the actual impact of such activity on improving regional life was most directly and clearly translated to the lives of the people and the towns they lived in by the efficiencies and development they triggered in the economy. The shifting patterns of production, the volume of goods brought to market, and, stimulated by specialization, the amount and range of trade such market activity encouraged, directly affected the well-being of town life and generated significant forces of change. It follows, therefore, that the structure of the regional urban system, defined primarily by the actions of merchants, can most directly be explained by analyzing the structure of and the dynamic forces of change within the regional economic system.

Patterns of production

The pattern of production of each of the region's major export products resulted from an interplay between the nature of the product and the environment, climate, and marketplace.