Question

most midwestern cities were established near

Answer 1

RIvers and lakes. A city is, first and foremost, a transportation nexus -- a place where different transportation routes and different methods of transportation join, and goods are transferred from one to the other. So cities begin as ports (where land traffic goes to sea, and vice versa), like Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, or Cleveland on Lake Erie, or on river junctions, like St. Louis at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and sometimes just at convenient locations on rivers, like Omaha on the Missouri River near the mouth of the Platte RIver.