The History of Dallas, Texas

John Neely Bryan rode down to a bluff over the Trinity River in 1841 planning to set up a trading post for Indian trade and settlers. By the time he got back with his belongings, the tribes he meant to trade with had been pushed out and the treaty that would've funneled traffic his way had fallen through. He built his cabin anyway. Nobody's fully sure who Dallas was named for — Bryan just said it was a friend, and the historians have been arguing ever since. The early town was tiny and muddy, and the Trinity turned out to be useless for shipping. What saved the place was a strange French utopian colony called La Réunion that collapsed just west of town in the 1850s; when it folded, its watchmakers, brewers, naturalists, and craftsmen drifted into Dallas and gave a frontier village a skilled European middle class overnight.

Here's the move that made Dallas. The Houston & Texas Central was coming north, and the Texas & Pacific was heading west, and neither one had much reason to cross at a marginal river town. So Dallas cheated. It bribed and lobbied the H&TC into laying its line close, then slipped a rider into a state bill that forced the T&P to pass within a mile of Browder Springs — inside the town — under the cover of a boring-sounding amendment nobody read closely. In 1873 the two lines crossed in Dallas, and a trading post became the biggest inland cotton market in the world. Money followed rails. By 1900 Dallas was a real city with banks, wholesalers, and a downtown that meant business.

Dallas never had an oil well worth naming, and it got rich off oil anyway. When the East Texas field blew in around Kilgore in 1930 — the biggest strike in the lower 48 — the wildcatters needed banks, lawyers, pipe, and payroll, and Dallas was the nearest big city with all four. It became the money-and-services capital of a boom happening a hundred miles east. Meanwhile Herbert Marcus and Carrie Neiman had opened a specialty store in 1907 that turned Dallas into an unlikely fashion address, and the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition at Fair Park put up a run of Art Deco buildings that still stand as the largest collection of the style anywhere. The city came out of World War II with aviation plants and swagger.

You can't write about Dallas and skip it. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot as his motorcade rolled through Dealey Plaza downtown, and for a generation the city wore that day like a scar — "the city that killed Kennedy," whether it deserved the name or not. Dallas spent decades answering for it, and part of the answer was to build. The Sixth Floor Museum in the old Texas School Book Depository now tells the story straight. Everything after is growth: banking towers, DFW Airport opening in 1974, the telecom corridor up in Richardson, the Cowboys becoming America's Team, and a metro that kept swallowing prairie in every direction. The muddy river ford is now the anchor of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.