Cowtown built its own celebrations. In 1896 the city held its first Stock Show, a livestock exhibition that grew into the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo — one of the oldest and largest in the country, running every winter for more than a century. The early-1900s oil boom poured new money into town, and frontier legend mixed with it: the Sundance Kid and his Wild Bunch passed through Fort Worth, posing in 1900 for the famous "Fort Worth Five" photograph, and the downtown entertainment district that rose later took the name Sundance Square in their memory.
Today Fort Worth wears two hats at once. North of downtown, the Stockyards keep the cowboy past alive in brick and neon; west of it, the Cultural District holds some of the finest museums in America — Louis Kahn's Kimbell, Tadao Ando's Modern, and the Amon Carter — within walking distance of one another. Between them sit Sundance Square, the Fort Worth Water Gardens, and the Botanic Garden, the oldest in Texas. A fast-growing city of skyscrapers and aerospace plants, Fort Worth has held onto the thing that made it: the sense that you are standing exactly where the West begins.
Why People Visit Fort Worth
Visitors come to Fort Worth for the rare combination it offers: a real working cowboy past in the Stockyards, where the longhorns still walk, and a world-class art scene minutes away in the Cultural District. Add Sundance Square, the Water Gardens, the Botanic Garden, and the winter rodeo, and a single day can hold cattle pens and fine paintings. Proud, friendly, and unmistakably Texan, Fort Worth rewards anyone who wants the West and the wider world in the same town.
