And the fighter got its name secondhand. The British ordered the aircraft before America was in the war and flew it first, as the Mustang Mk I; the Americans wanted to call their version the Apache, tried it — the dive-bomber variant, the A-36, kept the name for a while — and then dropped it in favour of the British choice. Everyone agrees the British took the word from the wild horses of the American West. Nobody wrote down why. So the plane that came off a North Texas prairie carried a name the British had already borrowed from the animal that used to run it — the long way round, and back to the same grass.
Start further back than Texas. Horses evolved on this continent and then vanished from it — gone from the Americas some ten thousand years ago, surviving only on the far side of the land bridge their ancestors had crossed. Every wild horse that has run the American plains since is descended from the ones that came back, and the ones that came back came in Spanish ships: Iberian horses with Barb blood in them, the tough, close-coupled stock of southern Spain and North Africa. The first of them on record in Texas arrived in 1542 with the Moscoso expedition — the remnant of De Soto's army, marching through the eastern pines looking for a way home to New Spain. The men eventually left by sea. Not every horse left with them.
Why People Visit Grand Prairie, Texas
People come for the central Metroplex location and the mix of prairie, lakes, and live racing — and stay curious about an aviation heritage most visitors never expect from a city between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is flat, friendly, and in the middle of everything, with a long horizon and a longer memory than its suburbs suggest.
