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.
The field next door has a story of its own. Hensley had been an army airfield since the 1920s, on land the city of Dallas bought and leased to the Army in 1928. In May 1941 the Navy commissioned a reserve aviation base on part of it, and somebody looked at the map, counted the hundreds of miles of dry country between that runway and the nearest ocean, and started calling it the Prairie Navy. The name stuck. What came through it is the strange part: fleet pilots and Marines, Coast Guard, the WAVES — the women who enlisted for emergency service and kept the place running — a contingent of Free French forces a long way from France, and three men who would later leave the atmosphere entirely. By the end of the war the field held 4,104 people.
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.
