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 fighter gets the posters, but the airplane the prairie built most was the trainer. The T-6 was so widely flown it answered to three names — Texan to the Army, SNJ to the Navy, Harvard to the British Commonwealth — and crews on every continent called it the Pilot Maker. It wasn't built to fight; it was built to teach, a fast, honest, unforgiving airplane, and nearly every American pilot of the war learned the feel of one before he learned anything else. Nearly thirteen thousand of them came off this one line.
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.
