Dallas almost shouldn’t be here. There was no harbor, no mountain pass, no obvious reason for a great city on this stretch of the Blackland Prairie — only a good place to cross the Trinity River. The Caddo had used that ford for generations when, in 1841, a Tennessee lawyer named John Neely Bryan built a trading post beside it and waited for a town to grow up around him. It did: Dallas became the county seat in 1846, took a town charter in 1856, and when the railroads crossed here in 1872 and 1873, the prairie outpost was suddenly a crossroads with somewhere to send its goods.
What followed was a boom the city more or less willed into being. Dallas made itself the largest inland cotton market in the country, then turned cotton money into banks, and banks into the financial capital of the East Texas oil fields — “Big D,” where the money was. Style came with the money: Neiman Marcus opened its doors in 1907 and gave the city a name for fashion and luxury it has never let go of. By the early twentieth century the prairie trading post had become one of the great commercial cities of the Southwest — glittering, ambitious, and a little theatrical about it.
Why People Visit Dallas
Dallas rewards visitors who like a city with confidence: a skyline you can read like a history book, a world-class arts district, museums of real weight, and food worth crossing town for. Add the flying red Pegasus, the Art Deco of Fair Park, and Texas hospitality scaled up, and Big D makes a strong case for itself.
