Here is a small Dallas mystery: nobody is entirely sure who the city is named for. The usual answer is George Mifflin Dallas, the U.S. vice president of the 1840s, and it may well be him — but John Neely Bryan, who did the naming, never pinned it down, and historians have floated a half-dozen other Dallases over the years. The city has worn the uncertainty lightly. Long ago Dallasites shortened the whole question to two letters that settle nothing and say everything: Big D.
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.
