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’s with the flying red Pegasus? Look up in downtown Dallas and you may catch a red horse with wings, glowing against the night. The flying red Pegasus has watched over the city since 1934, when an oil company raised a rotating neon “Flying Red Horse” atop the Magnolia Building — then the tallest tower west of the Mississippi — to welcome the oilmen of a national convention. It was visible for miles, bright enough that pilots are said to have steered by it, and it quickly became the thing Dallas loved most about itself. Nine decades on, taken down, rebuilt, and re-lit, the Pegasus still turns above the skyline — the unofficial mascot of Big D.
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.
