Cowtown built its own celebrations. In 1896 the city held its first Stock Show, a livestock exhibition that grew into the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo — one of the oldest and largest in the country, running every winter for more than a century. The early-1900s oil boom poured new money into town, and frontier legend mixed with it: the Sundance Kid and his Wild Bunch passed through Fort Worth, posing in 1900 for the famous "Fort Worth Five" photograph, and the downtown entertainment district that rose later took the name Sundance Square in their memory.
What made the town was cattle. From 1867, drovers pushed longhorns north out of South Texas toward the railheads of Kansas along the Chisholm Trail, and Fort Worth was the last real stop before the long dry run to the Red River. Cowboys laid in supplies, watered their herds, and blew off steam in the saloons and dance halls of a rowdy district that earned the name Hell's Half Acre. Over some seventeen years more than five million cattle walked through town. Fort Worth fed them, outfitted their drovers, and took a nickname it has never shed: Cowtown.
Why People Visit Fort Worth
Visitors come to Fort Worth for the rare combination it offers: a real working cowboy past in the Stockyards, where the longhorns still walk, and a world-class art scene minutes away in the Cultural District. Add Sundance Square, the Water Gardens, the Botanic Garden, and the winter rodeo, and a single day can hold cattle pens and fine paintings. Proud, friendly, and unmistakably Texan, Fort Worth rewards anyone who wants the West and the wider world in the same town.
