The grasslands between the forks of the Trinity were that kind of country — open prairie, deep grass, few trees, and horses on it long before anyone drew a county line across it. This ground was Peters Colony prairie in the 1840s, crossed by trading paths, and the settlers who arrived didn't have to invent names for what they found: they called one spring-fed branch Mustang Branch because Spanish horses ranged along it, and there is still a Mustang Creek running northeast into Tarrant County. The names outlasted the herds.
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.
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.
