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Grand Prairie Texas Vintage Retro Thank You Card Set - Black Logo
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Grand Prairie Texas Vintage Retro Unisex Embroidered Fleece Jacket - White Logo
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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.
Over the next two centuries, animals escaped, were traded, or were simply turned loose, and the ones that survived went wild on the grass. They spread north across the plains and became something the Spanish already had a word for — mesteño, roughly a horse belonging to the stockmen, a horse with no owner but the range. English wore the word down to mustang. By the 1800s they were the great curiosity of the Texas prairies: smaller and tougher than anything the settlers brought from the east, able to work all day on thin grass and bad water, which is exactly why every cattle range in Texas ended up running 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.
