Slicker cities
PHOTOGRAPHY: JILL HUNTER
“The cowboys used to come here to fulfill their needs before they moved further west,” says AJ. “They still can, although certain services the girls used to provide aren’t available anymore.”
AJ is the owner of Empty Pockets Trail & Arena Rides in Fort Worth, Texas. He is talking about the Stockyards, a former livestock market that operated in his home town from 1866, and was declared a ‘historical district’ in 1976.
Fort Worth, which sits next to Dallas in the southern US, owed its wealth to its location on the Chisholm Trail – a route used in the late 19th century to drive cattle from South Texas to Abilene, Kansas, where the cattle would be sold and shipped eastward by train. “We used to be known as the Wall Street for cattle,” AJ says proudly.
The 55-year-old cowboy, who easily looks ten years younger (“outdoor life is good for me”), runs his business out of the old stables of the Stockyards. Riding his horse along the Trinity River, AJ proclaims Fort Worth ‘the real Texas’. “We’ve always had the most cattle barns and we’re still a real cow town. You can ride your horse downtown and park it freely among the cars. They even have special poles to tie your horse to.”
Horses have the right of way over cars in Texas, a custom AJ and his staff use to their benefit. “Me and the boys love to ride to the baseball stadium, to watch the Fort Worth Cats, a semi-professional team. We load our horses with beer and Jack D, and off we go. After the game, we don’t have to worry about anything, because the horses know the way back to the stables themselves.”
These days, the Stockyards are a tourist destination, with plenty of bars, steak houses and souvenir shops. The true economic and cultural heart of the city and its 700,000-plus inhabitants can be found downtown
– home to the headquarters of big US corporations, and an impressive number of museums, which put the city in friendly rivalry with neighbouring Dallas for the title
‘Museum Capital of the South-west’. The most notable is the Kimbell Museum, with pieces by Rembrandt, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso. It is often dubbed the ‘best small museum in the world’ – thus forming a nice exception to the saying that ‘everything’s bigger in Texas’.
Still, on weekends the Stockyards are just as popular for a night out for
Fort Worth’s city-dwellers as among tourists. Such a night might look like
this: first, a juicy, hand-cut Texan steak (for example in The Lonesome Dove,
a restaurant that also has rattlesnake sausage on the menu), followed by a
rodeo show, and topped off by a couple of nightcaps in Billy Bob’s Texas, the
world’s largest honky-tonk and country music club.
The rodeo, officially called the Stockyards Championship Rodeo, is the heart of the evening. It is a full-on, competitive event that counts towards qualifi cation for the nationals in Las Vegas. Hours before the opening act (bullriding) the participants are already warming up their horses, all of them handsomely obeying the ‘proper attire’ requirements: cowboy boots, blue jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and a cowboy hat.
After heartfelt renditions of God Bless America and The Star-Spangled Banner, the first bullrider takes a seat on the back of an angry, blowing bull. Although cheered on by the pumped-up crowd, he lasts only a few seconds before he
lands roughly on the ground. The fourth contender gets kicked so hard when the bull throws him, that he stays motionless in the dirt for a while. Clowns distract the animal until the hurt cowboy finally gets up and stumbles out of the arena. It seems overly showy, it might be touristy, but it is also very real.
“The rodeo may seem like the real thing, but you won’t find the real Texas around here,” says Doug Terrell the following day. Terrell is a retired businessman from East Texas, who spends the summers in Fort Worth to be near his granddaughter. In the mornings he takes care of AJ’s horses. He clarifies: “I am talking about the real scenic Texas.”
For that, according to Terrell, you should get at least 50 miles away from the urbanised Dallas-Fort Worth area. For example to Young County, 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Here, the thick green grass still grows that once fed the thousands of wild buffalo that Indian tribes like the Comanches and the Kiowas used to hunt. It is also the home of the Wildcatter Ranch, a huge property six miles away from the town of Graham, which is both a working ranch and a luxury resort.
“They come here from all over the world,” says Don Bates, the facilities manager at the ranch. “They want to be cowboys for a while. I once showed the English Prince Henry around. His butler wanted to try a dip [a form of smokeless tobacco popular in rural Texas], but if you’re not used to it, you get real dizzy. He almost fell off his horse.”
Bates is the man who shows guests how to clay shoot or fire arrows, but Jay Brewer takes care of the real cowboy stuff – horseback-riding, calf-roping and bullfighting. According to his business card, Brewer is a ‘livestock manager and bullfighter,’ but on the ranch he prefers to be called ‘first horseman’. “I’ve been looking for a better job,” he says, “but I couldn’t find it.”
Brewer really did look hard: when he was 18 years old, in 1997, he went to New York to pursue a theatre career. In 1999, he came back to Graham. “There was just too much Texas in me to like it there,” he says. “New Yorkers are so self-absorbed and busy that they don’t take the time to understand what you’re about.”
His short-lived adventure makes Brewer look like a world traveller compared to Weston Covey, his second horseman. Covey has spent his whole life in Graham. “I graduated from high school in a class of seven,” he says. “You really had to like each other.” In the evenings, he practises roping dummy cows, and on weekends he visits or participates in rodeos. He once went to Dallas. “I see no reason to ever go back there.”
Bourbon & branch
Whether Dallasites like it or not, outsiders’ first associations with their
town are still the death of President John F. Kennedy (1963) and, though of
a slightly different order, the TV series Dallas (1978-1991). As is to be expected,
there are plenty of memorials in Dallas to the assassination, but the Ewing
family lives on as well. The old ranch house, ‘Southfork’, where part of the
series was shot, is open to the public. It’s as if the nasty oil tycoon JR
(played by Larry Hagman) could walk in at any time to pour himself a glass
of bourbon & branch — the latter being local creek water, as the tour guide
will explain. See southfork.com
With pieces by Rembrandt, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, the Kimble is often dubbed the ‘best small museum in the world’
So what is it that the Graham boys chose to miss out on? There must be something: the 1.3 million inhabitants of Dallas can’t all be wrong. It’s just not generally the stuff cowboys get excited about. Or as a local interior designer puts it: “Dallas is not a cow town.”
For one, the city is a shopping Mecca. Ever since the high-end department store Neiman Marcus, still headquartered in Dallas, opened its first branch here in 1907, the city has been a shopping destination for America’s beau monde, attracting such prominent patrons as Jackie Kennedy and former Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase.
Today, the historic Highland Park Village, the nation’s first planned open-air shopping centre, and the immense North Park Center pull in the crowds. North Park, with its 235 stores, doesn’t only stand out for its size – although 26 million visitors per year certainly sounds impressive. These masses do their shopping surrounded by great works of art by world-renowned artists like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Claes Oldenburg. All 70 of the mall’s pieces are unprotected and open to the public, thus giving the space a totally different look and feel from any other mall in the United States or, indeed, the world.
Most notable about Dallas is how it is a city on the move. Since 2000, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has added some 1.3 million new residents, making it the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area, with 6.3 million in total. Dallas alone absorbed 140,000 newcomers – and it shows. Neighbourhoods such as the Bishop Arts District are gentrifying, several run-down areas south of downtown are being revived. Just in the last few years, the Arts District added a new centre for the performing arts, an opera house and an urban park to fixtures such as the Dallas Museum of Arts and the Nasher Sculpture Center, famous for its top-notch contemporary sculptures.
“There is so much going on here that my husband and I have dinner in a different restaurant every week,” says Kristen Mills Gibbins, communications manager at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Next up is Smoke, an old-fashioned smokehouse that only uses local produce, and is the signature restaurant of the Belmont Hotel in the Bishop Arts District.
A random Thursday night at the rooftop bar of this hotel turns out to be the perfect showcase of the can-do spirit currently blowing through Dallas. Here, overlooking the impressive skyline of downtown, a group of corporate-looking people in their 20s and 30s have gathered for cocktails. Plans for the development of the Trinity River waterfront have brought them together. Among them is the high-heeled Tierney Kaufman. “Isn’t this amazing? Everybody here is young, I’m only 25, and working hard to build a career, but we’re all willing to spend a free evening to talk about the future of our city,” she says. “We all feel that something special is happening in Dallas, and we want to be part of it.”
Kaufman is especially
enthusiastic about the possibilities of the forest along the river. “I imagine
huge picnics, long runs and bike rides.” Her fellow Dallasite, Bill Wellington,
nods approvingly. Referring to the beaches Paris created along the Seine, he
says: “Dallas is not Paris, but we have our own style. Just look at that skyline.”
He raises his margarita and points at
the sky with his index finger: “That’s our limit.”
The old new frontier
Today, it’s hard to imagine that the peacefully sloping hills of Young County, in the north central part of Texas, once served as the battlefield between Comanches, Kiowas and early American settlers. Many of the bloody events that took place between 1850 and 1870 can be relived on the big screen:
• The Searchers (1956, starring John Wayne), about a devastating attack by
Comanches and Kiowas, also known as the Elm Creek Raid
• The Sons of Katie Elder (1965, starring John Wayne and Dean Martin), about
the three Marlow brothers, who the Indians accused of being horse thieves
• Lonesome Dove (1989, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones), about the
cattle drives on the Goodnight-Loving Trail
Dallas fact file
HOW TO GET THERE
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines operates five direct weekly flights to Dallas/Forth Worth International Airport from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
WHAT TO SEE
The best way to enjoy the grassy banks of the Trinity River is on the back of a horse. Tours are provided by AJ’s Empty Pockets Trail & Arena Rides at the Fort Worth Stockyards (www.fortworthstockyards.org).
WHERE TO EAT & DRINK
Texas’ cuisine is known for two things: BBQ steak, and Tex Mex, the local take on Mexican cuisine. For a mesquite-wood smoked steak, you can’t go wrong with Smoke in Dallas (www.smokerestaurant.com), or the Hunter Brothers’ H3 Ranch in Fort Worth (www.h3ranch.com).
A modern take can be found at Jorge’s Tex Mex Café in Dallas (www.jorges.com),
or Joe T Garcia’s has old-style Tex Mex in Fort Worth (www.joets.com).
WHERE TO STAY
For the best view of Dallas’, try the Belmont Hotel, up a hill in the Bishop Arts District (www.belmontdallas.com). To be near the Stockyards, the Hyatt Place Fort Worth Historic Stockyards is the perfect pick (www.stockyards.place. www.hyatt.com). Or combine scenic Texas with contemporary luxury at the Wildcatter Ranch in Graham. At night, from your hot tub, you can hear coyotes howl in the valley (www.wildcatterranch.com).
