Fort Worth

The US Army set up a camp on a bluff above the Trinity River in 1849 to guard the frontier and named it after General William Jenkins Worth, a veteran of the Mexican–American War. The soldiers left in 1853, settlers took over the buildings, and the town grew as a stop for cowhands driving cattle north on the Chisholm Trail to Kansas. It earned the nickname Cowtown, and the rough district known as Hell's Half Acre gave it a reputation for saloons, gambling and gunfights.

The Texas and Pacific Railway arrived in 1876, and Fort Worth became a shipping point for cattle. The Swift and Armour meatpacking companies, then the two largest, opened plants beside the stockyards, which became one of the largest livestock markets in the country. Oil was found in West Texas in the early 20th century, and fortunes made by men such as Amon Carter, Sid Richardson and Kay Kimbell paid for the city's later museums. During the Second World War an aircraft factory opened near the city; it still builds military jets.

The packing plants later closed, and the livestock trade declined as auctions moved closer to the ranches. The Bass family restored the old downtown buildings as Sundance Square, the Stockyards became a protected historic district in 1976, and the city spread outwards as the Dallas–Fort Worth area boomed. Since 2000 Fort Worth has been among the fastest-growing large cities in the United States.

Fort Worth calls itself the place "Where the West Begins", and Western culture is part of daily life rather than only a show for visitors. Rodeos are held through the year, the Stock Show each winter draws ranching families from across Texas, and country music fills the honky-tonks of the Stockyards. Cowboy boots and hats are worn to work, to church and to the opera.

The city also has an art scene out of proportion to its size. The Kimbell, the Modern and the Amon Carter form one of the strongest museum groupings in the country, the Van Cliburn piano competition brings young pianists from around the world every four years, and Bass Performance Hall hosts the symphony, opera and ballet. Philanthropy by oil and ranching families built much of this.

The city has a large Hispanic community, long-standing Black neighbourhoods such as Stop Six, and growing numbers of people from across the country and abroad. Locals are friendly and informal, proud of their slower, more neighbourly city, and quick to point out that Fort Worth is not Dallas.

About a million people now live in the city, making it one of the largest in Texas, and it shares a metropolitan area of more than eight million with Dallas. The economy is broad: aircraft manufacturing at the Lockheed Martin plant, American Airlines' headquarters near the airport, logistics around Alliance Airport on the north side, hospitals, banks and Texas Christian University.

Most people live in neighbourhoods of single-storey houses with lawns and in fast-growing suburbs and new subdivisions to the north and west, and almost everyone drives on a network of freeways. Older districts near the centre, such as the Near Southside, have been revived with restaurants and new flats, and housing costs have risen with the growth.

Life follows the heat: in summer people stay in air conditioning in the afternoon and head out in the evening, and high school and college football fill autumn Friday nights and Saturdays. Traffic, water supply, rapid growth and the pace of building are frequent local concerns.

Fort Worth eats like North Texas: beef, Tex-Mex and barbecue. Steakhouses line the Stockyards, and chicken-fried steak — a thin beef cutlet breaded and fried like chicken, covered in white pepper gravy — is served in diners across the city. Texas barbecue here means beef brisket, smoked slowly over wood and sliced to order, along with sausage and ribs, eaten on butcher paper with pickles, onions and white bread.

Tex-Mex is everywhere, from old family restaurants such as Joe T. Garcia's near the Stockyards to taco trucks across the north and south sides: enchiladas in chili gravy, fajitas, breakfast tacos of egg, potato and chorizo, and queso, a melted cheese dip. Kolaches, sweet or savoury pastries brought by Czech settlers, are a common breakfast.

Magnolia Avenue on the Near Southside, West 7th Street and Sundance Square have most of the newer restaurants, and craft breweries and distilleries have spread through the old warehouse districts. Iced tea, Dr Pepper — first made in Waco — and cold beer are the drinks of a hot summer day.