[ed. The second installment of this fascinating article can be found here: Dallas, Part 2: Up Close]
Between 318 and 271 million years ago, the ancient continental core of North America butted against what would become South America. Land folded and faulted; mountains were born. Then what would become the Gulf of Mexico opened, and inland seas washed the peaks away. It pays to remember there are mountains beneath Dallas. The tops may have eroded, but the roots remain buried deep.
Some 165 million years later—in 1841—John Neely Bryan built a shelter on a bluff and called the area Dallas.
One hundred and twenty-two years later—in 1963—John F. Kennedy was shot on that bluff, now named Dealey Plaza.
Seventeen years later—in 1980—J. R. Ewing was shot on TV.
Dallas exists outside of prehistory. Unlike surrounding areas, it was not a camp for Native Americans or prehistoric men. Dig and you find few artifacts. The Trinity River formed a boundary for ancient tribes: farmers to the east and hunters to the west. The Trinity is a true Texan; it begins and ends within the state. Its 710-mile path slices through what is now downtown Dallas, making Dallas a city on the cusp, on the boundary, in between. It wavers between being and not being. Dallas wasn’t there until—suddenly—it was, called forth in the minds of white men.
John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas, was born in Tennessee in 1810. In 1839, he arrived at the three forks of the Trinity River with a Cherokee he called Ned and a dog he called Tubby. He was twenty-nine. He wrote his name on a piece of buckskin, affixed it to a stake, drove it into the soft ground of an eighteen-foot bluff, and went back to Arkansas. Two years later, he returned to his bluff and built a lean-to. In another two years, he was married, a union which brought five children. Dallas—as he called his claim—was on its way. (...)
In 1855, some 200 French, Swiss, and Belgians—some on horses, some on foot, some in wooden shoes—made the 250-mile trek from Houston, settling just west of Dallas in a utopian community they called “La Reunion.” The settlement was a cooperative founded on the social ideals of France philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier. Women were equal to men and could vote. The usual entropy—combined with substandard housing, a severe winter, a spring drought, summer grasshoppers, and a crop of wheat grown without consideration that there was no one there to buy it—undid the community’s best-laid plans. By 1860, 160 members of the colony had defected to Dallas. Thus the first piano entered the city, which also gained from a pool of pastry chefs, brewers, dancing masters, artisans, jewelers, tailors, physicians, naturalists, and the like. The seeds of Dallas as a cultural hub were planted. La Reunion ended without formal dissolution—it simply disappeared, save for a small cemetery, once called Fishtrap, now Crown Hill Memorial Park, which some seventy years later would become the final resting place of outlaw Bonnie Parker. Today the cemetery remains fairly overlooked, overtaken by a different kind of entropy, abutted by drive-thru liquor stores, video chains, thrift shops, gas stations, and check-cashing places. Reunion Tower—named in honor of the colony—rises roughly three miles to the east, standing tall like a late 1970s microphone.
Dallas is: Big Tex, the Cotton Bowl, the Dr. Pepper clock, Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine (as seen from I-35), El Fenix (the downtown original), Reunion Tower, Fair Park (home of the state fair as well as the world’s largest collection of Art Deco buildings), Texas Stadium (R.I.P.), Old Red Courthouse, Highland Park Village (the country’s first planned shopping center), NorthPark Mall (with its modern art and holiday penguins), Love Field, the Cathedral de Guadalupe, Neiman Marcus, Bank of America Plaza (aka the “Green Building,” built in 1985 and outlined with two miles of green argon lights), the aluminum-clad Republic National Bank building (its rocket-like spire stretching to the sky), First Interstate Tower (its giant slanting curtain walls once home to Ewing Oil), Texas Commerce Tower (its curved glass top pierced by a seven-story hole, a passage made narrower than originally planned for fear that some Dallas daredevil would try to fly a plane through it), the beaux-arts Magnolia Building (boasting, in 1934, the largest rotating sign in the world, a 6,000-pound, neon red Pegasus, the logo of Mobil Oil, now ExxonMobil, headquartered thirteen miles down the road), among others. Some of these skyscrapers were to be built in pairs, but even in Dallas developers can’t forestall a crash in real estate or a bust in oil. So the buildings stand, twinless ghosts on the skyline.
John Steinbeck on Texas: “Few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox.” Dallas, in particular, is a city that resists narrative.
Between 318 and 271 million years ago, the ancient continental core of North America butted against what would become South America. Land folded and faulted; mountains were born. Then what would become the Gulf of Mexico opened, and inland seas washed the peaks away. It pays to remember there are mountains beneath Dallas. The tops may have eroded, but the roots remain buried deep.
Some 165 million years later—in 1841—John Neely Bryan built a shelter on a bluff and called the area Dallas.One hundred and twenty-two years later—in 1963—John F. Kennedy was shot on that bluff, now named Dealey Plaza.
Seventeen years later—in 1980—J. R. Ewing was shot on TV.
Dallas exists outside of prehistory. Unlike surrounding areas, it was not a camp for Native Americans or prehistoric men. Dig and you find few artifacts. The Trinity River formed a boundary for ancient tribes: farmers to the east and hunters to the west. The Trinity is a true Texan; it begins and ends within the state. Its 710-mile path slices through what is now downtown Dallas, making Dallas a city on the cusp, on the boundary, in between. It wavers between being and not being. Dallas wasn’t there until—suddenly—it was, called forth in the minds of white men.
John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas, was born in Tennessee in 1810. In 1839, he arrived at the three forks of the Trinity River with a Cherokee he called Ned and a dog he called Tubby. He was twenty-nine. He wrote his name on a piece of buckskin, affixed it to a stake, drove it into the soft ground of an eighteen-foot bluff, and went back to Arkansas. Two years later, he returned to his bluff and built a lean-to. In another two years, he was married, a union which brought five children. Dallas—as he called his claim—was on its way. (...)
In 1855, some 200 French, Swiss, and Belgians—some on horses, some on foot, some in wooden shoes—made the 250-mile trek from Houston, settling just west of Dallas in a utopian community they called “La Reunion.” The settlement was a cooperative founded on the social ideals of France philosopher François Marie Charles Fourier. Women were equal to men and could vote. The usual entropy—combined with substandard housing, a severe winter, a spring drought, summer grasshoppers, and a crop of wheat grown without consideration that there was no one there to buy it—undid the community’s best-laid plans. By 1860, 160 members of the colony had defected to Dallas. Thus the first piano entered the city, which also gained from a pool of pastry chefs, brewers, dancing masters, artisans, jewelers, tailors, physicians, naturalists, and the like. The seeds of Dallas as a cultural hub were planted. La Reunion ended without formal dissolution—it simply disappeared, save for a small cemetery, once called Fishtrap, now Crown Hill Memorial Park, which some seventy years later would become the final resting place of outlaw Bonnie Parker. Today the cemetery remains fairly overlooked, overtaken by a different kind of entropy, abutted by drive-thru liquor stores, video chains, thrift shops, gas stations, and check-cashing places. Reunion Tower—named in honor of the colony—rises roughly three miles to the east, standing tall like a late 1970s microphone.
Dallas is: Big Tex, the Cotton Bowl, the Dr. Pepper clock, Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine (as seen from I-35), El Fenix (the downtown original), Reunion Tower, Fair Park (home of the state fair as well as the world’s largest collection of Art Deco buildings), Texas Stadium (R.I.P.), Old Red Courthouse, Highland Park Village (the country’s first planned shopping center), NorthPark Mall (with its modern art and holiday penguins), Love Field, the Cathedral de Guadalupe, Neiman Marcus, Bank of America Plaza (aka the “Green Building,” built in 1985 and outlined with two miles of green argon lights), the aluminum-clad Republic National Bank building (its rocket-like spire stretching to the sky), First Interstate Tower (its giant slanting curtain walls once home to Ewing Oil), Texas Commerce Tower (its curved glass top pierced by a seven-story hole, a passage made narrower than originally planned for fear that some Dallas daredevil would try to fly a plane through it), the beaux-arts Magnolia Building (boasting, in 1934, the largest rotating sign in the world, a 6,000-pound, neon red Pegasus, the logo of Mobil Oil, now ExxonMobil, headquartered thirteen miles down the road), among others. Some of these skyscrapers were to be built in pairs, but even in Dallas developers can’t forestall a crash in real estate or a bust in oil. So the buildings stand, twinless ghosts on the skyline.
John Steinbeck on Texas: “Few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox.” Dallas, in particular, is a city that resists narrative.
