Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
DRIVING DISTANCES
Abilene to Austin
213 miles, 3½ hours
Amarillo to Odessa
268 miles, four hours
Amarillo to San Angelo
293 miles, 4½ hours
Dallas to Houston
242 miles, four hours
Dallas to Waco
100 miles, two hours
Fort Worth to Austin
187 miles, three hours
Fort Worth to San Antonio
265 miles, 4½ hours
Lubbock to Fort Worth
292 miles, 4½ hours
Odessa to El Paso
274 miles, 4¼ hours
History
In 1839 John Neely Bryan, a Tennessee lawyer and Indian trader, stumbled onto the three
forks of the Trinity River, a site he thought had the makings of a good trading post. Dallas
County was created in 1846, and both county and town were probably named for George
Mifflin Dallas, US vice president under James K Polk; the two were elected on a platform
favoring Texas statehood.
Dallas grew slowly for 30 years, though from the start the city had a flair for self-pro-
motion: Bryan saw to it that Dallas was placed on maps even before there was much of a
town. In the 1870s the state decided Dallas would be the junction of the north-south Mis-
souri, Kansas and Texas Railroad and the east-west Texas and Pacific Railroad. It worked
like magic: merchants from New York, Chicago, Boston and St Louis invested heavily in
the city.
Cotton created another boom. In 1885 farmland sold for $15 an acre. By 1920, with
cotton prices soaring, land values had risen to $300 an acre. And when the East Texas Oil
Field was struck 100 miles east of town in 1930, Dallas became the financial center of the
oil industry.
Post-WWII Dallas continued to build on its reputation as a citadel of commerce. But its
image took a dive when President John F Kennedy was assassinated during a November
1963 visit to the city. This tragic incident, coupled with the ensuing turmoil of the 1960s,
badly battered Dallas' self-esteem. Gradually, however, the city reclaimed its Texas swag-
ger with help from a few new chest-thumping sources of civic pride: the Dallas Cowboys
