The Rise and Fall of America's Wickedest Frontier City: Fort Worth, Texas

In 1900, five of the most wanted outlaws in America walked into a photography studio on Main Street in Fort Worth, Texas, and sat for a portrait. Nobody turned them in. That single fact — that Fort Worth was a city where criminals felt safe because crime was good for business — is the thread that runs through a century of booms, busts, gunfights, and demolitions in the place once known as the wickedest city on the American frontier. The story follows Fort Worth from its near-death as a ghost town in the 1870s, when a panther supposedly slept undisturbed on Main Street, through the cattle-drive era that gave rise to Hell's Half Acre — the most infamous red-light district in the West — and the arrival of the Texas and Pacific Railway that turned a dying settlement into a boomtown overnight. It traces the fortunes of the Fort Worth Stockyards, from the day a Boston investor paid $133,333.33 for a set of cattle pens to the coin toss that decided where Armour and Swift would build their massive meatpacking plants, employing thousands and tripling the city's population by 1910. It follows the oil money that raised Art Deco skyscrapers along Main Street — the Sinclair Building, the T&P Terminal, the Blackstone Hotel — and the one man, Amon Carter, who ran Fort Worth for fifty years through sheer force of personality and a bottomless hatred of Dallas. And it watches as the city, having outgrown its own wildness, bulldozed the Acre to build a convention center and hired a New York architect to cover the ground with falling water. Sources Richard F. Selcer, Hell's Half Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red Light District (Texas Christian University Press, 1991) Oliver Knight, Fort Worth: Outpost on the Trinity (University of Oklahoma Press, 1953) J'Nell L. Pate, "Fort Worth Stockyards," Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association Richard Selcer and Donna Donnell, "Who Shot the Iconic 'Fort Worth Five' Photo of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?", Wild West / HistoryNet, September 2022 "The Press: Mr. Fort Worth," TIME, December 1953 Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District, Stockyards Museum archives and historical markers, Fort Worth, Texas