Fort Worth Rides High on Cowboy Culture Yellowstone
creator Taylor Sheridan brings film and TV projects to town.

The Fort Worth Herd, a living tribute to the city’s cattle-driving past, makes its way down Exchange Avenue in the historic Stockyards. Courtesy of Visit Fort Worth

Fort Worth has acquired a pack of nicknames since the fort was established in 1849: Cowtown, Funky Town, Panther City, Wall Street of the West and the Modern West. By any name, Fort Worth seems to be having a moment. It topped one million residents last year, eclipsed Austin as Texas’ fourth most populous city and moved up to the nation’s 11th largest city. And theTimes of London declared that Fort Worth has moved past Austin as the coolest city in Texas.

The western cousin of Dallas, Fort Worth embraces its cowtown heritage even as it has grown up into a vibrant new West city of cowboys and culture. “When people think of Texas they think of cowboys, cowboy hats, the boots, the horses, the longhorns. They really can only get all that in Fort Worth,” said Alex Catterton of Fort Worth’s tourism office. “One of my favorite things about our city is it’s really like a triangle with downtown, the stockyards and cultural district all within a 10- or 15-minute drive of each other,” she said. Deep in the heart of Fort Worth is its stockyards historic district, featuring a twice-daily cattle drive of Texas Longhorns through its streets. The 1907 Cowtown Coliseum hosts rodeos on weekends. Billy Bob’s is home to country music and bull riding in “the World’s Largest Honky Tonk” with 30 bar stations and room for thousands of cowgirls and cowboys on the dance floor. Nobody is standing still in the historic district.

The Sid Richardson Museum offers an intimate gallery fi lled with exquisite Western art from one of Texas’ most famous oilmen Courtesy of Visit Fort Worth

“The Fort Worth Stockyards continue to evolve while preserving its legendary Western heritage,” Catterton said. Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, who grew up in Fort Worth, has brought film and TV projects to the streets of Fort Worth and the 101 Studios here. Sheridan and his partners bought the 1947 Cattlemen’s Steak House with plans to renovate it and add a private Cattleman’s Club to the landmark restaurant.

Recently purchased by Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, Cattlemen’s Steak House continues to serve up mesquite-grilled steaks that fueled generations of cowboys. Courtesy of Cattlemen’s Steak House

Hotel Drover opened in 2021 with 200 rooms and a whip-cracking neon cowboy out front. Drovers are the cowhands who herded cattle north out of Texas to market.

The adjacent Mule Alley project turned the district’s horse and mule barns into a collection of restaurants, shops and entertainment venues. Fort Worth has approved a project to add commercial space in the stockyards district, along with 500 hotel rooms, 295 housing units and a pair of underground parking garages with 1,300 spaces. The development partners will also spend $15 million for improvements to the Cowtown Coliseum along with building new barns, horse stalls and steer pens for the herd of Texas Longhorns. As for its cultural offerings, Fort Worth has a week’s worth of museums to explore:

Riding into the Sunset, a lifelike bronze statue of Will Rogers astride his trusty horse Soapsuds, stands prominently before the Art Deco-style Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth Courtesy of Visit Fort Worth

 National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame
 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
 Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
 Amon Carter Museum of American Art
 Kimball Art Museum
 John Wayne: An American Experience
 Sid Richardson Museum

The Kimball features Michelangelo’s first painting. An exhibit at Sid Richardson’s is titled “The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies.” The John Wayne museum showcases firearms used in Duke’s Westerns over four decades, contrasted with pop art prints of cowboys and Indians by Andy Warhol.

The Cowgirl museum includes exhibits on cowgirls who rode in Wild West shows. Visitors can engage with a virtual bucking bronco exhibit that shows a rider against the backdrop of a vintage rodeo film. The selfie images can be downloaded and shared. And the Cowgirl Hall of Fame includes 261 inductees. Four will be added in November.

“It kind of runs the gamut,” said museum spokeswoman Julie Bryant. “These are cowgirls in the sense that they support the Western lifestyle and the Western genre in art and music.” Some of the well-known inductees include Annie Oakley, Dale Evans, Georgia O’Keeffe and Sandra Day O’Connor. Patsy Montana, the first woman to sell a million records, is a 1987 inductee. She wrote the 1935 hit song “I Wanna Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” Montana sang, yodeled and played guitar, fiddle and organ.

Expect a little dust at the Cowgirl with a $19 million expansion underway. It will add 16,000 square feet of space and an 18-horse carousel. That project is set to be done by November 2026, in time for the Hall of Fame’s 50th induction luncheon.

Peter Corbett has been exploring the West for the past half century and spent 35 years as an Arizona journalist.