A hundred years ago a simple business arrangement changed the course of Fort Worth's economy for years to come and its character perhaps forever. On July 26, 1887, the Union Stock Yards Company received a charter to do business in an area just north of town. The legacy of that charter: Cowtown.
J'Nell L. Pate has spent ten years researching the Fort Worth market, with full access to company records and local archives. The result is a thorough, thoughtful, and colorful examination of the industry and its effects on this city.
The early years of the stockyards were years of struggle for local businessmen, but in 1902, national giants Swift and Armour assumed a two-thirds interest in the operations, and from there the market grew to be the largest in the Southwest---and one of the three or four largest in the nation. Decentralization after World War II saw local country auctions and later large feedlot operations set the market on a decline. Pate describes typical days during various periods of the market's existence; regales with anecdotes about traders, packers, and shippers; examines the successes and failures of the owners and managers; and impartially evaluates the policies and practices of national moguls Armour and Swift. Her study demonstrates the interrelatedness of the Fort Worth market and the larger Texas agribusiness scene and gives many new insights into the livestock industry generally.

Named after a Mexican War general William Jenkins Worth, Fort Worth began as a military post in 1849. More than a century and a half later, the defense industry remains Fort Worth's major strength with Lockheed Martin's F-35s and Bell Helicopter's Ospreys flying the skies over the city. Popularly known as ""Cowtown"" for the iconic cattle drives and stockyards that brought the city fame, soldiers, pilots, and military installations have been just as important-and more enduring-in Fort Worth's legacy. Arsenal of Defense: Fort Worth's Military Legacy covers the entire military history of Fort Worth from the 1840s with tiny Bird's Fort to the tremendous impact of the two World Wars on the city and the massive defense plants of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In August of 1897, in the small village of Henna, Syria, eighteen miles from Damascus, Mohammed (Ed) Aryain was born. As far back as he could remember, Ed dreamed of moving to the United States. In the early twentieth century Syria still suffered from high taxation and control under the Ottoman Turks. Ed saw Syrians who had been to America returning home with gold watches and money to purchase land, and he vowed to do the same. Although his parents did not want him to go, eventually they relented and watched fifteen-year-old Ed begin a 120-mile walk to Beirut to board a steamship. He tells of his emotional first view of the Statue of the Liberty and of his traumatic passage through Ellis Island. Joining the network of Syrians who supported themselves by peddling dry goods, Ed traveled across the Great Plains. Later he rented storefronts in wild oil-boom towns in Oklahoma and Texas. Finally he married an American woman and settled in West Texas, living in Littlefield, Sudan, Brownfield, and finally in Seminole, where he operated his own store on the town square until 1952. But even after decades in the United States, a man never forgets his homeland, and after nearly fifty years in America Ed returned briefly to Syria to visit those who remained of the family he had left behind. Eddie and Jameil Aryain, Ed's two sons, have each written an afterword, providing their perspectives on this unique piece of Americana. " A] beautifully edited memoir . . . that] not only puts faces on Syrian emigrants but humanizes them as well" --Great Plains Quarterly J'Nell Pate is the author of six books, including, most recently America's Historic Stockyards: Livestock Hotels, and a weekly history column in her local newspaper. She lives in Azle, Texas.