Beginning in 1853 as a tiny settlement at the site of an abandoned fort, Fort Worth, Texas, has become a dynamic metropolitan center. Fort Worth: A Frontier Triumph details the stories of the people who contributed to the early history of the city that would become known the world over as "Cowtown, Where the West Begins". Compiled from recollections of pioneers and old-timers, Julia Kathryn Garrett's narrative begins with the early Spanish explorations of the upper Trinity River and continues through the settlement of Fort Worth until the end of Reconstruction, when the town was poised on the edge of growth, ready to become a modern city with the 1876 arrival of the railroad. In addition to wagon trains plodding westward and herds of cattle winding to the north, both so prominent in the city's history, Garrett weaves in the stories of early Spanish explorers, the invasion of white men and their long and bloody war with the prairie Indians, the era of slavery and the Civil War, the chaotic period of reconstruction with its struggles between carpet-baggers and the Klu Klux Klan.