Paint your wagon

By CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING*

The immigration official at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport – who resembled Glen Campbell as the Texas Ranger in True Grit – smiled as he handed my passport back. "I like looking at birthdays," he said.

"It tells me a little about people. Mine's on 11 September. I guess that's just my bad luck. Dallas or Fort Worth?" "Fort Worth," I replied. "Well, welcome to the city of cowboys and culture. Have a good stay, now."

Cowboys and culture? Hollywood never made that connection. John Wayne, surveying thousands of cattle in the morning dew, waving his hat and shouting "Take 'em to Missouri, Matt" in Red River (1948), or delivering a homily to the beleaguered volunteers on the meaning of the word "Republic" and how it never fails to bring a lump to his throat in The Alamo (1960). Major TJ "King" Kong riding a B-52-dropped atomic bomb as if it were a rodeo bronc in Dr Strangelove (1964). Not too much culture there.

When George Bush said "wanted: dead or alive" and "we'll smoke 'em out" – distant memories of television westerns in the 1950s – he had nearly a century of celluloid images to back him up. Images like those in the celebrated cable to Alistair Cooke from a London newsdesk in 1968: "Would appreciate article on Texas ... cowboys comma oil comma millionaires comma large ranches comma general crassness bad manners etc.".

The leaflet I received from the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors' Bureau came as even more of a surprise: "Rothkos and Rodeos – Picassos and Paint Horses – Caravaggios and Cattle Drives – Experience the perfect blend of fine art and the American West". This looked like a double bill worth exploring. So, after checking into the Renaissance Worthington Hotel on Main Street – with the largest multi-level foyer you ever saw: marble, gilt and dark wood with a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright – it was off to the bureau, downtown near Sundance Square, named after a real-life outlaw who laid low in nearby "Hell's Half Acre".

Doug Harman – the president and chief executive of the visitors' bureau – removed his 10-gallon hat and explained that in the early 1980s, Fort Worth faced a big civic decision. It had a long-standing reputation for being a sleepy place compared with Dallas, its brash, get-rich-quick, over-reaching neighbour 50km away.

A century-old legend even claims that things were so slow in downtown Fort Worth that a panther went to sleep in a major street and was not disturbed. When the Dallas Herald published this story in 1875, the nickname "Panther City" was applied to Fort Worth. And somehow it stuck. Taking up the challenge with some defiance, the city adopted the panther as its emblem and named its baseball team "The Cats".

Several people told me during my four-day stay that Fort Worth is where the West and its colourful history begins (from army outpost to cattle town to railroad depot to oil distributor to aviation centre), whereas Dallas has walkways, freeways, shopping malls, nondescript corporate canyons and a sense of "never touching the street". So, when Fort Worth made its decision in the early 1980s, it went for the restoration of turn-of-the-century downtown buildings, brick sidewalks, topiary in the shape of cowboys and cows, a variety of street-level restaurants, a celebration of where the city came from – plus cultural prestige.

Luckily, a fair number of historic sites had survived the "knocking-down period" of the 1950s and 1960s, and the malling of other city centres. Sundance Square got its name in the 1980s rather than the 1880s. President John Kennedy gave his last speech in Fort Worth on 22 November, 1963, the night before he visited Dallas. He was presented with a cowboy hat by the chamber of commerce as a symbol of goodwill, but declined to wear it in public; he thought it might make him look silly.

The three areas of Fort Worth which have developed fastest since then – forming a triangle with sides of 1.5 to 2 miles – are the Cultural District, Historic Downtown and the Stockyards National Historic District. Harman reckons: "If you're a European, you could walk from one to the other. In Texas we prefer horseback, a car or a pickup."

At the Amon Carter Museum in the Cultural District – designed and recently extended by the architect Philip Johnson and named after a local newspaperman and civic leader – the director, Rick Stewart, draws breath for a moment in his enthusiastic, whistle-stop, three-hour tour of the museum's holdings of western art (western as in cowboys rather than civilisation). One of his favourite moments was when some people visiting an agricultural show at the nearby Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum walked across the street, looked at the collection of paintings and huge sculptures by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell and noted "those people sure knew their horses".

That, said Rick with a smile, was just as significant as any art criticism of a more conventional kind – maybe more so. It's certainly true that Remington and Russell (known locally as "a little R and R") have never been rated highly by critics in Europe, but together they created the visual language of the Wild West in the late 19th century – Russell for the action sequences, Remington for the US cavalry, both influences on the cinema of John Ford – and this is the place to see them, together with some iconic landscape paintings and more than 200,000 archive photographs. Reappraisal is in the air.

After experiencing the myth, I visited the old Stockyards District, which features the myth of the myth: twice daily, from March to November, a herd of 15 longhorn cows (one for each decade of Fort Worth's history up to 1999) is driven along Exchange Avenue by a bunch of working cowhands. "If you folks stay on the sidewalk," announces one of them, "that'll help the cattle to stay on the street." In Fort Worth, as Greg Staley of the visitors' bureau told me, "people kept asking 'where are the cows?' So we started the daily cattle drive".

The Stockyards District also includes the old hog and sheep pens (now converted into bijou shops and cafes), the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame, and some great stores specialising in how the West was worn – especially ML Leddy's cowboy boots, some incredibly elaborate singing cowboy shirts, hats in all gallonages – not to mention the cross-eyed moose antique store. You can lunch at the Lonesome Dove (terrific buffalo burger with Monterey Jack cheese, plus framed message of support from the celebrated Texas author Larry McMurtry) or dine at the Cattlemen's (Desperate Dan-sized portion of corn-fed beef), and have a drink at the White Elephant Saloon, with live country music, a poster of the American flag with the slogan "these colours don't run", neon beer signs and Patty behind the bar explaining that Dallas has a lot to learn about how a city should work from the Fort Worth experience. Patty is surrounded by large hats pegged to the wall, with names. One is tiny. "That was worn by an armadillo," she helpfully explains.

Meanwhile, back at the Cultural District and next door to the big fine art museums, the National Cowgirl Museum has just opened, dedicated to celebrating and documenting the role of women in the Wild West. It was designed in neo-art nouveau style by David Schwarz (who in 1998 also designed the astonishing downtown Bass Performance Hall, with its 48ft white limestone angels with golden trumpets on the frontage, more than 2,000 seats under a painted sky within) and named after the philanthropic Bass family – one of the wealthiest in America. The main rotunda evokes Tara from Gone with the Wind.

The director Pat Riley explains that there is a hall of fame of 158 women, galleries devoted to ranch-life, rodeos, costumes ("mascara in the mud") and reel cowgirls plus a talking horse to help orient visitors. The hall of fame turns out to be branded with the culturally inclusive approach of so many Fort Worth attractions: it includes Dale Evans, who wrote "Happy Trails", and sang it with her husband, Roy Rogers; Annie Oakley, Georgia O'Keefe and Sacagawea, the most important native American guide to the pioneering Lewis and Clark expedition to find the Pacific. This disregard for the usual cultural hierarchies – a great painter next to Dale Evans, for goodness' sake – is, as the talking horse reminds us, a special kind of happy ending. "Cowgirl" is evidently a flexible category.

Having moved from the huge Renaissance Worthington to the more intimate but equally upscale Ashton Hotel further downtown, it's time to explore the fine art part of the cowboys and culture equation – those Caravaggios, Picassos and Rothkos which alliterate on the leaflet with their cowboy counterparts. The pickup heads west again to the Cultural District. The Kimbell Art Museum, off Camp Bowie Boulevard, is housed in a 1972 Louis Kahn concrete building which successfully bends natural light through metal reflectors beneath narrow slits to the sky. The permanent galleries, based on the Kimbell family collection, include a Caravaggio and one of those Picassos, plus some carefully chosen greatest hits from ancient times to the 20th century.

Then, to the building site of the new Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to be the second-largest museum of its kind in America (after Moma in New York). The structure, resembling a gigantic Japanese house which hovers over a 1.5 acre reflecting pond on Y-shaped pylons, will exhibit as many of the media and experiences of modern and contemporary art as can be imagined. The director, Dr Marla Price, explains that the original Modern Art Museum, designed by Herbert Bayer in 1953, proved too small, despite numerous extensions. The permanent collection includes works by Picasso, Rothko and Jackson Pollock (who saw himself as a latter-day cowpuncher, after all). "It's a $63m project," says Marla. "This town has raised $450m in cultural donations – from a population of 450,000. This will be the Moma of the West."

And while we are on icons, Ronald Reagan once observed that nothing is so good for the insides of a person as the outsides of a horse, so after overdosing on Western art (in the traditional European sense), it is time for a ride at West Folk Ranch – a short Chinook drive west of downtown Fort Worth on the Interstate Loop. My host is cowboy Steve Murrin – known locally as "the unofficial Mayor of Cowtown" – who resembles a benign Lee Marvin in Monte Walsh, complete with red bandanna, long white hair and a handlebar moustache. He was one of the people behind the revival of the Stockyards and a mural of him riding the range is on one of its historic buildings.

A stop-over on the way at Angelo's Barbecue teaches me where George Bush Snr got his strip-beef sandwiches when he was in the White House (they were flown east), and also about his son "who came to Fort Worth a lot when he was governor of Texas – you know a resident designed his new-build ranch in Crawford, the one he calls 'The Western White House'". Then, further down the highway, a look-in on Mark Meek, a former dentist who now produces hand-made saddles. At the end of the trail, several cattle grids later, is West Fork Ranch, Steve's residence. The ranch used to be called "Donegal Hills" – his father was Irish, his mother Mexican – but is actually on a West Fork of the Trinity. "Before you ask, there isn't a South Fork." My sturdy black mare is called Honey – and really is the "easy goin' cow pony" I was promised – while Steve's more spirited horse is called Matt Dillon.

A few hours riding along the rolling hills, past Aberdeen Angus bulls, Texas longhorns, wild turkeys on the horizon – like the silhouettes of Apaches in a John Wayne film – and buzzards tucking into something it's best not to ask about, and I really do begin to feel at home on the range. Except that the skies were cloudy and there weren't any antelope. I know I'm going to be eating meals off the mantelpiece for the next two days, but hell, it is well worth it. And then in Steve's Chinook – with comfortable armchairs, videos of "cowboy heroes of the silver screen", an Indian arrow and a map of Ireland in the back – to the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum for me to see some real craftsmanship at the cutting horse championships, a battle of wits between rider, horse and bewildered cow. Precision and skill, as immortalised in the writings of the Montana novelist Thomas McGuane.

After that, the only place to hitch one's wagon seems to be Joe T Garcia's on the road towards the Stockyards, founded four generations ago by a family which crossed the Rio Grande during the Mexican revolution. It is one of the best-known Tex-Mex emporia in America – the finest enchiladas and fajitas I've ever tasted, served family style – and the setting (fountain, mariachi music, eating outdoors in the courtyard) fits the purpose just right. A few iced margueritas, a conversation with Pat Riley about whether the sassy cowgirl puppet from Toy Story 2 is eligible for her Hall of Fame, the band playing the trumpet dirge from The Alamo (at least I think it was), and I really do agree that other big cities have something to learn from Fort Worth. President Kennedy should have stopped being the liberal Easterner for a moment and put that stetson on his head.

* Professor Sir Christopher Frayling is Rector of the Royal College of Art.

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