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Posted on Sat, Feb. 19, 2005
By Bud Kennedy
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
The Legend of the Sleeping Panther lives in Fort Worth, where we now have so many cat statues that Cowtown looks like
Cat Town.
The panther story is our frontier epic. For 130 years this month, we have retold how the city rallied after a Dallas newspaper
wrote us off as so dead, a wild panther could wander the streets.
But could we please straighten out this cat's tale?
First of all, only one guy claimed there was a real cat. He was a nutty ex-preacher.
Second, the cat was on Weatherford Street. Not Main.
Of all the great legends of downtown Fort Worth -- the "Last Great Gunfight," Butch and Sundance, JFK's last
speech -- the most celebrated involves a fired Baptist preacher and a huge cat.
This much we know: The former Rev. A. Fitzgerald claimed that a mountain lion got his dogs all stirred up one night. Fitzgerald
lived in what today we would call a loft apartment at Houston and West Weatherford streets across from the courthouse square.
Catacorner, in fact.
Rent must have been cheap. All but a few hundred Fort Worth residents had moved to Dallas for the railroad.
In one resident's retelling years later, Fitzgerald showed townsfolk a huge paw print in the back yard.
But in the only eyewitness version I can find, pioneer Howard W. Peak wrote that the parson showed him an outline in the
dirt in what is now the 200 block of West Weatherford.
Peak, then 18, wrote later that Fitzgerald wanted him to see "where the panther had laid down." Peak wrote that
the shape could have been either a big cat or a calf.
He described Fitzgerald as a "very devout but eccentric man."
The story made it to Dallas, where young prosecutor Robert E. Cowart had just moved from Fort Worth.
The newspapers in both cities -- surprise -- jabbed each other regularly. Fort Worth Democrat editor B.B. Paddock had
already accused Dallas of having a "murder or two" daily and streets "filled with holes."
Cowart, 25 and later a prominent Dallas lawyer, poked fun back in the Dallas Daily Herald on Feb. 2, 1875, under the headline
"FORT WORTH IN A COLD SWEAT -- A 'Panter' Loose In Her Streets."
In an unsigned and unattributed report, Cowart wrote that the Trinity River had overflowed and driven a panther -- back
then, the word meant a mountain lion -- up the bluff to wander "at his own sweet will through the streets."
Cowart reported that Fitzgerald -- "that son of thunder" -- drove a stake where "the panter had laid down"
and warned townsfolk not to talk about the cat, "for the Dallas people and their confounded papers would nevr let up
on Fort Worth."
Defying the barbs, Fort Worth leaders chose the panther as the town symbol. Two wild panther cubs from West Texas were
captured as the town mascots. Fort Worth became "Pantherville" -- later Panther City.
Our city leaders finally laid the railroad track into town themselves. That's another great story.
Less than a year and a half after Dallas readers laughed about our panther, they read how the regional railhead had moved
west to Fort Worth.
Both Fort Worth High School and Fort Worth Colored High School -- now Paschal and long-closed Terrell -- later chose the
Panthers nickname. The Fort Worth Panthers pro baseball team -- later the Cats -- became one of the most storied in the game.
So the Legend of the Sleeping Panther isn't about whether a big cat walked Weatherford Street.
It's about a city's awakening.
And about how Dallas gets clawed when it messes with Fort Worth.
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