The decimation of Fort Worth left here about one thousand people. Many of them stayed because they could not well get away. Others remained because their faith in the ultimate growth and preeminence of the city was not shaken by this disaster. They went to work with a grim determination to make a city of Fort Worth and how well they performed the task, many still living, well remember. Their names are household words with the older citizens and will never be forgotten. They are inscribed on the tablets of their memories never to be effaced. A great number of those who left Fort Worth at that time went to Dallas. Some of them have become prominent factors in the development of the city. There was little or no business left to Fort Worth, except the spring cattle drive. That brought business to a few. The town was dead as far as business and development went. The grass literally grew in the streets. This was not a metaphor to indicate stagnation, but a doleful fact. There were more empty stores and vacant dwellings than those that were occupied. The people busied themselves principally with an effort to devise ways and means to secure a railroad and with politics in which they took an interest that was keen and constant. Town meetings were almost of weekly occurrence, and a sufficient number of resolutions were adopted and committees appointed to have built the embankments for a road to Dallas if they could have been utilized for that purpose. The faith of the people never wavered for a moment. It was with them constantly and under all circumstances. They never failed to sing the praises of the city and to predict its glorious future. Volumes were written and distributed telling of the glorious future that waited upon those who believed and remained with the city. Among those who left the place when the cyclone hit it was a young lawyer who had come hither from Georgia. One Robert E. Cowart. He went to Dallas where he still lives and is one of the promoters of the scheme to get deep water in the Trinity at that place. Cowart was, and is, a bright man. He has a keen sense of the ridiculous and verbiage that can make an Indian’s hair curl. He lived long enough in Fort Worth to become acquainted with the peculiarities of its people. It was he who furnished the facts that gave Fort Worth the name of the “Panther City.” Knowing the conditions that prevailed here, he wrote a communication for the Dallas Herald, then the leading paper of North Texas, telling of the discovery of a panther in the streets of Fort Worth, and the action taken by the people.