Frontier Texas!

Abilene exists because of a deal. When the Texas and Pacific Railway pushed west in 1880, a group of ranchers and businessmen, among them Claiborne W. Merchant and John N. Simpson, arranged with the railroad's townsite locator to bypass Buffalo Gap, the county seat, and run the line across their own land. Merchant suggested the name, after the Kansas cattle town. The trains arrived in January 1881, lots were auctioned on March 15 that year, and more than 300 sold in two days. Abilene took the county seat from Buffalo Gap in 1883.

Frontier Texas! stands downtown by those tracks. It is a nonprofit museum of about 14,000 square feet built around technology rather than artifacts: actors on screen portray frontier figures who guide visitors through the galleries, and a theater compresses a hundred years of the frontier into a few minutes of stampeding bison, storms, wolves and gunfights. A tipi, a re-created saloon, a 461-foot mural and a replica of Amigo, the 1998 world champion steer with horns nearly nine feet across, fill out the rooms. The center describes its subject as the lively mythology of the frontier, and that is a fair label: this is the settlers' telling. The Comanche Nation's own account is at its museum in Lawton, Oklahoma.

The building also serves as the official visitor center for Abilene and the Texas Forts Trail Region, and it is the place to pick up the trail's maps before heading out to the forts.