All that glitters

Letter in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. 

Fool's gold

Letter writers and columnists are lambasting the new Museum of Science and History and nostalgically longing for yesterday's old museum. What if after a billion earmark dollars are spent on new-fangled Trinity Vision with its boondoggle of canals, condos and bridges to nowhere, Fort Worthers, suffering buyer's remorse, wake up, tax bills in hand, and long once more for the old nature-carved Trinity and its vanished West Fork-Clear Fork landmark confluence admired by Ripley Arnold, Robert E. Lee and Amon Carter -- the confluence where the deer and the antelope played and Indians pitched their tepees, a picture that no museum artist ere could paint.

An 1898 painting by Frederic Remington portrays Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado on his ill-fated quest in 1541 to find the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. The expedition, which included hundreds of soldiers and Native American guides, lasted two years and traversed some 4000 miles of the American West. In the end, no cities of gold were found and Coronado returned empty-handed and in debt.

Coronado's Seven Cities of Cibola. Kay Granger's Trinity Vision. All that glitters is not gold.

-- Don Woodard Sr., Fort Worth