Wichita Falls

Serenely parked on the high plains just 15 mi south of Oklahoma, Wichita Falls is an earnest and family-friendly city. The town was founded in the 1800s by cattle ranchers and the railroads that later sustained them—before the all-important discovery of oil in the early 1s. The Wichita River once did contain the city's titular waterfall, but an 1886 flood destroyed the landscape that created it. In 1987 the city erected an artificial waterfall that rises more than five stories.