During the 1958 World Expo in Brussels the United States pavilion featured popular rodeo shows performed by Cowboys and Indians. Halfway through the Expo this rodeo went bankrupt. The cowboys returned to the States by selling their horses and gear, but the impoverished Native Americans, members of the Lakota tribe, had nothing to sell. They were abandoned in Brussels, forced to live in their teepees on the outskirts of the Expo site, mud up to their ankles during the rainy Belgian summer. Very few people were willing to help them but a man named Marcel Kesterman had a piece of land outside of Tremelo, a small village 40km Northeast of Brussels. Together he and the Inidans built a wooden frontier town complete with saloon, bank, hotel, church, and stables on his land. Here the Lakotas could perform Wild West shows to raise money to return home. They called the town, which was completed in 1959, “Texas City.” The rodeos held there were very successful drawing enthusiastic crowds from all over Belgium, France and Germany. The town became so popular that The Who held their largest photo shoot ever to take place in Belgium there in 1967.

For many years following Texas City’s founding young men came to the cowboy village to mimic what they had seen in Hollywood westerns playing cowboys by shooting guns, tying lassos and robbing stagecoaches in their reenactments. For years Texas City was a place to escape their daily lives; a place where they could live out their fantasies of being born in a simpler place during a simpler time. But over the years less and less men fantasized about being cowboys. And due to fires and lack of money Texas City is now a shadow of its former self.

This film tells the story of the rise and fall of the cowboy village through the memories of four men who have been involved with Texas City over the span of its fifty year history. Through them we learn what it means to be a cowboy in Belgium.

Additional commentators include the widow and daughter of a Belgian cowboy who was involved with Texas City during its founding, the current mayor of nearby Tremelo and a local historian. 8mm archival footage and photographs from the 1958 Expo and early days of Texas City, as well as footage from western movies and television shows will create a sense of the history of the Wild West village. New footage includes a modern-day rodeo and cowboy reenactment, as well as a cowboy council meeting at Texas City.