Swisher County Texas map
34.53° N · 101.74° W · County seat: Tulia · 901 sq mi
Swisher County is the halfway point on I-27: Tulia is roughly 50 miles from Amarillo and 50 from Lubbock, and the interstate runs down the county from north to south past the town of Happy. The flat surface breaks only in the southeast, where Tule Creek has carved Tule Canyon back into the caprock — a gorge with a Red River War battlefield in it and a reservoir at the bottom.
I-27 runs top to bottom through the middle of the frame. The branching lines in the southeast corner are Tule Canyon and its draws.
Where Swisher County is
Swisher lies at the southern edge of the Panhandle, on the line where the region is usually said to give way to the South Plains. Randall County is north, Armstrong northeast, Briscoe east, Floyd southeast, Hale south and Castro west.
Everything west of Tulia is the Llano Estacado at about 3,500 feet: section-line roads, playa lakes, cotton, corn and grain sorghum under centre pivots, and feedyards. The eastern quarter is different country. There the plain begins to break toward the Caprock Escarpment, and Tule Creek runs east into Briscoe County toward the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.
James Gibson Swisher, whose name the county carries, fought in the Texas Revolution and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. The county was laid out in 1876 and organized in 1890, after ranch land began to be sold off to farmers.
Towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Tulia | City · county seat | 4,479 |
| Kress | City | 601 |
| Happy (part) | Town | 543 |
Happy straddles the county line with Randall, but nearly all of it is on the Swisher side. It advertises itself as "the town without a frown" on the sign at the edge of town.
Roads
- I-27 – enters from Randall County at Happy and runs south past Tulia and Kress into Hale County toward Plainview. Exits are few and the frontage roads carry the local traffic.
- US-87 – shares the interstate alignment through the county.
- SH-86 – the east–west road, running west from Tulia toward Dimmitt in Castro County and east toward Silverton, dropping past the head of Tule Canyon.
- SH-194 – a short connector northwest from Tulia toward Happy and Nazareth.
- Loop 292 – the business loop around Tulia.
Tule Canyon and Mackenzie Reservoir
Tule Creek cuts a canyon several hundred feet deep along the county's southeastern corner — smaller than Palo Duro, 30 miles north, but the same escarpment and the same red and white rock. In the 1970s the Mackenzie Municipal Water Authority dammed the creek there, and Mackenzie Reservoir now supplies water to Tulia, Silverton, Floydada and Lockney. The lake sits well below the plain, reached by a road down the canyon wall from SH-207 north of Silverton, and the shoreline is rock and juniper rather than beach.
The canyon and the reservoir both take their name from Ranald Mackenzie, whose Fourth Cavalry campaigned across this ground in the Red River War of 1874. After destroying the Comanche and Kiowa camps in Palo Duro Canyon on 28 September, his troops drove the captured horse herd — well over a thousand animals — south to Tule Canyon and shot them, so the bands could not remount. It ended organized resistance on the Llano Estacado within months and opened the country to the ranchers and then the farmers who laid out these section lines.
Tulia grew up as the trading and courthouse town for those farmers, on the Santa Fe branch line, and it remains an agricultural service centre: elevators, gins, implement dealers and feedyards. The county's population peaked in the mid-twentieth century and has fallen slowly since, a pattern shared with almost every dryland farming county on the High Plains.