Bigger in Texas? Damn straight

Lazbuddie, Texas, Zip Code 79053

Lazbuddie is in Parmer County, on the western edge of the Panhandle. Parmer County abuts New Mexico.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hll26

The county has three main creeks – Running Water Draw, Catfish Draw and Frio Draw. All three are intermittent, but, as with all creeks, ditches and gullies in West Texas, can be extremely dangerous when rain falls upstream. The creeks run northwest to southeast. Rainfall in Parmer County averages 17.5 inches a year.

“Apaches occupied the Panhandle-Plains until they were pushed out around 1700 by the Kiowas and Comanches, who ruled the Texas High Plains between 1700 and the end of the Red River War in 1874.”

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hcp04

That is something a whole lot of people don’t know or think about or would rather just kind of ignore, Indian tribes pushing each other from place to place. Kiowa and Comanche wound up in the Southern Plains of West Texas and the Panhandle after being pushed out of the High Plains by the Sioux. The Sioux went west because they were pushed across the Mississippi River by Eastern forest Indians. People want to remember only how dastardly European whites killed off as many Indians as they could and put the remainder on reservations to become alcoholic and perform badly in school.

Giving native lands back to the Indians would be a question of, “Which native lands are you talking about?” Like environmentalists who say, “We should keep the land in its natural state.” Of which century? Of which era?

In 1900, the XIT Ranch had 150,000 acres in Parmer County with 13,675 cattle. In the 2010 census, Lazbuddie had 248 people.

The XIT was also home to Cordelia Jane Sloan Duke.

DUKE, CORDELIA JANE SLOAN (1877–1966). Cordelia (Cordia) Duke, rancher, writer, and game warden, was born near Belton, Missouri, on January 10, 1877, the daughter of A. R. C. and Belle (Wingert) Sloan. She attended school in Overbrook, Kansas, where her family moved shortly after her birth. She passed the teachers' examination at the age of sixteen and taught school for several years in the Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma Territory, before moving to Sherman County, Texas. In September 1906 she began teaching in a four-pupil school on a strip of Texas land between Oklahoma and the XIT Ranch. There she met Robert L. Duke, then foreman of the Buffalo Springs division of the XIT. The story goes that after returning with her charges from a late roundup near El Frio Springs, Cordia was warned by one young cowboy not to "fool with that Bob Duke," who had fired a cowhand for mistreating a horse. She took her chances anyway, and she and Duke were married on January 9, 1907; they eventually had three daughters. Duke became general manager of the XIT under Henry S. Boice, and when the ranch ceased its cattle operations in 1912, he was retained to oversee that portion of the range leased to the Shelton and Trigg partnership.

During her years as a ranch wife, Cordia Duke kept a diary in which she noted details of a rapidly vanishing way of life. She used these and reminiscences of the ranchhands in articles for such newspapers and magazines as the Cattleman. Later, excerpts from this diary were used as the basis for a book entitled 6,000 Miles of Fence, which she coauthored with Joe B. Frantz. This book, published in 1961, was the first in the M. K. Brown Range Life Series of the University of Texas Press. In the 1920s, when the land around the Duke homestead was designated a wildlife sanctuary, Mrs. Duke was appointed game warden, the first woman to hold that job in Texas. She was warden for a number of years and became legendary for her rapport with the thousands of wild ducks that found refuge on the sanctuary during their annual migrations. After her husband's death in 1933, Cordia Duke moved to Dalhart, where she died on July 23, 1966, and was buried.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdu11