After the 1874 battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Ranald S. Mackenzie ordered 1450 Indian horses shot.

[4] The Buffalo Hunters' War of 1876 was an attempt by the Comanches to drive out the white man and stop depletion of their hunting grounds.

The stimulus of World War II demand and, particularly, the development of large-scale irrigation in the area, led to the revival of the county's economy.

After World War II this activity increased dramatically; by the 1980s over 225,000 acres (910 km2) in Swisher County were irrigated.

[5] Rural Texas in the early 20th century was often connected by unpaved routes, often of caliche or other rock and dirt paths.

The Ozark Trail was a highway network maintained by local entities or private citizens from Arkansas and Missouri through Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, to New Mexico.

Collingsworth, Childress, Hall, Briscoe, Swisher, Castro, and Parmer counties along with Curry and Roosevelt counties in New Mexico raised $10,000 in 1920 to erect markers along already existing roads to mark the Ozark Trail from Oklahoma across Texas to New Mexico.

Whereas the counties to its north in the Panhandle proper became overwhelmingly Republican at a Presidential level with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, Swisher County continued to favor the Democratic Party for another four decades, even being narrowly won by Walter Mondale in 1984 when he came within 3,819 votes of losing all fifty states.

During the twentieth century the only Republicans to carry Swisher County were Herbert Hoover in 1928 due to intense anti-Catholic sentiment against Al Smith, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, and Richard Nixon in 1972.

Like the rest of the Bible Belt, due to opposition to the Democratic Party's liberal positions on social issues Swisher has trended powerfully Republican[19] and in the last six elections the Republican nominee has won more than 64 percent of the vote – over seven percent more than Nixon won in his 3,000-plus-county landslide in 1972.