Cedar Lake explains a lot about northeast Gaines County

Twenty-five miles northeast of Seminole, out where the cotton rows finally give way to a wide white salt flat, is Cedar Lake (Laguna Sabinas to the Spanish, named in English for the gnarled scrub cedar that once ringed its edges). It is not a lake you swim in. It is a shallow salt basin on the southern edge of the Llano Estacado, the kind of place that meant water and salt in a country that offered little of either.

For a long stretch this was the most important spot for miles. Comanches camped here and traded with the Comancheros who came down off the plains, and some hold that Quanah Parker, the last Comanche war chief, was born at this lake. Buffalo watered here until the hide hunters finished them off. George Causey killed roughly 200 head at Cedar Lake in 1882, thought to be the last sizable herd left on the Staked Plains.

What came after is the rest of West Texas in miniature. By the late 1870s cattleman C. C. Slaughter had pushed his Lazy S Ranch up to the lake; cotton followed by 1920, and oil derricks went up after 1935. Stand out there now and you can read all of it at once — old camping ground, dead buffalo range, ranch, farm, and field, which is about as honest a map of this corner of Gaines County as you'll find.