I'm in Joe Rowe's house, standing at his kitchen table, looking at a photo of the Republic of Texas Embassy. In this photo, it's deep winter, and snow blankets the ground, glittering, almost like it's knitted over the earth. The stark white trailer and rickety lean-to are surrounded by trees with skeletal branches. Why is it burning? I should mention, in this photo, the embassy is on fire. Joe slides over another photo. In this one, the snow is melted, and the embassy is suddenly no more. A browned pile of ember and scrap metal, walls collapsed in like scorched playing cards. A wiry man with a white beard stands in front of it. He's grinning, his cheeks flushed in the cold. Is that you? At fire department practice. Fire department practice. What happened? At fire department practice. All right. Joe told me that once the standoff was over, Rick's overdue land payments caught up with him, and the Lean 2 Embassy went to taxing authorities, who sold it at auction to the Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy had no use for it, so the DMR volunteer firefighters, including Joe, burned it down and buried the whole thing. They dug a hole and buried it. Now why would he want to come back to that? After the ceasefire agreement was signed, after the ROT surrendered and laid down their weapons, Rick McLaren, Evelyn McLaren, and the three other followers who were holed up at the embassy were arrested. As onlookers remember it, Rick was pretty jovial as he was taken away by the authorities, smiling from the backseat of the police car like a politician. For Rick, the arrest meant that he was a prisoner of war, held captive by the U.S. government. It meant that the Republic was real. Here he is, another POW in this state of emergency war that we're in. Richard McLaren, can you hear me, my friend? Yeah, sure can. While he was in jail awaiting trial, Rick kept writing letters to Robert Halpern at the Big Ben Sentinel about the illegal annexation of Texas, which Robert sometimes printed. Rick did phone interviews on talk shows with other true believers. God bless you, Richard. It's good to hear your voice and thank you for coming on the Jeff Davis Show, sir. How are your spirits? Pretty good. I've been pushing so much paperwork very hard. It's time to get these hearings we've been denied out on the table, start bringing all these sacred cows and this governmental fraud on all levels out on the table. We're going to have to clean government out. But Rick did not end up cleaning out the government. He was tried by the federal government on charges of fraud and by the state on charges of aggravated kidnapping. Rick was convicted by both the state and the federal government on the charges against him. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He's still in a state prison in Amarillo, serving out the remainder of his time. He's 72. And by the way, I did send Rick letters and multiple interview requests. He declined each time. But as recently as 2018, he told a reporter that he still believes he's the leader of the nation of Texas. And when I went to do some fact-checking at the Jeff Davis County Clerk's Office recently, they told me that Rick still sends them mail all the time. Filings. The paper war continues. I'm Zoe Kurland, and this is A Whole Other Country. I'd rather be in there with them. You'd rather be in jail? Yes. Because they're innocent too. It's not fair. This is Mark Hernandez, the young, quote, revolutionary you heard earlier in the series. He was tried, along with five other members of the Republic, in that federal fraud case. He was the only one acquitted. Long story short is I was found innocent. And then right when I got out, I said, you know what, I want the media to find out and everybody to find out what really did happen. And so I went forward trying to see about getting a movie deal. The movie hasn't taken off yet, but Mark is still hopeful. The first time we talked on the phone, he saw my California area code and asked if I could hook him up with anyone in Hollywood. You know who would be perfect for Richard McLaren? There's two people that I think would be perfect. One would be Woody Harrelson. Would be perfect to play him. Or there's Matthew McConaughey. Either one of those, and they're both Oscar winners. And you know how Richard will always have his hair like a professor out real long and extended out, and he looked like a wild professor? I picture those guys letting their hair grow and have it long like that, you know, or whatever they do in the movies. While Mark left the fight for Texas independence long ago, he says he still believes in what they stood for. All right, maybe I'll end it by saying this. Long live the Republic of Texas. Now I'll be sure to invite you to the premiere of my movie if I ever get that going again. That narrative harmed a lot of innocent people who just held a firm belief that Texas would be better off as an independent nation. Daniel Miller, who joined the ROT back in 1996, he told me that after the standoff, the statewide Republic of Texas movement fractured. No one really had the same idea about what Texas independence should look like or who should lead the fight. By 2002, there were about a dozen different groups calling themselves the Republic of Texas. And eventually, the group dissolved. While that movement flamed out, the idea, that seed, that kernel, that spark, it never went away. Daniel is now the president of an organization called the Texas Nationalist Movement. formed in 2005. He and his pals dropped the annexation thread, the idea that Texas is currently an occupied sovereign nation. Instead, they're modeling their campaign on movements like Brexit. According to Daniel, the Texas nationalist movement has 633,000 followers. They believe in the strength of Texas as an economic and cultural force and want to separate from the U.S. While independence hasn't yet been on the ballot, it has been polling better over the past few years. I always love it when people say that Texit can or won happen And I just tell them open your eyes it happening right now You know Texan is the process of Texas withdrawing And I think we are accelerating I mean, we are moving rapidly that direction. I mentioned to Daniel that I'd moved from California and he really wanted me to know, you don't have to be a born and raised Texan to believe in the cause. Well, yeah, okay, but look, that's no big deal. Our organizational development director and his wife were both California refugees. Whatever the future holds for Texas independence, I've mostly been thinking about the beacon of independence a few miles out from me, the DMR, the Wild West world of individualists that Rick walked into, and the chaos he left in his wake. It's not like after Rick, the DMR became an entirely different, entirely peaceful place. Property owners still soldiered on in the fight to eliminate fees and rules, the fight Rick had largely started. There are still contentious arguments at property owners association meetings. And occasionally, up in the mountains, something very dramatic happens with a loaded gun. It was kind of like a convergence of myths. Rick McLaren's story is the convergence of myths in a mythic place, where you can invent yourself and you can be the leader of your version of Texas. Journalist Jonah Petoskey. You could have done that at the Davis Mountains Resort and gotten away with it. If you hadn't gone down to the courthouse and filed liens, if you hadn't taken your neighbor hostage and shot him, he could still be doing this today and claiming this. And people would all be going by, oh yeah, that's that crazy guy, Rick, who thinks that's the embassy of Texas. And people wouldn't think twice about it. Because there's a lot of people out in our neck of the woods that are like that. You know, there's a reason Texas' motto is, it's like a whole other country. I don't know if they use that anymore. Todd Jagger of the Internet. That used to be the tourism motto. And if Texas is like a whole other country, the Trans-Pecos is absolutely like a whole other country. And, yeah, we're independent. And that manifests in a lot of different ways, including negative ways like this. Todd told me that when he started his company, it felt kind of pioneer, jacking together the wires, doing the work that no big company would do. He was a frontiersman, and it was exciting. But in the wake of the standoff, things felt different. I think those of us who were in on the internet early on, we thought that this was going to bring the world together, that it's turned out that it's driven us apart in many ways. Todd's more cynical now, more cautious. The standoff, that's done. But the questions that arise about how people utilize and disseminate information that can affect people, we're dealing with that more today than ever. A lot of people did everything but stand on their head to keep from saying where they were from. And I'm thinking, well, that's dumb. But that's just the way they reacted to it. Donna Watkins told me that after the standoff, the DMR's reputation as a weirdo zone blew up. People didn't want to admit that they were from the resort. And I have to admit, I never could figure out why they were ashamed of it. It's not any different than crazy people in New York City. So, I mean, you know, they're all over. And that wasn't all. Before the standoff, the DMR had been relatively unknown. That's part of why the land was cheap, why people were able to live differently, build their own houses, and be sort of off the grid. But after the national news stories, that changed. People found us. See, we were not known. Nobody knew it existed. We had a lot of strange folks that would come out, looky-loos. God, we had three years of that crap. Some people I would help and some people I wouldn't. Because at that time I kept a rifle by the front door. But Donna stayed put until it was quiet up on the volcano again. A lot of people were kind of afraid of the resort, which I think is hilarious, because they thought crazy people lived out here. I'd just die laughing. To this day, they think it. And we're all crazy, and we shoot people. Let's see. Well, I've thought about it a few times. They're all gone. Even the people that just kind of dabbled in it are gone. This is Chris Kirby again, the one who bought the property across the road from the ROT headquarters and took me on the Kawasaki tour of the ruins. He told me that most of Rick's old allies in the DMR have moved away or died. It's history, and it's been history for 24 years or something like that. Chris said that these days, most people don't even know about the standoff. What is DMR living like now? Well, it's, I like it. It's quiet. You're the only car that's come up this road all day. I've been outside all day, and I haven't seen another car. When it snows, and I'll drive my Kawasaki Mule up there, and I'll come back down, and I'll go up there a month later, and those are the only tracks that are still there are my tracks. So it's like you're in your own little national park here almost. From the road, it's true. The DMR looks almost uninhabited. All of the houses are hidden except for Joe Rowe's adobe home, a single tooth in the mountain mouth. I guess Mike took a picture of that back there. When I was standing in Joe Rowe's kitchen looking at photos with him, I noticed the quiet hiss of his oxygen tank, the translucent white tube coiling at his feet like a sleeping snake. I don't know if this question was rude or not, but I asked it. How long have you had the oxygen tube? Full time. First part of the year. How's it going? I guess better than a casket. Better than a casket. When Joe was shot back in 1997, a bullet went through a wall in his house and out the other side. That wall is still standing hole included Joe told me he never patched it up I just hung a picture on both sides of it Really Okay that works And then you don have to look at it That's funny. What's hanging there? I don't know. Let's go see. Yeah, let's go see. Howdy, Billy. You're stepping on your tube. Oh. Hi. At this point, Joe's wife Phyllis Arp wakes up. She's wearing a Lebowski 2024 t-shirt. Oh, you guys are looking at... We're looking at a bullet hole. Here's where it come out, see? Oh, wow. Come in the other side, come out this side. What have you got hanging over it? Is that lightning? Yes, it is. That's where you do it, though. You just redecorate it. Quote, scene of crime. The scene of the crime. Two pictures hang on either side of the wall, a wagon on one side and lightning striking a field on the other. They conceal the bullet hole, still sharp and splintered. Yeah, I mean, do you ever feel weird living in a house that you got shot in? Well, it's the only house I ever lived in that I was shot in. It doesn't ever bother me. Life goes on. But it wasn't just Joe who dealt with the ROT that day in 1997. His former wife, M.A., was also held hostage. And Joe told me that for her, it wasn't just a same old life-goes-on situation. M.A. left the DMR and the marriage shortly after the standoff. Breached, you know what I mean? M.A. felt like she'd been violated. Joe told me she was traumatized by the experience. When did she decide that she didn't want to live here anymore? 2001, yeah. Was that hard for you? What, her leaving? Financially. It's interesting to react differently to an event like that. It wasn't what I had in mind. It wasn't what we had planned. But that was her decision. When I first got in touch with Joe, I thought he might not want to talk to me about the ROT, that it might be getting old for him to rehash it. He's been telling his story for years. He's talked to people for their books, for their documentaries, even for a hokey TV special. He told me they don't ever get it quite right. A radical militia group takes hostages in Texas. Capture them, hold them at gunpoint. In the TV special, Joe's life got a kind of bizarro Hicksville treatment. His beautiful two-story adobe, the one he built himself, became a lone white trailer. His dog looks unkempt and mangy. And his wife. And so a half-kempt woman, supposedly my wife. She might be my ex-wife and all that. But she's definitely a little woman. Let's just say the special did not do M.A. justice. M.A. and Joe and their house were molded into an image floating in the collective imagination of what this story should be, A standoff in rural West Texas. An isolationist community up a mountain. Real Texans, once again, overshadowed by the fiction of the sellable Wild West. What do you think, you know? We through? I think we're through. Hope you got what you come for. I think so. Did I get what I came for? When I started reporting this story, I wanted to know how it could help me understand the way these ideas about the West impact people's real lives, how these reenactments of a bygone frontier change how we live in the actual West today. And in a way, I feel like I saw that. The DMR was a place built on the appeal of a Wild West fantasy, down to the infrastructure itself, the names of the roads. When Rick moved there, he saw the values his neighbors held, values shaped by the story of self-reliance. And then he capitalized on them, twisting them to wreak havoc on the neighborhood and beyond. When I zoom out, I can see echoes of what Rick did in the cowboy cosplay I see today. Developers looking out at untouched, seemingly endless land and sensing financial opportunity, dreaming of expansion. Visitors coming to this collection of small towns and treating them like backdrops for their adventures, forgetting people actually live here. Recently, I went to watch a Jeff Bezos rocket launch in the West Texas desert. In the press coverage, he's wearing a cowboy hat. But if I'm honest, those big ideas about individualism, playing cowboy, what it all means. After all the time I've spent in the DMR, I have to say, they've started to feel a little less important. For me, the story of Rick and the story of the DMR itself, it's all a lot less abstract now, less of a myth. It's been made real by the people who lived it. The standoff was enough to keep people away, because they were afraid. And when that started, you should have seen the people, that live here go flying out of here because they were so they were afraid. Margie Urkula, the DMR resident you heard from way back in episode one, whose horse came up to my car. When I went to visit her, we talked about the standoff and how it changed the neighborhood. But the parts of our conversation that stuck with me were what she said about how it really feels to live out here. I mean, there were so few houses when I came here. It was just beautiful. I mean, I could ride for miles and miles and not see a house or a driveway or anything. And it was just, you know, natural and just beautiful. She told me things get hard, too. It can get lonely. I can feel sorry for myself a little bit. Only when I'm hurting physically do I feel like, oh, poor me. But then I look out at this place or walk around the house and I okay What Margie is describing is in many ways something I find myself seeking Moments of solace and calm. A world that feels simpler, more open, less crowded, less complicated. I mean, I can't sing, but I used to sing when I wrote. I was so happy. What did you use to sing? old cowboy songs. And I never knew all the words. I'd just sing the same phrase over and over again. What was the phrase? Oh, I can't. I can't do it. Old cowboy songs. That's the kind of stuff I remember from the movies I watched as a kid. The warm hum of voices, horseback, land forever and ever, sky even more so, staggering technicolor sunsets. You could even just say the words. See those tumbleweeds blowing. Lord, it makes me want to cry. It reminds me of my sweetheart. It's a Texas lullaby. I made that up. After the DMR was created, the old friend ranch fragmented into tiny parcels owned by newcomers, non-ranchers, and people who didn't all have conservation in mind. The Nature Conservancy fought to protect the environment surrounding it. They converted the land behind it into a preserve. This sort of locked the DMR into isolation, making it one of the last communities of its kind in the Davis Mountains. The people who live there got in on something unique, something that likely won't happen again for a very long time. And I can take you up top if you want and show you why we live here. I'd love that. At the end of Chris Kirby's Kawasaki tour of the embassy, as we were puttering back up his driveway, Chris offered to take me to see his favorite view of the DMR. I couldn't possibly pass that up. The mule took a sharp left, and we started going up. The road is totally unpaved. Rocks rolled underfoot as we ascended the mountain. The Kawasaki felt like an ant climbing up a very big log. I flipped it over one time. How did that happen? Oh, I got high-centered on a sult hole that was bigger than it looked, and it just kind of tipped over to the side. You would tell me if that was going to happen to us, right? That's not going to happen to us, unless you want the adventure. Nope, that's not that kind of adventure. We get to the spot without flipping over. Chris cuts the power. Okay, so here is the top corner of our property. We look out onto the land, down at Chris's house, and the empty lot where the embassy stood. When you said that this is the reason, what about this view specifically? Well, the bluffs, the trees, you don't see any city lights or anything like that, and how quiet it is. And, you know, this time of day is the best, or in the morning, because you've got the shadows, kind of bleaches out at noon, you know, you don't have the shadows. but the bluffs and the trees are what I'm attracted to. It's extremely rugged, but, you know, it's extremely beautiful too. Only a few houses dotted the landscape. We didn't see any cars, any people. It was just us in this big place that looked wild, undeveloped, unfenced. the houses shrinking into the mountains like rings in a too big box. Oh, this is beautiful. We'll go up here and turn around. Okie dokie, well, I'm glad you came out. Yeah. You weren't too bored or whatever. No, not at all. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for chatting with me for several hours and taking me on the best ride around the DMR. I was all nervous. No, you were great. You were fantastic. I left Chris in the DMR as the sun was setting. I made my way down the mountain, down the highway, past the cattle, past the fences, the wrought iron gates to the real ranches and real cowboys. Then back to my house, small, under the purple sky. This episode of A Whole Other Country was reported, written, and produced by me, Zoe Kurland. Liza Yeager edited and also co-wrote the show. Original music by Andy Stack. Editorial support from Lindsay Houck. Artwork by Carolyn McCartney and Lindsay Houck. Thanks to all of the people who I interviewed for this show, and big thanks to the many people who helped me out on this reporting journey who wanted to stay anonymous. People who dug maps and magazines out of their parents' garages, who answered my emails and calls, who connected me to people who may not otherwise have given me a call back. Thanks to Elise Peppel, former executive director of Marfa Public Radio, who greenlit this project. If you want to learn more about the standoff, you can read about it in The Republic of Texas Secessionist Standoff by Donna Marie Miller, Standoff in Texas by Mike Cox, and Rachel Monroe has also covered it for The New Yorker. A Whole Other Country is a production of Marfa Public Radio, a non-profit public radio station in the middle of the West Texas desert. If you'd like to donate to support the station's work, head to marfapublicradio.org slash donate.
