Hey. I'm Chris Kirby. Hey! Nice to meet you. This is the sound of me, up in the Davis Mountains Resort, meeting a guy named Chris Kirby. If I sound oddly thrilled, it's because I'd been trying to find his house but was lost, snaking through the DMR on roads named things like Tomahawk Trail, Stagecoach Pass, High Lonesome Trail, and Six Shooter Gulch. gulch. I was slowed to a near crawl on a bumpy, pine-lined road until this very moment when he pulled up next to me in his humming Kawasaki 4x4. I'm going to dump this creek right here, and then you can follow me. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for coming to find me. As we caravan back to Chris's house, the trees multiply, greener, bigger, canopy-like, over the road. The sun filters in. Oh, who's that? Oh, that's one of my two cats. Adorable. They don't have names. The vets just call them the gray and white and the black and white, so I don't know where the black and white one is. Probably chasing lizards or something. Chris grew up in Houston, but he came out here when he was just a kid to go to ranching summer camp. He told me about riding the bus up into the Davis Mountains, his face glued to the window, falling in love with the land. He moved out when he was in his 20s, and a few years later, a real estate agent told him about this one special lot. She said it's probably the prettiest place in the resort, but I can't get any buyers because the Republic of Texas was right there across the road. The Republic of Texas. Let's do a little recap here. Back in the 90s, a guy named Rick McLaren started a, quote, nation in this off-the-grid community, the DMR. At the time that Chris was on a real estate hunt, the Republic of Texas was headquartered in a lean-to and a trailer right across the road from that very pretty place in the resort. She wasn't coming out here. She gave me directions, and she kind of explained, and she said, you better bring a gun with you, because they've got guns. And, you know, like I said, I was 25, full of myself. I didn't care. I was like, okay. And drove around, and you could see them hiding behind the trees, peeking out, you know, like squirrels from the other side of the tree. I'd wave at them and, you know, they'd just stare. Chris was unfazed and bought the property anyway, which is why I'm here to visit him. The one time that I had any interaction with him was when he came over. I'm thinking he was on a recruiting drive looking for people to join him. Chris told me he hadn't interacted with Rick all that much, but that back when he'd first moved to the neighborhood, there'd been this one time. Chris was watching football with a friend when Rick showed up at the door. You hear a knock on the door and it's this guy, tall guy with hair sticking out from under his hat like Bozo the Clown wearing a cap. He did mention a little bit about Texas being annexed illegally and all this kind of stuff. We were college kids. We didn't care. We're watching football here. Chris and his roommate shooed Rick out to watch the game and mostly forgot about the whole interaction. But six months later, there was a package on their doorstep. We come home from the railroad blues about three in the morning. There's a bunch of wine bottles on our porch with no labels. And we were puzzled, who left this here? But he had managed the vineyard, which you drove by. And then I remember, I said, I'll bet he did this. Rick McLaren, who created a militia in the mountains, had tanks flying up the road to his compound, drew a SWAT team to the DMR. Was a vintner? Leaving mysterious fermented deliveries on his neighbor's doorsteps by night? Like some kind of wine-tooth fairy? The plot was thickening. I am curious if people have come up here looking to see the embassy. I've never had anybody come to me and ask anything about the embassy. Now, I can show you where the embassy was if you want to see that, but if you're one of those people that wants to know where the embassy was, I can show you. Well, today I guess I am. We'll jump in the mule and drive down there. Cool. We hop onto Chris's Kawasaki, and we putter just a few yards across the road. Let's see, there's one of the fortifications. Chris points out a tiny rock pile, a lookout point where Republic members would hide with guns, belly down in the dirt. The Kawasaki chugs forward, and he notes a dip in the road where a pipe was laid across to stop people from going in and out. And then... So that's where the embassy was. An empty lot. I'm not sure I knew what to expect coming up here at the start of my investigation into the story. Part of me was looking for dramatic ruins, a dilapidated trailer, objects half buried in the dirt, clues as to who Rick McLaren was, what kind of world he created, and how. Instead, I found Kalichi, bristling silvery grass, and Chris, humming through the land in his Kawasaki, his tire treads the only visible ones on the road, donkeys trotting after him. I'm Zoe Curland, and this is A Whole Other Country. The ruins of Rick McLaren's Republic of Texas embassy didn't exactly produce the big reveal I was looking for, so I hit the archives. I found a lot. Richard Lance McLaren was born in Missouri and grew up in Wilmington, Ohio, raised by his mother and grandmother. He graduated from high school in 1972, having been named the most valuable player of the tennis team. He was also a picky eater and would apparently refuse to eat the cafeteria food. He got special permission to go home for lunch. Buried on page 16 in the Wilmington News Journal of 1974, I found an announcement from Rick's first job at a Buick dealership. Rick was the newest member of their team, and they published a photo of him, his hair thick, luxurious, and vaguely Beatles-like. He's wearing a loud plaid jacket that just screams, I'm dying to sell you a car. And then in 1977 Rick and his high school sweetheart Sandy moved to Texas At first to Fort Worth but Rick was apparently an avid reader of regional magazines like Texas Monthly and Texas Highways And at the time, those magazines were reporting on a burgeoning wine industry in the Davis Mountains, prolific vineyards in the middle of the desert. Rick packed up and headed west. I found an article from around the time Rick moved to the Davis Mountains titled, A Vintage Texas Dream. Fort Davis Winery hopes to challenge California. Rick talks about the volcanic water, says that the climate allows him to grow any grape that's grown anywhere in the world. There's a photo of Rick in the article. He's mustachioed and wearing a cowboy hat, his hands sort of framing some particularly nice grapes for the camera. The caption reads, Rick McLaren brags about his Davis Mountains grapes. As I read all these articles and saw the pictures of Rick, I was kind of rooting for him. He seemed excited, like he had a vision. And I could see it. He was striking out on his own in this magical place where land was cheap, the trees were green, and the skies were big. But behind the scenes, apparently, things were rough. I found interviews with his wife, Sandy, who said that most of the furniture they'd brought from Fort Worth sat under tarps. They were living in a lean-to, heated by a wood fire in a 55-gallon drum. And it seems clear that Rick didn't have a gift for the grape. By 1984, he'd produced just one batch of wine. When his wife got sick of eating hot dogs, she urged him to start hunting and kill a deer for dinner, but Rick gagged when he had to gut it and went vegetarian immediately afterwards. And then I got to a new part in the story. As Rick was flailing as a homesteader, he learned that he needed to pay fees to the DMR Property Owners Association for road maintenance. That's a condition of living in the resort, described in the DMR's covenants. He was already defaulting on payments for his property. The guy he bought it from was lending him money for food. So Rick decided to try to get out of paying the fees. And to do that, ever the reader, he headed down to the basement of the county courthouse to do some research. Specifically, digging into property records. All this country from here to Marfa was one ranch at one time. This is Toy Fisher. Toy, spelled T-O-I. You heard from her in episode one. She's the unofficial historian of the DMR, and she's going to narrate this piece of the story. Because what Rick found deep in the county archives was a story about the Davis Mountains Resort itself, the history of the land. And that story would end up changing Rick's life, becoming the key to everything that came next. An epic property battle for an imaginary new nation. So is it picking up my voice? Yes, it is. Okay. You can even see. Okay, yeah, my twang. Get all that twang in there. Toy told me that the story of the DMR starts with one guy. Skinny Friend. Yeah, you heard that right. Who's Skinny Friend? Skinny Friend is, and I'm going to say, I don't know his first name, but his last name is Friend. He was skinny. He was a little skinny guy. Skinny Friend used to own the area that is now the DMR, back when it was all ranch land. In the 50s, World War II, a lot of this was sheep country. So they had the sheep herders come in, they shear the sheep, and they have those big shear camps. As a young man, my dad worked the area as a cowboy. So he worked with the sheep men, and they would shear all the sheep, all they needed to do. But then, of course, World War II was wool. Government was buying wool. And then that stopped. That dried up. The wool market tanked. And you might think, if you can't raise sheep, raise cows. But the DMR was not cattle country. Too many mountains. Too rocky. Skinny Friend was in trouble. They had money, but not super wealthy. Lots of land. Or land rich and money poor. And, of course, you had the drought of the 50s, which was really hard here, too. So in 1969, Skinny Friends sold to a company called Global Land Development Corporation. And Global wanted to develop the land into something new, something very different from ranch land, a subdivision. A lot of people in this county hated or really disliked and talked about when Skinny Friends sold. But it was, he was not thought of as well. It was, people were very angry about it. Most of the land in the Davis Mountains had been in the same families for generations. And people were not happy with this sale. And they're thought that once you start selling off land like that, dividing it up, then you've got newcomers coming in, your atmosphere changes. By 1972, Global had divided the land into 800 plots. They'd plowed through the pines and oaks, carving a tangled spaghetti of roads into the land. But their cookie-cutter subdivision plan wasn't easy to execute. The land was rough, and it was hard to make clean lines through the canyons, flowing creeks, and staggering uplifts of the mountains. And before they finished the project, Global went bankrupt, which was the start of a pattern. The property was transferred to a bank, which also went broke. Then all of the unsold land in the DMR was redistributed once again to two other owners, who kept selling it, plot by plot. And it was that pattern that caught the eye of one Rick McLaren down at the county courthouse. He was pretty good at reading legal papers and, you know, documents. that's reporter Jonik Petosky again. Here is what Rick, in the depths of his property records research, noticed. Because the land in the DMR had been surveyed and broken up so many times, some of the property lines didn't match across every map of the resort. So in 1984, instead of paying his road maintenance dues, Rick filed a lawsuit, claiming that because of the map problem, the land surveys around his property were invalid. And thus, the guy he'd bought the land from, one of those DMR developers, didn't even own the land in the first place. He challenged, you know, the ownership of the land, the legality of, you know, ownership and all this. And he was just looking for holes in the documents where he could challenge things As the lawsuit wound its way through the court system Rick got to stay on his land without paying anything for the roads or for the land itself And then Rick starts telling other people about his case. In the Jeff Davis County News Archives, I found all these letters Rick wrote and sent into the paper. Letters addressed to his fellow DMR residents. It is apparent to anyone who is in the district courtroom on Friday the 13th that the lands in and around the Davis Mountains Resort are a total title mess. It is no longer my fight alone. You must choose whether you will support effective legal change and correction of this massive problem or continue to sit on the fence. Don't listen to the lies or those who have refused to read this document. Make your own decision. Read it yourself. Read it yourself, by the way, is in all caps. I read a lot of Rick's letters, and I was kind of impressed with the writing. It was historical, lyrical, like this one, which kind of reminded me of a sermon or maybe a call-and-response summer camp song. So there might be a little state land in the resort. Who cares? So none of the deeded titles tie to any known patent or survey in Jeff Davis County, Texas. Who cares? So some were sold the same property twice and both have the title to the same land and don't know it. Who cares? At this point in the story, I feel like I'm seeing this whole new Rick emerge. He's transitioning from failed frontiersman to this wild-haired man feverishly dusting off records, rallying his neighbors, trying to get them to see what he sees. And it seems like whatever Rick was doing was working. 49 other DMR residents join his case, make it a class-action lawsuit against the DMR developer. They all want their property for free, and they don't want to pay property dues. This does not go over smoothly in the neighborhood. Davis Mountain's Property Owners Association meetings, where neighbors generally discussed road maintenance or the next potluck, are becoming battlegrounds. He's trying to get something for nothing. His operation is totally illegitimate. Joe Rowe, our wiry homesteader from episode one, became president of the Property Owners Association, and he's emerging as Rick's most outspoken neighborhood rival. He's, in my opinion, a total asshole for neighbors. At one point, Rick and the other dissenting neighbors create a rival faction called the Concerned Property Owners Association, basically trolling the regular, unconcerned property owners association. Rick even sets up his own book of, quote, legal records. He calls it the Davis Mountains Land Commission. People start filing with him for legal residency in the DMR for land titles, car titles, marriages, births. During this time, by the way, Rick's wife Sandy leaves him. But this does not seem to slow Rick down, because he's discovered some new tools for staking his claim, for questioning the status quo of property law in the entire DMR. Like, there's this one law called adverse possession, which basically states that if land is undeveloped, you can build a fence, grow a garden, dig a well, and then lay claim to that land, even if it technically belongs to someone else. Essentially, squatters' rights. In the 1800s, adverse possession law was a legal pathway for settlers to claim territory in Texas. But in the 1980s, Rick starts using it too to nudge his way onto seemingly empty acreage, just taking the land he wants. And then there are the liens. You can slap a lien on someone and cause them, they can't do anything with their property if you file the lien, whether it's frivolous or not, until that's resolved. Jonik Petoskey again. A lien, excuse the technicality, is basically a legal way to dispute the ownership of a property by claiming there's a debt to be paid on it. Leans aren't that hard to file if you know what you're doing. And if there's a lien on a property, it can't be bought or sold. Then it was like, that's when he would show up in town was to go to the courthouse and file liens. Rick started filing liens on properties all over the DMR. on huge properties people lived on, or huge properties no one lived on. It's hard to get an exact count, but he files at least 100 liens in Jeff Davis County through the 80s and early 90s. We had a few liens filed against our property for, you know, we owed nothing to nobody out here, but it has to go through the court once the filing is there. This is a person who wanted to remain anonymous. His mom was part of the Property Owners Association, which made her one of Rick's rivals. And they were filing all kinds of lawsuits, alleging anything and everything, and it was just to cause the maximum amount of headache to everyone that wasn't part of their group. So by virtue of just basically getting involved with the legal process, he was gumming up people's lives. Between the liens and the adverse possession cases, Rick had become a neighborhood colonizer. And now, people who normally didn't even like going to town were suddenly having to show up to court, hire lawyers to battle fraudulent claims on land they'd lived on and worked for generations. You know, I'm a reporter. I mean, generally people in Fort Davis, the people of far west Texas, don't volunteer too much if a reporter comes around asking questions. And for people to come up to me and say, you know, if he shows up again and I'm here, I'm going to whip his ass. That says a lot. This guy was just a nuisance. He was a pain in the ass. I've been hearing about the Republic of Texas for years, as a quick aside in conversation, a fun fact. But in all of those conversations, no one had ever mentioned this years-long preamble, the property battles in the DMR. At first, I thought that was because this time period wasn't that important to the bigger story. But learning more about it, I started to think that people didn't talk about this part of the story because they didn't want to think about it. Because Rick's tactics of being the biggest pain in the world actually worked. It seems like for a lot of people, the easiest way to make Rick go away was to give him what he wanted. So people gave him small amounts of acreage, let him move their fence lines. Rick amassed 900 acres of land he never paid for this way But the biggest get came from that first developer he sued the guy who given him money for food That guy didn actually have a lot of cash for legal fees His daughter had cancer and he was paying for the treatments. So eventually, he stopped fighting. He settled. And Rick walked away with a huge prize. 20 lots in the DMR, two buildings, and $88,000 from selling some of the land he acquired. A lot of people who got caught in the McLaren legal vortex have passed on, but there was one couple I knew of that was still around. They spent more than 12 years and over $100,000 fighting Rick's 17 claims that their ranch, which had been in their family for four generations, had been illegally surveyed. When they finally got a clear title and sold the land, half of the money they made from the sale went to paying their legal fees. At first, when I called and asked if I could interview them, they said, sure, they'd chat. But then they dropped off. Later, I got this email. Zoe, and I have decided that we will not do an interview. We lived that herringous 12 years of having to counter legally the ridiculous filings that he kept producing. We lived it once. We don't want to live it again. He got his just due and we finally got justice. Don't drag up old news. It will not serve any value. Sent from my iPad. Could you actually describe the view that we're seeing? Gosh. Gosh. You know, it's different in every light, every time of the day. it's rugged but yet welcoming restful and peaceful has a calm to it but yet a lot of history a lot of years a hardness but yet an atmosphere of welcoming and grace by the Creator During our interview about DMR history Toy Fisher and I were sitting on her neighbor's porch. It's rain warped, deck sort of buckling in around us. She told me we had to come up here because it's the best view. But if you didn't get a visual from what she said, you're not missing anything. She did not physically describe where we are. What she described is, in a lot of ways, more interesting. It conjures up the feeling of being close to nature, of early times in Texas, settlement, ruggedness, rugged individual. And you have to be a certain person to live out here. As I've met more and more people in the DMR, talked to them about this place and what's important about it, They keep telling me about this intangible stuff, about the versions of themselves they can be here. You're on your property and what you do to it is what it's going to become. And it's your effort and your energy to do what your vision and hopefully get it done. Now, there's lots of pipe dreams out here because a lot of living happens in between your plans. But I think a lot of people come out here to be the individual they want to be. Here is the physical description of where we are. It's fall, and it's a misty day. Dark green trees spill down the mountain, which slopes away, opening up a view that stretches across the county. Craggy red rock mountains framing the gray sky, desert in the distance. As we were sitting there, one of Toy's dogs, Chip, seemed kind of confused by my recording equipment. He started clamping his mouth around my wrist, but without biting, sort of miming an attack. Like a mantra, Toy kept repeating this phrase to him. No, gentle and sweet, gentle and sweet. Gentle and sweet, you know that. Yeah, you know. Gentle and sweet. I find myself moved by this. Up there in the fog with Toy, I feel like I'm seeing a version of the DMR that is gentle and sweet. No biting, no fighting. A version that could have been. Except, that's not what happened at all. Because during his first decade in the DMR, Rick had essentially learned a magic trick. By filing a lien or a lawsuit, he could push a weird idea through the legal system, and it would come out transformed into something real, something with material consequences. Through this process, Rick himself could transform too. He wasn't failing anymore. He was winning. And now he was about to take his neighborhood property fight and go even bigger, like the whole state of Texas bigger. And he recognized it. He said, are you those guys that are in the news all the time? And he called out all his employees out to the front And he told them, it's rare you ever get to meet a true revolutionary while he's still alive or not in jail. That's next time on A Whole Other Country. This episode is dedicated to Chris Kirby, who passed away while we were making this show. He was so generous with his time and his insights and spent a long while showing me around his world up in the DMR. When you're making radio, you get to spend a lot of time with people you might not normally meet, and you get to ask them about their lives. And I feel really lucky that I got to spend that kind of time with Chris. You'll be hearing from him again later in the show. 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 special thanks to Jeff Smith, Rachel Neal Jennifer Elsner, Robert Halpern, Joe Rowe Phyllis Arp, Shane O'Neill, Rusty Adams Victoria Contreras, the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University and the Jeff Davis County Clerk's Office big thanks to the people I interviewed who wanted to stay anonymous 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.
