Welcome to A Whole Other Country

Far West Texas tends to attract a lot of drifters from far away. You don't know what they're running from. It's like it's an empty spot on the map. Out in the reaches of far West Texas, the kind of mythic Texas you only see in the movies. Ranches, cowboys, cattle crossing the road. There's a place called the Davis Mountains Resort, the DMR for short. The DMR is an off-grid community up in the mountains. Houses there are connected by winding dirt roads, wild donkeys roam around. It's mysterious and notoriously private. You can operate, however you want to operate. You can work out your ideas here. And a couple of decades ago, one guy in the DMR started working out a really, really big idea. He calls himself an ambassador and this is his embassy. Nestled deep in the mountains of West Texas, which in McLaren dreams of the day Texas will separate from the US and become its own country. The man's name was Rick McLaren and up in the DMR, he had started what he referred to as a nation. He called it the Republic of Texas. He'd started printing his own money, his own license plates, built an embassy, planted a flag. He wanted to secede from the United States. For a long time, the people around Rick mostly laughed off what he was doing. There were plenty of characters up in the DMR. Rick was another eccentric. Until one day, he wasn't. Authorities in the Republic of Texas are locked in a hostage standoff in the Davis Mountains in West Texas. The standoff signals the separatist group's escalation to violence. In April of 1997, the Republic of Texas went to war with the actual state of Texas. Horses, reporters, a SWAT team, tanks rolled up the mountain to this corner of the world that had up until then been hidden. You know, they brought out tanks and oh yeah, the tanks. By the end of the standoff, one man would be shot, another would be dead, and hundreds of residents would be barred from entering their homes, wondering what they'd find when they returned. It was kind of exciting. I live in Marfa, a town down the mountain from the DMR. I'd been hearing about this story for years, but I hadn't heard it from the people who were there, building their houses, riding their horses, reporting on it, living their lives alongside it. I remember all of it. How's there listening and learning? And one of those things you're like, I'm probably never ever going to see a story like this again. I mean, people died. What happens when the myth of the frontier crashes violently into reality when the national media descends on a place people go to hide away? They thought, crazy people lived out here. I just die alive in. Coming October 8th, a new show from Marfa Public Radio. Subscribe to a whole other country, wherever you get your podcasts.