Okay, let's see if this still exists. Embassy of the Republic of Texas menu page. Yes, it does. Welcome to the beautiful Davis Mountains. This land has a rich heritage of resistance to tyranny. The great Mescalero Apache war leader known as Victorio was living here until the first land grabbers and their federal muscle ran them out of these mountains. The embassy, which is sponsored from the body politic of the sovereign citizens of Jeff Davis County through their duly elected and empowered ambassador, Richard Lance, McLaren, Chief Legal Officer for the Office of Foreign Affairs of and for the Republic of Texas and Consul General of the Embassy of and for the Republic of Texas. Brief Bio on Ambassador McLaren. He lives quite humbly in a small trailer with a simple frame add-on. Dear drink in the front yard and wild turkeys call from the dense forest of pine, cedar, and oak, where he has hiked and rode his horse. While he longs to return to his fields of vines to work the soil and tend the grapes, his dedication to the cause... I'm on an archived version of the Republic of Texas website. Clicking through it reminds me of being in my parents' house in the computer room, a repurposed closet with a desktop computer, and finding some of the World Wide Web's earliest offerings. There's neon blue and red text, little decals next to some of the links reading new or hot, clip art style graphics, long legal jargony paragraphs, and a very sort of tangly menu. History of the Embassy in Davis Mountain Land Center. Introducing new section Davis Mountain Land Convention. International notice of alert on embassy services. Treated by Ambassador McLaren on the Republic of Texas. Open letter from the Ambassador. Are you Todd? I am. Hey, I'm Zoe. You could have been more accurate about arriving at the same time. Exactly the same time. Todd Jagger ran the internet company that hosted Rick's website. At the motel where we're meeting, by the way, each room is styled like a log cabin, and there's a big antique wagon on the lot. The design of this place is very Wild West. Right? Yeah. Todd told me he didn't set out to start an internet company. At first, he just tried to buy Internet services from the usual providers, the big companies. They all said, if you don't have 100,000 potential customers, we're not interested. And so I'm like, well, I guess I'll do it. Had zero technical background. And so I literally had to buy a binder of somebody's printed instructions for $100 that showed what kind of equipment you needed and how to connect to the telephone company and stuff like that. But Todd got things set up. He got customers. And in 1996, about a year after he started his internet experiment, the ROT came knocking. So a man came to my office and wanted to set up internet for Rick McLaren and the Republic of Texas. They had a reputation. I didn't know anything about, you know, that they had been like booby trapping their compound up there. I just knew that you needed to be careful. And in fact, he was kind of notorious for trying to pay for things like auto repairs and groceries and stuff with the Republic of Texas script. And I said, okay, the only requirement that I have is that you pay me in U.S. currency. And he was like, okay, no problem. So Todd helped them set up a website, a new platform for Rick's big ideas that could reach a whole new audience. They had all their documentation about why they felt like Texas had never been properly annexed. And, you know, that kind of stuff was in there. And it just hummed along. I mean, it was multiple layers deep. I remember that. And Todd told me the website was popular. I kept track of statistics on how many people would visit different websites and stuff. And theirs was always the number one website. Wow. Did you ever read anything he wrote on there? Yeah, I read some of the stuff. And it was interesting, but it was so dense that it was like, okay, yeah, just read a little bit and then move on. Squirrel, cat pictures. In late 1996, a groundbreaking ceremony had taken place in the Davis Mountains. Out of the annals of history, the Republic of Texas had officially risen. Its new embassy held within the walls of a tin shed on Tomahawk Trail, one of the properties Rick had won in his slew of DMR lawsuits. And it was from this embassy, which was guarded by Republic of Texas devotees with guns, that Rick was updating his brand new website. His desk, which I've seen pictures of, was piled with mounds of legal documents. There was also a television and a collection of VHSs, including Hard to Kill and Thelma and Louise. And if it seems like I'm being jokey about all of this, I have to admit I'm a little confused by the tone here. Everyone I talk to about the Republic of Texas has this half-serious, half-goofy way of telling the story. Rick was a delusional vintner playing cowboy, a crank, as rancher Joe Williams put it. But he also stole people's land. He caused his neighbors real pain. And as I started to learn about what happened next as the Republic crystallized up in the mountains into something real, that question of how serious this all was felt like it was hanging in the air, both for me and for the people who had watched it play out in real time. I'm Zoe Kurland, and this is A Whole Other Country. I forget how he came on our radar, just as news does. Robert Halpern is the former editor and owner of the Big Bend Sentinel, the local paper for this region of Texas. Robert worked there for 30 years which means he been on the sidelines of basically everything that ever happened out here including the ROT It was just so darn interesting that he was basically purporting that Texas had been illegally annexed into the union filing all of those liens against people in the Davis Mountain Resorts. And that's journalist Alice Ashmore. In the mid-90s, she was working for the Midland Reporter-Telegram. Alice and Robert were friends, and they'd talk about the stories they were working on. Robert was in the throes of reporting on Rick, and Alice was intrigued. He was just kind of off on his own mission. And you could tell that he was very, very smart, but also there was quite a bit of something extra going on there, too. There was something very fascinating about that type of crazy. Up in the DMR, Rick's new embassy is right behind the country store, where everyone goes to get their mail and essentials. He's begun harassing the U.S. Postal Service, claiming that as employees of the U.S. federal government, they had no right to be on his sovereign land. Rick's also encouraging people to move up to the DMR to live near him, using his new website to beam out recruitment messages. And followers are trickling up the mountain, camping out survival-style on Rick's property and patrolling the embassy by day, including Rick's new wife, Evelyn, a longtime friend and recent ROT devotee, who Rick marries in an official Republic of Texas ceremony that he officiates himself. Rick's still acting as ambassador and legal advisor for the statewide Republic of Texas group. Under his direction, members have started filing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of liens against other Texans, regular people, and state officials. Plus, the Pope. They're printing ID cards and license plates. Rick insists these are valid documents. Anybody that gets pulled over, stopped, arrested, you can demand to be read your rights under the Geneva Convention because the United States is a party to the Geneva Convention and you are a prisoner of war. And with Rick's counsel, the ROT starts printing their own checks with fine print that says they're backed by the full faith and credit of the people of Texas. The idea being that the checks are drawing on state assets, which Rick claims belong to the Republic of Texas. Despite not being backed by any actual money, these checks don't bounce. And Rick starts amassing cash. A lot of cash. Actually, $3 million, which he's busily spending on tricking out the ROT embassy in the DMR. And then there's the faxing. When I say this man was a prolific faxer, you simply have no idea. Rick was faxing manifestos and press releases. He sent letters to the Texas Supreme Court, to the U.S. Secretary of State, even to the World Court in the Netherlands, letting them know Texas was a nation unto itself. Trade with the ROT was open. He wrote to a massive amount of countries, I don't know, but one or two countries had responded recognizing the Republic of Texas. Robert Halpern is reporting on all of it. We kind of, for better or worse in journalism, kind of became a voice for him. And soon, it's not just the local media that's reporting on Rick. He's getting press from outside the region, too. His website catches the attention of a Washington Post reporter who comes to visit Rick at the embassy for an article entitled Cyber Savvy Texians. In the piece, Rick claims to have 10,000 sympathizers, mostly through the internet. Another journalist comes to visit and writes a piece describing Rick as dizzying. He never stops talking, and he's so energetic that one writer describes his rolling chair flying across the room as he emphasizes a point. In one video I saw, Rick walks a TV reporter through the embassy, pointing out his tech setup, his stacks of legal papers. We've been financing the computers. That's state money we've been spending. Texas state money. Texas state money. It's all paper. The reporter is nodding, incredulous, raising his eyebrows. This is the first time that anybody's ever attempted regaining a nation without firing a shot. What's he going to do next? What are you going to do about this, Robert? Are you going to go out and interview him again? As more and more news comes out about Rick, Joe Nick Petoskey and Robert Halpern are keeping in touch about the story. It was sort of a running joke. In the media, Rick sometimes does make aggressive statements, like one notable time he threatens to, quote, do something if Governor George W. Bush doesn't abandon the Capitol. He claims he's in contact with militia forces all over Texas, that he's building the kind of neutral, nonviolent army any self-defending nation needs. If they try to bust the door down and come in, we will forcibly defend the embassy. And up in the DMR, he and his followers have started doing target practice. Speaking of followers, it's hard to know exactly how many Rick had at this point. We know that his website was reaching thousands of people. And we know that a core group of about six people from all over the country had moved up to the compound permanently. Dozens more join for militia practice. As 1996 rolls into 1997, Rick is increasingly, fervently telling reporters that the Republic of Texas is winning. In January of 1997, he tells the New York Times that the Republic had just restaked its claim to parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming that were once part of the Texas Republic. We've got Aspen now, he tells the reporter. We've got Vail. This is great. None of this is backed up by fact. When I was first learning about Rick's tactics, I kind of had to hand it to him. He had actually turned out to be a pretty dastardly frontiersman, finding legal loopholes by harnessing colonial laws a colonial mindset to push outwards grow his empire He fashioned himself as a nouveau crockett an underdog fighting the good fight up in the rugged mountains. But at this point in the story, it was starting to sound like he was drinking his own Kool-Aid. Like maybe his initial successes, which were kind of crazy in the grand scheme of things, had given him so much confidence that his vision of reality had gotten skewed. Like he'd gone from taking cues from Westerns, borrowing legal tactics, to just entirely pretending he was in one. Members of the Republic of Texas gathered at this Richardson Hotel, hoping to recruit and to dispel what they call unfounded myths about their group. In March of 1997, the broader statewide Republic of Texas group publicly breaks ties with Rick. He's giving the movement a bad name. We have begun to rethink some of the things that were actually filed. In his dispatches, Rick is sounding increasingly paranoid. We have a lot of ex-military, including special forces, that have joined us. Some of them even have military aircraft, and they said if they hit, they'll come in to reinforce us. So if they want it all out, war, that's how far people are prepared to take this. And he says if any ROT members get arrested, it's war. I may be the bait here, but when they pull it off, the massive amount of military retaliation by the Republic of Texas will be unheard of since the Civil War. Local and state law enforcement, if you're wondering, are tuned in to what Rick's up to, to an extent. There's a warrant out for Rick's arrest, and the Texas Attorney General has outlawed false liens to try and stop the flood of paperwork. Rick's in dialogue with the local sheriff, saying, writing, or faxing odd and alarming things that are published in the newspaper. But it seems like mostly to the authorities, Rick is just so far up in the mountains, it's not worth provoking him. This is a 1997 statement from the Texas Attorney General's office. We don't really care if they stay there, hold up in the desert for the rest of their lives. They have sort of self-incarcerated themselves, and from that position there, they can really do no more harm, and it's the same as if they were in jail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rick's neighbors in the DMR do not feel this way. When I talked to Donna Watkins at the DMR Community Center, it seemed like thinking about that time in the DMR and Rick himself still made her annoyed. Did there friends who were sort of, who got wrapped up in that at all? Ha ha, there was a whole bunch, honey. Yeah. Most of them are dead now. But yeah, they did. ROT members would intimidate people when they were getting their mail. They'd drive through the neighborhood wearing fatigues, waving guns around. There were murmurs of booby traps, bombs. A lot of land was still in litigation limbo. Residents couldn't buy or sell, and non-residents were afraid of going up to the DMR for fear of encountering the ROT. After his threats to the U.S. postal workers, Rick had successfully gotten mail delivery to stop. In a way, as the ROT was getting bigger and bigger, the DMR was getting more and more isolated, cut off, and stigmatized. Back before then, people were a lot easier to live and let live, you know. Live and let live. Joe Rowe, Rick's longtime rival from the Property Owners Association meetings, told me that's the neighborhood he moved into. But as the ROT grew, he was watching it change, divide, and transform into something he didn't recognize. You get me on one side, the other. Did you have friends who got into it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. What did you think of that? Well, some of them I talked into getting out of it. Some of them I didn't. Some of them I wish I'd left the hell alone. Joe has a shortwave radio, and he can hear the ROT guys broadcasting messages to each other from up the mountain. It's all in code. They're playing soldier. But he hears his own name. They're talking about him. And then he has this other creeping feeling that the ROT has been inside of his house. So you just would come home and... You know, you just know. Just know. How did that feel? To me, that was the scariest part of it, the spookiest part. I was wondering what's going to happen next, when. I was realistic enough to know that someday it's going to all come down to something. We're having lunch, and after lunch, I say, well, let's call Rick. Let's see what's going on. Robert Halpern of the Big Ben Sentinel told me it wasn't until one day in early spring that he actually understood just how far gone Rick was. He was having lunch with Alice Ashmore in Fort Davis. And they wonder, what's Rick up to? And he says, come on up. And Alice and I drove up to the resort. Rick had moved his embassy from behind the country store and up the mountain to his old lean-to, attached to a trailer. So far, no journalists have been up to visit the new compound. He had Robert and my husband Mike and I meet his people at the central postal location in the Davis Mountain Resorts. At some point, we meet a couple fellas with rifles and shotguns, and they say, leave your car here. They had us all get in the car. It was interesting, they were armed. They had radios. I remember Robert and I looking at each other going, okay. We walked another hundred yards or so, got into a vehicle of theirs. On the dirt road, you see off in the distance here and there, there mostly men with rifles And there was kind of a mobile home with a lean attached and a 55 drum cut in half blazing flames for heat It was an embassy that every Texan could be proud of I say that jokingly Robert, Alice and Mike are just kind of standing there, taking in the scene. A white trailer, a wooden lean-to, a blue flag with a star in the center, waving in the breeze, and a lot of guys. Everyone at the compound seems sort of jittery, and they're very well-armed. Rick has a bodyguard-type person with him. He made me really nervous. He had what looked like probably a .45. It was a revolver. And he also had no teeth. He had arrived from Chicago and said, I am here and I'm willing to die for this cause. I'm like, why? You're not even a Texan. But he gave me some unintelligible explanation. And when he said, again, I'm willing to die for this, I thought, OK, he probably will. Rick is showing Robert and Alice maps, a map of Texas, a map of the DMR with writing all over it. He's talking about what a war could look like. And so he begins to tell us what's going on, that it's getting serious. Stuff was going to go down even if he had to make it go down. And then, just a few weeks later, he does. On April 27, 1997, Joe Rowe spots a white van speeding down the dirt roads out of the DMR. He calls the local sheriff, who pulls over the driver, an ROT member. He finds a small arsenal of illegal weapons in the car. Rick from the lean-to is tuned in to the police scanner, listening in on the action. And then the sheriff arrests the ROT member. This, for Rick, is the first shot. It's time. Let me tell you what's happening around the Davis Mountains. There are militia forces gathering, and they haven't told you yet. And s*** is fixing to go big time. For weeks, the Republic of Texas threatened an armed confrontation, much like the Branch Davidian siege outside Waco. if anyone tried to arrest them. Well, now they have their standoff, and they have declared war against the government. We're in the state of war with the United Nations and all of its counterparts, which includes, and please understand, this is not the United States citizens, or let's say Americans, this is the federal government, the state government, who has refused to honor their own law. And Rick's first target, his first move in this war, is obvious. Rick gets on the radio and speaks directly to his militia, putting into action the plan that Joe Rowe has been hearing snippets of on the radio for months. Go out and take Rowe Vista. Do what you need to do. Rowe Vista. Joe's house. Strategically placed right at the entrance to the DMR, where you can see every car that goes in and out of the resort. Three ROT guys race to Joe's house. They head up the driveway, guns pulled. Joe has his own gun, which he points out of a crack in his door. His dog is on the porch. One of the Republic members aims. Joe says he'll put his gun down if they don't shoot his dog. But they shoot at Joe. A piece of shrapnel strikes his shoulder. He's bleeding. They barge in. They got flying up there. Come charging here. Automatic weapons. Shot me and blood flying everywhere. As Joe tells it, he's bleeding like a stuck hog. He's on blood thinner, which he says makes everything look really dramatic. Joe's wife, M.A., is also in the house. Joe says she's mainly concerned about the blood on the floor. She's yelling at the gun-toting militia members for making a mess. these floors where you could eat off of them. I'm telling the truth. I believe it. I'll tell you what, she ate their ass out. Now I thought, they've kind of got the upper hand right now. I mean, you know, I'm going to bleed, you know. They've got the guns. Well, I guess everyone asks differently. Just pull your horn back in a bit, you know. And this is the start of what comes to be known as the standoff. The standoff between Rick and the state. Between fantasy and reality. What might have been cute and silly up to the point of before the kidnapping, before the gun was fired, all that changed the nature of it. And it became pretty damn serious. Reporter Joenik Petoskey was watching the news. When you start affecting other people, that's where it went bad. And that's when, you know, he kidnapped Roe and his wife. When McLaren did that, and then he actually shot Roe, wounded him, that's when it had gone, you know, all this talk and kind of, let's go play war and let's do reenactments. It was national news. And it's like, get in the car and go. That's next time on A Whole Other Country. 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 Phyllis Arp, Mike Cox, Barry Caver, Daniel Miller, Rachel Monroe, and Victoria Contreras at the Archives of the Big Bend. 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.
