There's a long drive I've been doing lately in my Prius. It's a pretty long dirt road. It's not too much around it at all. I leave Marfa and I drive north down Texas State Highway 17. I can't see any houses yet. Just desert for a long, long, long time. Along the highway, cattle with big golf ball eyes crowd up at wire fences. Beyond them, back in the sprawl, ranches sit against the horizon. Far West Texas tends to attract a lot of drifters from far away. You don't know what they're running from, but they've arrived here and it's empty enough that they think they've gotten to where they needed to be. It's like, it's an empty spot on the map. I'm driving out here to report on something that happened in the mountains down this highway. Back in the 90s, in a community called the Davis Mountains Resort, the DMR for short. In the DMR, you can't see any houses from the road. There's no male delivery and no municipal water system or utilities. No cell service either. There's a country store that's never open and wild donkeys roaming around. The DMR is notoriously closed off. The people who live there are mostly retirees, preppers, home stethers. I've heard it's a place where people go to hide, whatever that means. That's where you go when the town of Fort Davis is too civilized. Or, you know, that's where you go when you just don't fit in. This is Jonik Potoski. He's a legendary Texas journalist and he used to report in the DMR. You know, it was isolated beyond isolated. You can operate, however you want to operate. You know, you could work out your ideas here. And a couple of decades ago, one guy in the DMR started working out a really big idea. He calls himself an ambassador and this is his embassy. Nestle deep in the mountains of West Texas, Richard McLaren dreams of the day Texas will separate from the US and become its own country. Richard McLaren or Rick. Up in the DMR, he started what he referred to as a nation. He called it the Republic of Texas. Well, I'll take you on a tour here. We don't have a formal armory right now, so we have to disperse the military unit. This is a clip of Rick showing a reporter around his headquarters, a red tin building with a seal on the side, Embassy of the Republic of Texas. Rick is scrawny and tall with long wild hair, bald on top. In videos, he's usually wearing a blazer and cowboy boots, marching around in the bright sun, beaming. We have a warped uniform's ordered and everything else. You can come on back here. This is our internet site where we're dealing with them. Rick, who by the way was originally from Ohio, had taken the name the Republic of Texas from the 1800s when a group of frontiersmen and settlers had proclaimed that Texas was an independent country. He wanted to return to the laws of that time too. No taxes, no speed limits. He'd started printing his own checks, his own license plates, and he was trying to legally win land and money for his new nation by filing tons of lawsuits against the government. He wanted to secede from the United States. Joe Nick told me that at first, none of this raised any red flags for him. There were a lot of characters in the DMR. Like one guy that I visited had aluminum foil all inside his cabin. He could do that out in the Davis Mountains Resort, no one cared. There was the infamous insect collector that sold insect specimens all over the world. Here in Davis Mountains Resort, yeah, you could find people like that. Rick and his new nation fit right in. That was perfect. That was about right. It's like, yeah, okay, what else? Yeah, what else? That's exactly what I wanted to know. Far West Texas sits somewhere on a spectrum of myth. Out here, there really are the darkest of dark skies, sunsets that will knock you to the ground. But there's also something else out here, alongside all that. The idea of this place, the idea of the West. Tourists ride down the street on horseback. Airbnb's appear like Mirages, promising visitors a luxury Western escape. People buy land and don't ranch it. They just own a ranch. I'm kind of obsessed with this phenomenon, cowboy cosplay, myth, quietly warming its way into real life. But while I can see the pattern, it can be hard to figure out what it means to put a finger on the actual consequences. And when I heard this story about a guy building a whole Wild West style nation in the mountains, it sounded so clear, so tangible, like understand this story, and I could understand the whole thing. Plus, the people who'd watched it all play out, Rick's neighbors, they still lived in the DMR, right down one long brain rattling road into the mountains. Which is why I'd been driving up there, trying to get the lay of the land in this very private, kind of intimidating neighborhood. One thing about West Texas, if you don't want to be bothered, you don't have to be bothered. This is Donna Watkins. When I meet her at the DMR Community Center, she's wearing a purple sweatshirt and driving one of the biggest trucks I've ever seen. I don't lay off where all these people do. I'm total seclusion. I'm on a 7,000 feet above sea level, ancient volcano. That is very cool. Yes, it is. I'd headed up to the Community Center because people in the DMR weren't really answering my calls to their landlines, which didn't exactly surprise me considering the reputation and all that. But when I got up there, I was surprised at how open people were face to face. Oh, you'll see them all here. Most of the people come right here. Yeah, this is kind of the hotspot. Yeah, everybody's coming in to chow down and everybody meets and greets and then we all go back into the mountains somewhere. I'll see you all. And most people like to be left alone on the most part. I mean, we do live out here because we don't be told what to do. This is Toy Fisher. She's a small blonde woman, black eyeliner, another DMR resident. Yeah, I think it's just who we are. I mean, it's you get out here and you do enjoy the solace, you do enjoy the ruggedness of it. Speaking of ruggedness, the DMR is notably green, kind of an aberration in the otherwise flat, dry desert landscape in this part of Texas. When I was researching the DMR before I came here, I found this educational video. The mountains are an area of woodlands, dominated by gray and emery oaks, for rough skin alligator junipers and pinion pines. Rainfall is plentiful during the months of July through September, causing the peaks to almost disappear at times behind a shroud of mist and clouds. Driving up the mountain, it's true. It looks almost illustrated. I've been coming up here since college because this is a tree fix. For those of us who grew up where there was always a bunch of trees, you could come up here and feel like you were in the Rocky Mountains even though you're not. I met up with Edna Queen, the chief of the Volunteer Fire Department in the DMR at the Firehouse. It's right next door to the Community Center. Volunteer firefighting is new for her. She did something really different before. We had an unusual business. We had the mouse factory. I bred my syn rats for the pet trade. What is that? I've never even heard of that. We had a male order company. We shipped nationwide either to pet owners, pet stores or zoos. I sold frozen my syn rats for food, either for your pet snake or your birds or alligators. Everybody from SeaWorld in San Antonio to Discovery Cove, Florida. I even had Michael Jackson's Neverland Valley Ranch as a customer. You have that business. You've been coming out up here. Up here, yes since college. Edna started telling me about the DMR. Why is she lives here? But then... Yeah, hello. This is the sound of one of the DMR's wild donkeys budding into our conversation. We have to pause. We have to pause for that male that's just an owner he is. And this was not my only animal encounter in the DMR. Out on my next interview, I had parked in a driveway when suddenly a gigantic angular head was by my very low window. A horse. Then this woman came out of the house. Her hair, a soft platinum cloud. She was wearing so many rings we couldn't shake hands. This is Margie Erkola. What is your horse's name again? Shaman Kali. It means that... Of course, Shaman, we all know what that means. And Kali means forever and ever. Everyone that comes here is amazed. Because they've never been met by a horse at their car. I can tell you, I was amazed. Margie told me she used to work as a cop in Massachusetts. But when she retired, she found this place. When I saw all these wide open spaces, you know, to a horse person that's like, I want to ride everywhere out here. Look at all this land. And I just... I don't know the whole feeling of it, of cowboys and wide open spaces. I loved it. I just fell in love with it. And it worked out beautifully. Am I coming here? The DMR wasn't exactly beating the reputation of being a very out there place. But I have to say, I was feeling kind of enchanted by it. The trees, the wildlife, the endless space. Just how far away from the rest of the world it felt. Part of the resort changed a great deal when we had an idiot out here and he wanted to go back and take Texas out of the Union. Rick McClaren? Yeah, yeah. Donna Watkins at the Community Center reminds me of what I'm actually here to report on. She brings up Rick McClaren without me even asking. One time, I met him as in, I was introduced to the man. If you want to say he was a man, I would definitely argue the poem. Uh-uh, not my kind. What was those guys name? McClaren? McClaren. McClaren, that's right. Rick McClaren. Local rancher, Joe Williams. Joe's silver-haired and he lives in Fort Davis, the small town down the mountain from the DMR. In West Texas, nothing ever happens. It's revolutionary or you know, just really throwing a wrench into the works. Nothing ever happens out here. You can be away for a week, two weeks, a month, three months. At one point, I was away for three years. I drove back into Fort Davis and stopped at the drugstore. And the same five guys were drinking coffee. Nothing had changed. But then, there was Rick. Did you ever encounter him? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody knew him on the street. And yeah, everybody thought he was just a crank. You know, he's heart-cranked. You'd see him at the grocery store or something like that, buying gas. You know who he was. He didn't hang out with him. He was one of those wild-eyed guys, you know, with ideas of his own. There was one more neighbor I knew I needed to talk to if I wanted to get the story of what happened with the Republic of Texas. Joe Roe lives at the entrance to the DMR in a big two-story Adobe house. And though he was never close with Rick, the Republic of Texas has come to define his life. I drove up to meet him on a foggy day. Unfortunately, I made the worst entrance possible. You heard my wife. He didn't know why she'd never run after you. He heard her eating my ass at the long clock when all of it. That's awful. So, I'm counting Joe Roe is the third Joe in our story so far. He's wiry with long white hair and a beard. And in case you had trouble understanding him through his West Texas accent, let me repeat. His wife was not happy when the alarm went off for our supposed interview. We'd had a miscommunication about the timing, and Joe had thought I was coming over very early in the morning. I was worried you said I'd thought he... I would never make you get up that early for this. I'm so sorry. Luckily, Joe seemed to forgive me. Just talk to it. What do you know about this project? I almost said it by the whole interest is all the same. I gave him my spiel about Texas, about playing pretend, about how this story, a guy from Ohio marching around in cowboy boots, making his own country in the mountains, seemed like part of a pattern. What interests me about this is that someone who wasn't even from Texas was like, I'm going to be the ultimate Texas. Yeah, they're trying to actually... I guess at the time it might have put in a model, my idea. Joe nodded. It's probably a stretch to say he was into what I was saying, but he accepted it, and started to tell me his story about Rick McLaren and the DMR. When we moved out here, there wasn't hardly anybody here. Joe moved out to the DMR in the early 90s. In his job as a petroleum engineer for Shell Oil, he'd been all over the place, and he wanted to settle down. He chose the DMR, a place where one could count on being left alone. I think I was just kind of the either take care of yourself living out here, and that's been a different guess. Living in the DMR meant trading in some of the usual comforts. At that time, you were responsible for getting power to your property. Everyone got water from a communal well and drove their trash 20 miles to the dump in Fort Davis down the mountain. But in exchange, Joe got this place. He told me that back then, the DMR looked like Ireland, rolling hills and green, green, green, totally undeveloped. Joe got to work, building his house. Cutting brush and sand and trees and cleaning off his lofts of the house. At the day of time, I could tell you everybody that went out and everybody come in by name. From his land, Joe could see who drove in and out of the DMR every day. Could name them. He and his neighbors would pull money to fix the roads through the local property owners association. Things were peaceful, except for one little thing. Rick. Do you remember meeting him? Yeah, yeah. What was he like? Yeah, I'm meeting him back for me, become politically inclined, I guess. Politically inclined was, unfortunately, putting it very mildly, because there's actually a big part of the story that I haven't told you yet. Over the years that Rick lived in the DMR, his funny little idea about founding a nation started gaining power. I've noticed it's time to bake a sauce and get out of Texas. Gaining followers. Like any true freedom fighter, I will die on my feet before I live on my knees. Gun-toting militia members who joined him up in the mountains. So if they wanted all out, war, that's how far people are prepared to take this. And then, one day in 1997. Let me tell you what happened around the Davis Mountains. There are militia forces gathering and they haven't told you yet. And shit is fixing to go. Big time. The Republic of Texas declared war on the actual state of Texas. Richard McLaren, the self-proclaimed ambassador of the Republic, declared war in order to take over an elderly neighbor's home. And Joe Rowe got caught in the middle. Authorities in the Republic of Texas are locked in a hostage standoff in the Davis Mountains in West Texas. He pronounced Joe Rowe and his wife, M.A. Rowe, prisoners of war. Rowe suffered two minor gunshot wounds according to name. That spring, in 1997, Joe became enemy number one of the Republic of Texas. And the first victim of what would become a real life wild west standoff in the DMR. Rick and the Republic fighting with all they had for their fantasy nation to become a reality. You know, they brought out tanks and... oh yeah, the tanks. It made national news the standoff. Well, it was kind of exciting. I remember all of it. I mean, there are people died. I thought crazy people lived out here. I'm just not a lightning. All right. Could you sing me the Davy Crocket song? Ha, ha, ha. Historic considering that everyone makes fun of my singing. This is my mom. She does not live in the DMR. Okay. Davy, Davy Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier. Would you do it with a slight less twang just in case anyone gets insulted in Texas? Davy, Davy Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier. Yeah, that's the same. I just need to talk about one last thing before we end this episode. When I was growing up, my mom used to sing the Davy Crocket jingle thing to me all the time. Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, green estate in the land of the free, raised in the woods, so I knew every tree and so on and so forth. It was just something that had sort of warmed its way into her brain and then made it into mine. Did you have any westward awareness as a kid growing up in Brooklyn? Oh yeah. There were so many TV shows that were westerns. They were kind of magical, you know, when the guy showed up at the summit on the horse and the horse rear little. And, you know, the guy looked so serious and capable and strong. I like Rick and like a lot of those horse riding tourists. I'm also not from Texas. I'm from California. Maybe the Prius already tipped you off. No one drives them out here. But like my mom, I absorbed the myths of the frontier. I watched a lot of westerns as a kid and most of them, or at least the really good ones, took place in Texas. Texas, to me, became synonymous with the idea of the Wild West. An idea I left. I rode horses growing up and not to brag, but while most of the other girls were equestrians in training, I rode western with little cowboy boots on. I was devoted to Annie Oakley, Calamity J, and then I sang this Davy Crockett song, not knowing exactly what it meant, but knowing it was cool. When I moved to West Texas to be a reporter eight years ago, I was still holding on to a bit of that vision. Big skies, adventure. Sometimes I still feel myself slipping into the romance of it. My tiny house set against an endless landscape. The stars looking like they're hole-punched out of the night sky. It can feel like I'm playing out my own version of a friend to your fantasy. I guess what I'm saying is the Wild West thing? I could see how you could get just a little too into it. I'm Zoe Carland, and this is a whole other country. 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 him. 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. Next time, how Rick McLaren went from just a regular old Ohioan to a guy so into Texas, he built his own embassy. This episode of a whole other country was reported written and produced by me, Zoe Carland. Liza Yeager edited and also co-wrote the show. Original music by Andy Stack. Editorial support from Lindsay Hauke. Artwork by Carolyn McCartney and Lindsay Hauke. Special thanks to Elise Pepple, James King, Phyllis Arp, Jeff Smith, Ray Queen, Carlos Morales, Jackson Roach, Dee Dee Taylor, Jennifer Elzner, Ann Morosis, Rachel Neal, Leah Caldwell, Sam Carras, Nora Matheson, Victoria Contreras, Mike Cox, Lucy Schiller, Steven Cassidy Jones, Travis Bibennec, Art Mitchell, Dale Larish, and Helene Carland. And a huge thanks to the people I interviewed who wanted to stay anonymous. A whole other country is a production of Marfa Public Radio, a nonprofit radio station in the middle of the West Texas desert with only one podcast producer. We're now 100% community funded. If you'd like to donate to support the station's work, head to marfapublicradio.org slash donate.
