Jeff Davis County
Last week, Marfa Public Radio debuted A Whole Other Country, a podcast about the 1997 Republic of Texas Standoff. In the ‘90s, Richard McLaren — originally of Ohio — became convinced that Texas was not legally annexed by the United States to the letter of the law and ought to secede. He launched what Big Bend Sentinel called at the time a “paper war,” filing bogus liens to try to crumble an impostor empire lawsuit by lawsuit.
McLaren ended up in Jeff Davis County, where he spent hours at the courthouse poring over property records, where he discovered numerous errors and inconsistencies. Using a creative interpretation of adverse possession laws, he amassed over 900 acres in an area called the Davis Mountains Resort (DMR) that he hoped was the start of a brand new country.
On April 27, 1997, the standoff kicked off when DMR resident Joe Rowe called the sheriff on three people poking around an abandoned structure near his property. McLaren then sent Republic of Texas members to Rowe’s home to hold him and his wife hostage—in an instant, the paper war became a traditional war of threats and gunfire.
Big Bend Sentinel sat down with Zoe Kurland, head of the station’s podcast studio, to talk about the year she spent chasing this story down bumpy mountain roads.
How did you encounter the story of Richard McLaren?
Since coming out here for the first time nine years ago, I’d been hearing this story in fits and starts—if I went for a hike in the Davis Mountains and told someone about it, they’d be like, “Well, did you know about the secessionist movement that happened out there?” It was just sort of a fun fact about the region that was not fully fleshed out.
Once I started learning more about the story from people who had either been around at that time or wanted to tell me a little bit more, I was hooked. It’s an interesting historical event in and of itself, but I feel like it touches on a lot of threads and themes that I’m personally fixated on as a reporter in this region—this broader theme of people coming out to West Texas to play a fantasy version of Wild West life. I call it “cowboy cosplay” in the podcast.
Rick McLaren seemed like a perfect example of that. He’s a guy from Ohio who says he did a book report about Davy Crockett in elementary school that made him really love the state. It’s clear that he fell in love with a mythical Texas, the mythology of Texas.
He moved out to Texas after he graduated college, and then steadily made his way further and further west to this place where he could basically live out that fantasy life. Spoiler alert: he didn’t do it very well, and that’s where his problems—or you could say, his legal ingenuity — started.
In terms of the “cowboy cosplay” thing, what do you feel like folks are lacking in their everyday lives that they’re trying to fill?
I want to say I do empathize with people about the West. I certainly moved here because I was intrigued by some form of that mythology. I don’t want to entirely demonize that way of seeing the world, but I do think there is something that feels authentic about West Texas. In a world where authenticity feels out of reach, there’s something about the idea of ruggedness, about the symbol of a cowboy hat, about ranching in general that feels down home, that signals to people that you’re a good person.
This is along a similar theme, but you and I are both non-Texans who have dedicated our lives to creating content about Texas for Texans. What is about Texas that draws people like us—and like Richard McLaren?
I joked throughout making this with my editor, Liza Yeager, that I was a little like Rick in certain ways. Obviously I’m not trying to steal a neighbor’s land, but there is something really romantic Texas, something I’ve always been drawn to. I’m sure a lot of people who are outsiders or transplants have their own stories about this. I was a big consumer of Westerns when I was younger. [My home state of] California is also the West, but it’s not the “West” in the same way.
That’s so funny, given that California was also its own country broken off from Mexico at one point. It’s interesting that these two mythologies don’t map onto each other, even though “California” is the default ideal for Americans, if we’re thinking about that as the way that our country is depicted on a studio lot.
I think you’re so right that California has shaped our view of what ideal living could be. I grew up in California, and I was watching movies made in California about Texas. It’s a very trippy thing to realize that a lot of my formative ideas about this state were formed by the state I grew up in.
I’ve always wanted to ask you this — have you ever gotten any attitude from people out here when you reveal that you’re from California?
Don’t California my Texas! I did interview someone who freely told me she did not count California as a state.
I don’t think they count us either.
There’s a sort of playfulness to it. People still spoke to me and mostly wanted to know how I ended up here. But no one refused to speak to me because of it.
Following the thread of “fantasy versus reality,” I just listened to the episode that’s coming out this week that has a lot to do with unpacking myths about Texas history. Sort of the moral of the story is that—as the kids say—your faves are problematic, that Davy Crockett was kind of a loser in real life, that the Texas Revolution was to some degree about slavery. I’m curious if you felt any type of way about putting that message out there in today’s political climate.
Episode 3 is definitely the one that I’ve thought the most about, though I’ve thought about all of them a lot. I would also say that each of these episodes has its own distinct sonic and thematic personality. This one, I got to go deep on some of my “faves” that I had growing up, including Davy Crockett. I really understand how precious mythology is, and this is part of being an outsider reporting on a state that has this really intense identity.
I talked to a lot of people for this project, and I talked to a bunch of people who told me that they think of themselves as Texans before they think of themselves as Americans. In schools here, you pledge allegiance to the Texas flag as well as the American flag. Being independent is part of the state’s identity. We learn in this episode that the tourism slogan was at one point, “Texas: It’s like a whole other country.”
I wanted to let the Texans I talked to tell me about this mythology, how they’d learned it in school, versus how they’d come to understand it. I’m worried about how people will hear this dissection of the story of the Alamo—which is very precious and widespread and makes a lot of Texans feel a great sense of pride—that also has this darker undertone about slavery.
Anglo settlers came to Texas because they wanted to grow cotton using slave labor, and that is definitely not as fun to hear about as the rebels led by Sam Houston against the Mexican Army fighting until they couldn’t fight any longer. The real story, as I understand it, is very different. When we’re looking at the kind of mythology that draws people like Rick McLaren, or even like me to a certain extent, it feels like it would be very irresponsible not to look very deeply at that mythology.
Episode 3 also has a cool diverging story line that takes place in the Archives of the Big Bend at Sul Ross. Can you walk me through how you thought about sourcing this podcast?
There have been a couple of really good books written about the Republic of Texas standoff, including Donna Marie Miller’s 2023 book, Texas Secessionist Standoff. I went to interview Joe Rowe really early in this process—Joe was held hostage by Rick McLaren during the big standoff in 1997. Joe’s advice was to read Mike Cox’s book Standoff in Texas. I started there to get a better look at what I was working with history-wise.
I also went deep into local newspaper archives on microfilm at Sul Ross. Local news always gets it right—and I’m not just saying that because you’re sitting across from me. There was a ton of national coverage about this at the time, but I’d say the local news was the best for getting a thorough timeline.
There is also no history of the Davis Mountains Resort, so I had to hear it directly from the people who live there.
The story of the DMR sounds a lot to me like the story of Terlingua Ranch, which has been lovingly referred to as a “land scam” over the years. There was also a famous land scam in Brewster County called “Progress City,” where the developers platted a subdivision complete with light rail lines on top of Santiago Peak. I’m curious if you can talk a little more about McLaren’s “paper war,” and the ways in which you think that this is part of our region’s story.
I feel like the way the West was won was through property schemes. That’s a tale as old as time. I was reading [a quote from historian Patricia Nelson Limerick in] this book called The Lure of the Local by Lucy Lippard that really summed it up for me: “If Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history, its movies would have been about real estate. John Wayne would have been neither a gunfighter nor a sheriff, but a surveyor, spectator or claims lawyer.”
This goes back to the development of the DMR, where people would just place lines on maps, and that’s what would count as real, when the actual land itself tells a really different story. I’ve talked to people in the DMR who have land that is not accessible except by easement with their neighbors—because if they were to access their land as it was mapped, they would be driving off a cliff everyday. What Rick McLaren did was reveal the very real vulnerabilities in that way of viewing the land and of viewing the world.
The DMR has such specific local lore. Did your interactions with folks up there feed into those stereotypes for you personally, or did your assumptions get challenged along the way?
I got so much tape of people in the DMR telling me why they live there and what’s interesting about it. In service of the broader Republic of Texas story, I had to cut down a lot of that stuff. The DMR certainly has a reputation for being a place where people can be reclusive, where they can be out of the eye of surveillance. And yeah—weird stuff happens up there. Some people, when I asked them about the standoff, asked me to specify, “Which one?”
It still is a place that is mysterious. When you’re driving through it, you don’t see a lot of houses. There’s a sense that you’re not seeing all of it. What I wish I could have included more of is how the DMR has changed, not just in the wake of the Republic of Texas movement in the ‘90s, but even since the pandemic, when a lot of people moved out there to build their dream homes in an off-the-grid place so they can work remotely. That’s changed the culture there, from what I’ve heard.
The DMR is notorious for having contentious property owners association meetings, where people are constantly going toe to toe about covenants and their validity. It’s kind of like the NextDoor app on steroids. It feels like a hyper-aware and hyper-independent community that is constantly deciding what it wants to be. It’s an incredible story that I don’t think gets captured in the podcast as much as I wish it did.
Listen to A Whole Other Country online at Marfa Public Radio: marfapublicradio.org/podcast/a-whole-other-country.
