SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
The phrase - Texas, it's like a whole other country - used to be the Lone Star state's tourism slogan. And back in the 1800s, it was its own country. It was a nation called the Republic of Texas. That was before it joined the Union of the United States in 1845. More than a century later, in the 1990s, an armed insurgency tried to make Texas independent from the U.S. The podcast, A Whole Other Country, from Marfa Public Radio, traces that story, and its host, Zoe Kurland, is with me to talk about it. Hi, Zoe.
ZOE KURLAND, BYLINE: Hey, Sacha. Thanks so much for having me.
SACHA PFEIFFER: How did you end up researching this history?
KURLAND: Well, I heard about it kind of the best way you hear about stories in Far West Texas, which is word of mouth, as sort of an aside in conversation or a fun fact about the region, which is already sort of storybook in a lot of ways. Far West Texas is a place where you'll still see cowboys roaming stretches of ranch land, the occasional horse tied up outside of a bar.
SACHA PFEIFFER: (Laughter).
KURLAND: And to me, one of the most mythic places is this community called the Davis Mountains Resort, the DMR, for short. When you go there, you can't see any houses from the road. There's no mail delivery, no municipal water system. You have to drive your trash down to the dump in town. And the people there have a reputation for being pretty reclusive. And that happens to be the place where this guy, Rick McLaren, back in the '90s, decided to set up shop and start his secessionist movement.
SACHA PFEIFFER: Right. And I believe this guy, Rick McLaren, is a key character in your podcast. So tell us about his background.
KURLAND: Yes. He is definitely very key. He's actually a Texas transplant. He's a guy from Ohio who says he did a book report about Texas independence in elementary school that really got him interested in the state. He moved out to Texas after he graduated college to be a winemaker/homesteader in the mountains, and it turned out he wasn't very good at either of those things. So he started wreaking havoc on his neighbors and stealing their land through filing tons of liens and tying up the DMR in an avalanche of lawsuits. He was pretty universally despised.
SACHA PFEIFFER: Those harassed neighbors, I understand you spoke with some of them for your podcast.
KURLAND: Yes. I did. They are definitely very much around. I talked to a bunch of them. Here are Donna Watkins (ph) and Joe Williams (ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
DONNA WATKINS: Part of the resort changed a great deal when we had an idiot out here who decided to - he wanted to go back and take Texas out of the Union.
JOE WILLIAMS: You knew who he was. You didn't hang out with him. Well, he's one of those wild-eyed guys, you know, with ideas.
SACHA PFEIFFER: So we hear him called an idiot, a wild-eyed guy. How did he make the leap from really bad neighbor to secessionist?
KURLAND: Well, Rick was really obsessed with history, and as he was digging into all of this neighborhood property stuff, he discovered what he believed to be an error in the way that Texas was annexed by the United States back in the 1800s, at the time that it was an independent nation. He became convinced that Texas was a sovereign nation illegally occupied by the U.S. Rick was certainly not a lawyer, but he was a master of digesting and manipulating legalese to his advantage. And he joined up with a few other people in Texas who were into the idea of independence, and so they, quote, "reinstated" a constitution from the 1800's Republic of Texas and appointed a whole government. Rick was their foreign ambassador.
SACHA PFEIFFER: Hold on for a second. By foreign ambassador, do you mean, as in someone to represent Texas when dealing with other states in the U.S.?
KURLAND: No. To represent Texas to the rest of the world, to other countries.
SACHA PFEIFFER: (Laughter) OK.
KURLAND: It was elaborate. And Rick and his fellow Republic of Texas members were really enthralled by this idea of an old world. They were advocating for stuff like no taxes, but also no speed limits. They wanted to return to what they saw as the glory days of Texas, the 1800s. And in the show, we go really deep on the story of the Alamo, which is a big fixation for Rick and the Republic, which is the locus of the Texas Independence story, this historic battle that was fought. And a lot of Texans feel a lot of pride about that. You learn about it in schools here. But there's a darker underside that's not taught in schools.
The Texas Revolution was, to some degree, about slavery. And the story is also about how mythology is digested and weaponized. The Republic of Texas valorized the story of the Alamo and called themselves Texians after the Anglo settlers who fought in the battle at the Alamo. So Republic of Texas members would meet up in hotel ballrooms across the state and discuss how to further the cause, essentially reenacting this old world.
SACHA PFEIFFER: Those reenactments, how realistic did they get?
KURLAND: They got quite realistic. That reenactment, which a lot of people had written off as a kind of joke, started to get a lot more real in the Davis Mountains Resort. Under Rick's direction, the Republic of Texas started issuing license plates, ID cards and paying for stuff with fake checks, which, against all odds, actually didn't bounce and got Rick and his followers millions of dollars. And Rick decided to build an official embassy up in the Davis Mountains Resort, as foreign ambassador, and encouraged his followers to come up there. They'd patrol the embassy with guns and intimidate the neighbors. And soon after, Rick formed the Republic of Texas militia, which would routinely engage in target practice up in his neighborhood.
SACHA PFEIFFER: Zoe, this is starting to sound very ominous.
KURLAND: Well, just hold on to your hats, because Rick became increasingly paranoid, and his neighbors were becoming increasingly terrified. And one day, it all came to a head. The Republic of Texas shot one of Rick's neighbors and held him hostage, inciting a literal Wild West standoff in the middle of the West Texas desert. These are examples of what we heard from three people who were there, Marjie Erkkila (ph), Robert Halpern (ph), and Joe Nick Patoski (ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MARJIE ERKKILA: You know, they brought out tanks and, I mean - oh, yeah, the tanks.
ROBERT HALPERN: Well, it was kind of exciting.
JOE NICK PATOSKI: I mean, there (ph) - people died.
SACHA PFEIFFER: All right, Zoe, let's end on that cliffhanger of sorts so that people who want to listen to the podcast can find out what comes next. And for our listeners, you can listen to what comes next wherever you get your podcasts. That's Zoe Kurland. She's the reporter and host of the podcast A Whole Other Country from Marfa Public Radio. Zoe, thank you.
KURLAND: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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