A Volatile Standoff on the Fringe of Texas

He is not even a native Texan, this headstrong militiaman waging war over his beloved Lone Star State.

No, Richard L. McLaren, the self-styled “ambassador” of the so-called Republic of Texas, is actually from St. Louis. He wrote a book report in the third grade about the Alamo. A confused sense of history and a keen sense of mythology later brought him here to meet his fate.

As the wiry, wild-haired, 43-year-old organic vintner continued his armed standoff Tuesday with a growing phalanx of real, badge-wearing Texas gunslingers, the story of his quixotic battle would almost have been laughable if the potential for bloodshed still weren’t so great.

Three days after members of his ragtag group burst through a neighbor’s door in a hail of gunfire, it is clear that McLaren stands firmly on the fringe of an already extremist movement. In fact, rivals within his own purported republic, which claims to be the provisional government of a free and sovereign Texas, revealed that they had impeached this said same ambassador last month.

“Richard McLaren and those acting with him have gone completely off the deep end,” insisted the Republic of Texas’ World Wide Web site.

In interviews and statements issued from his makeshift camper high in the Davis Mountains--once home to the Apache warrior Victorio, as he likes to note--the media-hungry McLaren often appears deluded by his own bravado.

Even as rifle-toting state troopers tightened the noose around his remote compound, McLaren continued to describe himself as the rightful spokesman for an independent republic, one at war with the “de facto” government in Austin and its enforcers in Washington. He expressed confidence that Texas’ 18 million residents would join his nation if only given the chance. He contended that thousands of militia sympathizers from around the country are rushing to his defense. And he warned that his backers have begun targeting “foreign agents”--legislators, judges, Internal Revenue Service officials--for “deportation” from Texas soil.

The fact that there is no evidence of such support doesn’t surprise those who have watched McLaren dig his own ditch. “He’s not a leader, a Richard the Lionhearted,” scoffed neighbor Ben Behrendt, 69, a retiree from Illinois. “He’s Dippy the Dip. He started out as a handyman around here. Now he’s turned into an sob.”

Despite McLaren’s intransigence, both his attorney and law enforcement authorities were optimistic Tuesday that a peaceful surrender could still be negotiated.

“It’s clear to me that Rick is willing to die for what he believes in,” said McLaren’s lawyer, Terry O’Rourke, a former assistant county attorney in Houston. He added, however, that his client “does not have a death wish. He does not need to be a martyr.”

As part of the negotiations, McLaren was allowed to prepare a packet of legal documents and set it outside his trailer, situated at the end of a 10-mile road deep within a forest of juniper and pine. A SWAT team using an armored personnel carrier was scheduled to pick up the papers and deliver them to O’Rourke, who described the transaction as a prerequisite for an eventual surrender.

“What I’m telling him is that he has a lot better chance fighting in a courtroom than he does fighting in the mountains,” O’Rourke said.

McLaren and five other members of his faction were charged Monday with engaging in organized criminal activity, a first-degree felony that could send him to prison for life. Three of them also were charged with aggravated kidnapping for the Sunday hostage-taking, now resolved, that launched the armed standoff.

“Members of this group are no longer novelties or curiosities; they now are bona fide criminals,” Texas Atty. Gen. Dan Morales said Tuesday. “What is occurring in West Texas is terrorism, pure and simple.”

Officials calculate that McLaren is holed up with about a dozen supporters, none believed to be children. An estimated squad of 75 state and local law enforcement officials, as well as a few FBI agents, are also at the scene. Most of the neighbors have been evacuated.

“I’d go in there with a bulldozer--blade up--and smash that trailer flat as a fritter,” said one old Fort Davis man in a straw cowboy hat, summing up the attitude of many in this picturesque ranching and tourist town.

Before his group triggered the latest in a growing pantheon of anti-government skirmishes, McLaren was considered more of a local eccentric--nettlesome, nerdy and obsessive, “a nut with a fax machine,” as Jeff Davis County Sheriff Steve Bailey put it--but hardly a threat to public safety.

For years, McLaren has waged a war of paper terrorism, mirroring the tactics of the “freemen” in Montana. His weapons have been bogus liens, fraudulent checks and petty lawsuits--first aimed at his neighbors, then at state officials and finally at Pope John Paul II. Until recently, the strategy was to ignore him.

“He loves this attention--it’s almost orgasmic for him,” said Bob Dillard, a former county judge who now owns the local newspaper.

But as much as Texas officials had hoped he would just disappear, McLaren kept getting in their craw. The tone of his missives grew more ominous. In January, officials shut two public buildings in Austin after receiving a bomb threat from suspected Republic of Texas militants. McLaren, facing an arrest warrant for failing to appear in a civil lawsuit, vowed last month to open fire on anyone trying to apprehend him.

“He talks the big talk, but if you went in there pointing a gun, he’d be the first to throw his hands up,” said the Fort Davis postal inspector, Bill Ross, noting that McLaren’s beefy attaches are the ones who seem more intent on provoking an armed struggle. “He’s the rhetoric; they’re the muscle.”

That would have to include the man who calls himself White Eagle, McLaren’s self-designated aide and military liaison. He answered McLaren’s phone on Tuesday by saying that any show of force by authorities would “set off the second American Civil War--or that’s what you would call it,” he said. “For us, it’s an attempt to reclaim our sovereign nation from a foreign aggressor.”

The notion that Texas was improperly annexed by the United States in 1845, nine years after its declaration of independence from Mexico, is the group’s raison d’etre. Texas historians reject such claims, which at any rate would have to be considered moot, even if substantiated.

“They take little pieces of fact and, in an imaginative . . . way, come up with fantasy,” said Jim Paulsen, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.

But the idea of an autonomous Texas remains a rallying cry in a state that promotes its maverick spirit in everything from litter campaigns (“Don’t Mess With Texas”) to tourism slogans (“Texas--It’s Like a Whole Other Country”).

McLaren couldn’t have picked a more evocative setting for his siege than Fort Davis, a former stagecoach junction surrounded by spectacular 7,000-foot peaks.

It is, as the official visitors’ guide boasts, “a John Wayne movie come to life.”

Times researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this story.