By PATRICK C. McDONNELL
Scripps Howard News Service
When he owned property in Fort Davis, Texas, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bear Walters became acquainted with Richard McLaren, leader of the Republic of Texas.
Walters said he is tired of the one-sided portrait being painted of McLaren, who is now holed up on his property in a standoff with state law officers.
``He's a good kid, a hard worker and extremely bright,'' Walters said. ``I don't agree with the extent he has gone to now, but I can understand how he has been pushed into it by government bureaucracy and the Fort Davis clique.''
Walters, 76, a retired military investigator, lives in the Northeast and has had battles of his own with city government over fiscal, open-records and First Amendment matters.
In the late 1970s, he and his wife, Roxie, bought several acres in Fort Davis, they said. Their plan was to build a house on the property and eventually move to Fort Davis. That's where they met McLaren.
``He'd come by in the evenings, and we'd talk,'' Bear Walters said. ``He told us about how his father had been a professor at Texas A&M and how he himself had graduated from A&M and though he was interested in law, he was working toward realizing his dream of a vineyard started from scratch'' in the Davis Mountain Resort area.
McLaren and his wife ``lived in a cardboard shack out there at first, and he had to carry water by hand to his vines for a long time,'' Walters said. ``He was really putting in a lot of hard work out there. He really has that pioneer spirit. But the people around there are all in their own little clique and want to control everything that goes on. They resented him; they resented us, too. The attitude of that clique is the reason we left.
``They even gave us a hard time when we sold the property because I didn't go through their real estate agent and their title company. That group - and it was based around that Fort Davis Mountain Resort Association - tried to control everything that went on down there.''
He said Joe Rowe, the neighbor with whom McLaren has long had a dispute and who was taken hostage Sunday to start the standoff, is ``part of that clique.''
``That bunch was always after Rick,'' Walters said. ``First they told the sheriff he was cultivating marijuana out there, and the sheriff told me himself that he had gone out to Rick's place two or three times and never found that going on, just Rick out there in the cardboard shack or out working like a dog on his grapevines.
``Then, when they couldn't get him on the dope allegations, they started on this idea that the land that he was working had not been surveyed properly and belonged to someone else,'' Walters said. He said that made McLaren research the issue.
Walters said McLaren found out that the surveys were wrong and that there were several pieces of land that didn't belong to anyone, so he claimed them. ``That really made some of those people mad. They accused him of stealing land.''
Walters said it was that research into land rights that apparently led McLaren into the matter of Texas statehood, the matter at the heart of the Republic of Texas case.
