A Texas Deputy Called John Wayne a “Fake Cowboy” — Then Wayne Asked Him One Question

March 1958. Del Rio, Texas, on US Highway 90 at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, 40 miles north of the Rio Grande, and 150 miles west of San Antonio, where the mesquite and the caliche and the big sky make a country that does not care what you call yourself and has no patience for the version of itself that gets sold to movie theaters.

A Valverde County Deputy Sheriff is looking at a man who has just stepped out of a hired car and telling him with some precision what kind of cowboy he is. The man is listening. Here is the story. Earl Duggan had been a Deputy Sheriff in Valverde County for 11 years, since the spring of 1947, when he came back from the Pacific with a malaria scar on his liver and a campaign ribbon he never framed, and a clear preference for sleeping under a roof rather than canvas.

His grandfather had come to Valverde County in 1887 with a string of cattle and a survey map and a disposition that did not include the word quit, and had built the Duggan operation from scratch. Two sections of high desert ground between US 90 and the river bottom, 1,300 acres of mesquite and grama grass and rocky creek drainage that a man who knew it could run cattle on and a man who didn’t know it would fail on inside of a season.

The land smelled of creosote after rain and dry chalk in dry weather, and in March it smelled of both, because March in Valverde County can go either way before noon. The caliche roads that crossed it turned to reddish paste in a hard rain and cracked pale and powder fine in drought. And the cattle that worked the draws moved differently than cattle on grass country, more cautious on the rocky ground, more deliberate.

Toughened by it the way everything that survives in brush country gets toughened by it. Earl had grown up knowing the smell of each drainage on the property and what it meant for the week’s work and which draws to check first after a dry spell and which gates to open before a rain. His father had run the ranch from 1924 until a heart attack took him in October of 1951 and the land came to Earl along with the note at the Laughlin Federal Credit Union and whatever cattle had survived the previous year.

His brother had not come back from Guadalcanal in 1943. Earl had come back from the Marianas and after his father died, he worked the ranch alongside the deputy job six days a week, the badge paying the bills the cattle couldn’t cover. The cattle justifying the badge on the days the badge felt like a compromise.

The drought that had been eating the Texas Hill Country since 1950 had reached Val Verde County by 1957 with seven accumulated dry years behind it. The creek drainage was down. The river bottom grazing was contested by every rancher in the county with water access and some without. Earl had sold 40 head in November that he had planned to carry through the winter because the feed cost had become impossible and the sale price had been low because every other operation in the county was moving cattle at the same time for the

same reason. He was behind on the note. He was not a man who described himself as struggling. He was a man who described himself as working a bad cycle and waiting for the weather to correct. Earl Duggan knew this country the way a man knows something he has worked for 35 years with his hands. He knew which draws ran water in a dry year and which ones were decorative.

He knew the difference between a man who understood the land and a man who had seen pictures of it. Some of you come from families like this. Three and four generations on the same ground. A relationship with a specific piece of country too particular to explain to someone who didn’t grow up inside it. Some of you know what it means to hold land through a bad cycle because selling means admitting that what your grandfather built can be undone in one decade of weather.

Some of you know exactly what Earl Duggan looked like driving that county road in March of 1958. This is for all of them. John Wayne was in Del Rio that week because he was driving the southern route across Texas looking at terrain for the Alamo picture that had been in development for 2 years and that he intended to shoot somewhere in the hill country or South Texas brush country in the coming year.

He was not on a studio schedule. He was driving himself in a hired car through the specific country the picture needed to understand looking at the way the light fell on the limestone and the way the sky sat above the mesquite and reading the landscape the way a director reads a location not as a tourist but as a man trying to understand what a piece of ground would hold and what it would refuse.

He had stopped at the Magnolia station on the east side of Del Rio for gas and coffee. The station had a counter with four stools and a pot that had been on since 6 and a ceiling fan that turned at a pace that suggested it was aware of the heat to come and was already tired of it. There were three men at the counter and a ranch hand waiting on a tire repair and Earl Duggan’s patrol unit in the lot because Earl had stopped for his own coffee at the same counter at the same time by coincidence, which is the only way most stories start.

Earl came out of the station and saw the hired car at the pump and the big man beside it and said what he said. Not shouted. Not performed, said. In the flat declarative manner of a man who is not being rude so much as precise. He said he’d seen enough John Wayne pictures to know what Hollywood thought a cowboy looked like.

And that whoever had taught Wayne to ride had done a reasonable job with the basics. And that beyond the basics, there was a distance between what happened on a movie screen and what happened before dawn on a working operation in Val Verde County that no amount of good lighting was going to close. He said, “No offense intended.

You do good work for what it is. But we both know what it is.” The men at the counter could see through the window. The ranch hand by the tire rack could hear. Nobody said anything. They were waiting for what usually happened when someone said something like that to a man who was used to people treating him differently, which was that the man who was used to being treated differently would say something about it.

Wayne looked at Earl for a moment. You know that pause. The moment after a thing has been said plainly and the room holds its breath to see what the plain thing produces. The moment when the obvious response the defensive one, the one that pulls rank or calls a lawyer or reminds the room of certain box office figures is available and not taken.

Where are you watching from right now? Drop your state in the comments. I want to know how far this one travels. Wayne set his coffee cup on the hood of the hired car. He looked at the country around him, the caliche flat, the mesquite, the thin March light on the limestone outcrops to the north. He looked back at Earl.

He said, “How long has your family been in this county?” Earl said, “71 years. My grandfather came in ’87.” Wayne was quiet for a moment. He said, “Then you know something I have never known and will not know. I know how this country looks through a camera. That’s the whole of it. I’ve been borrowing what families like yours built for 30 years and putting it on a screen and calling it the West.

You’re right about the distance.” Earl looked at him. Wayne said, “I’d like to ask you something about the real version if you have a few minutes.” They talked for 40 minutes at the counter of the Magnolia Station. Wayne asked about the drainage patterns south of the highway, about the quality of the brush cover along the river, about what the limestone outcrops did to the sight lines on horseback.

He asked about the 1887 survey lines and where the original grant boundaries ran. He asked how the creek drainage behaved in March versus October, which draws held water longest, whether the river bottom changed character below the second bend or stayed consistent. He asked what the drought had done to the brush cover on the south section specifically.

These were not general questions. They were the questions of a man who understood enough about what he was asking to know whether the answers were accurate and who would know if they were not. Earl answered because the questions were real. A man can tell the difference between questions asked to fill a silence and questions asked to learn something and these were the second kind.

Wayne was not performing interest in the land. He was interested in the land. That was the thing that surprised Earl, not the questions themselves, but the fact that the asking of them was genuine. At the end of it, Wayne said he was looking for land that read like South Texas in the 1830s, ground that hadn’t been significantly altered, that still had the brush cover and the sight lines and the caliche terrain of the original country.

He said the Duggan land sounded like it might be what the picture needed. He said, “I have a problem that a piece of ground south of the Nueces might be able to solve. Yours might be the right piece. I’d like to send someone out to walk it in April, with your permission, and if it’s right, we’d pay a scouting fee for the access and a location fee if the production uses it.

” Earl said he’d allow the walk. He did not say anything further. He finished his coffee. He went back to his shift. The location scout came out in April of 1958. The Duggan ground was right. The brush cover was intact. The limestone formations were accurate. The river bottom terrain was what the picture needed for the exterior sequences south of the Alamo site.

The production paid Earl Duggan a scouting access fee of $1,200 in April and a location use fee of $4,800 in the fall of 1959 when the production came through for 3 weeks of background shooting. $6,000 across 18 months. Here is what $6,000 did in 1958 in Val Verde County, Texas. It serviced the note at the Laughlin Federal Credit Union for 22 months.

22 months of breathing room at the exact moment when the drought cycle was beginning to break and the county water table was starting to recover. It paid Earl’s two oldest children through the school year without the kind of calculation that makes children feel like a cost. It bought a new stock tank on the south section that the ranch had needed since 1954 and that changed the carrying capacity of the south pasture for the following decade.

But here is what the 22 months of breathing room actually bought. In 1960, the Duggans won a water rights case they had been in litigation over for 4 years. A case involving their access to the river bottom grazing during drought conditions. The case had been running since 1956. It resolved in the Duggans favor in February of 1960 and the water rights it confirmed secured the family’s grazing access to the bottom land in perpetuity.

If the note had gone into default before the water rights case resolved, the family would have sold. They would have sold the water rights with the land. The land the water rights now protect has been appraised at current market value in excess of $900,000. $6,000, a scouting fee and a location use fee paid by a man who said he had a problem that the Duggan land could solve, bought 22 months that contained a water rights case that the Duggans won and that they still hold.

Earl Duggan ran the ranch until 1979 when he turned it over to his son Robert. Robert ran it until 2003. Robert’s daughter Katherine manages it now. The fourth generation on the same 1300 acres. The same ground Earl’s grandfather walked off a survey in 1887. The operation runs 380 head on what has been expanded over the decades to just under 2,000 acres.

The location agreement from 1958, a single typed page with a production company seal and a dollar figure and two signatures, is in a frame in the ranch house on the south section. It hangs in the kitchen on the wall beside the window that faces the creek drainage because that is where the light is good in the morning and that is where Earl put it in 1959 and where it has been ever since.

The creek drainage is green in a wet year. The agreement is still readable. Both signatures are still clear. If you find yourself on US 90 coming through Del Rio, the Magnolia station is long gone, but the county road south of the highway that runs toward the Duggan property is still there. The land is private and still working and not a landmark, but the family is in the county and the agreement is on the wall and the creek is running this year, which is more than it was doing in 1957.

Some of you know what it means to hold something past the point where holding it made any financial sense because selling it would mean something more than losing money. Some of you know what a water rights case feels like when the outcome is still undecided and the note is coming due. If you know that kitchen, this story is yours.

John Wayne never mentioned the Duggan ranch in any interview about the Alamo production. Not in his accounts of scouting the Texas terrain, which were frequent, because journalists found the physical process of making the Alamo interesting and Wayne was willing to describe it. Not in any profile that covers the period 1957 through 1960, which was a heavily documented stretch of his career because the Alamo was the largest production he had ever undertaken.

And people were paying close attention. The location fee was a line item in a production budget that had many line items. And the scouting trip was one of dozens that year. And Wayne gave no particular emphasis to Val Verde County in any account that was written down or recorded. The one person who told the story in the right order, the gas station, the question, the 40 minutes at the counter, what the question meant and why it was asked, was Earl Duggan, who told it to his son Robert in 1971 when Robert was 18 and had just told

Earl he intended to run the ranch after school rather than go to college. Earl sat him down at the kitchen table and told him about the March morning in 1958 and the man at the counter and the one question the man had asked and what came after it. He told it because he wanted Robert to understand what the ranch had almost been and what it was instead and why those two things were different.

Robert asked what had surprised Earl most about the conversation. Earl said it was not the question itself. He said he’d been called many things by strangers over the years and had developed a reasonable theory of what kind of man produced what kind of response to being called a name. He said, “He agreed with me.

That’s what I didn’t expect. He said I was right about the distance. And he said he’d been borrowing what we built and he meant it. A man who means that kind of thing when he says it, it is a man who’s been thinking about it for a long time before he says it.” He looked at the agreement on the wall. He said, he asked me one question, and the question was real.

That’s the whole of it. If this story is worth keeping, pass it on to someone who would understand what it means. Subscribe so you don’t miss the ones still coming. There are more of them, and they all deserve to be heard. And unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.

A Texas Deputy Called John Wayne a “Fake Cowboy” — Then Wayne Asked Him One Question

March 1958. Del Rio, Texas, on US Highway 90 at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, 40 miles north of the Rio Grande, and 150 miles west of San Antonio, where the mesquite and the caliche and the big sky make a country that does not care what you call yourself and has no patience for the version of itself that gets sold to movie theaters.

A Valverde County Deputy Sheriff is looking at a man who has just stepped out of a hired car and telling him with some precision what kind of cowboy he is. The man is listening. Here is the story. Earl Duggan had been a Deputy Sheriff in Valverde County for 11 years, since the spring of 1947, when he came back from the Pacific with a malaria scar on his liver and a campaign ribbon he never framed, and a clear preference for sleeping under a roof rather than canvas.

His grandfather had come to Valverde County in 1887 with a string of cattle and a survey map and a disposition that did not include the word quit, and had built the Duggan operation from scratch. Two sections of high desert ground between US 90 and the river bottom, 1,300 acres of mesquite and grama grass and rocky creek drainage that a man who knew it could run cattle on and a man who didn’t know it would fail on inside of a season.

The land smelled of creosote after rain and dry chalk in dry weather, and in March it smelled of both, because March in Valverde County can go either way before noon. The caliche roads that crossed it turned to reddish paste in a hard rain and cracked pale and powder fine in drought. And the cattle that worked the draws moved differently than cattle on grass country, more cautious on the rocky ground, more deliberate.

Toughened by it the way everything that survives in brush country gets toughened by it. Earl had grown up knowing the smell of each drainage on the property and what it meant for the week’s work and which draws to check first after a dry spell and which gates to open before a rain. His father had run the ranch from 1924 until a heart attack took him in October of 1951 and the land came to Earl along with the note at the Laughlin Federal Credit Union and whatever cattle had survived the previous year.

His brother had not come back from Guadalcanal in 1943. Earl had come back from the Marianas and after his father died, he worked the ranch alongside the deputy job six days a week, the badge paying the bills the cattle couldn’t cover. The cattle justifying the badge on the days the badge felt like a compromise.

The drought that had been eating the Texas Hill Country since 1950 had reached Val Verde County by 1957 with seven accumulated dry years behind it. The creek drainage was down. The river bottom grazing was contested by every rancher in the county with water access and some without. Earl had sold 40 head in November that he had planned to carry through the winter because the feed cost had become impossible and the sale price had been low because every other operation in the county was moving cattle at the same time for the

same reason. He was behind on the note. He was not a man who described himself as struggling. He was a man who described himself as working a bad cycle and waiting for the weather to correct. Earl Duggan knew this country the way a man knows something he has worked for 35 years with his hands. He knew which draws ran water in a dry year and which ones were decorative.

He knew the difference between a man who understood the land and a man who had seen pictures of it. Some of you come from families like this. Three and four generations on the same ground. A relationship with a specific piece of country too particular to explain to someone who didn’t grow up inside it. Some of you know what it means to hold land through a bad cycle because selling means admitting that what your grandfather built can be undone in one decade of weather.

Some of you know exactly what Earl Duggan looked like driving that county road in March of 1958. This is for all of them. John Wayne was in Del Rio that week because he was driving the southern route across Texas looking at terrain for the Alamo picture that had been in development for 2 years and that he intended to shoot somewhere in the hill country or South Texas brush country in the coming year.

He was not on a studio schedule. He was driving himself in a hired car through the specific country the picture needed to understand looking at the way the light fell on the limestone and the way the sky sat above the mesquite and reading the landscape the way a director reads a location not as a tourist but as a man trying to understand what a piece of ground would hold and what it would refuse.

He had stopped at the Magnolia station on the east side of Del Rio for gas and coffee. The station had a counter with four stools and a pot that had been on since 6 and a ceiling fan that turned at a pace that suggested it was aware of the heat to come and was already tired of it. There were three men at the counter and a ranch hand waiting on a tire repair and Earl Duggan’s patrol unit in the lot because Earl had stopped for his own coffee at the same counter at the same time by coincidence, which is the only way most stories start.

Earl came out of the station and saw the hired car at the pump and the big man beside it and said what he said. Not shouted. Not performed, said. In the flat declarative manner of a man who is not being rude so much as precise. He said he’d seen enough John Wayne pictures to know what Hollywood thought a cowboy looked like.

And that whoever had taught Wayne to ride had done a reasonable job with the basics. And that beyond the basics, there was a distance between what happened on a movie screen and what happened before dawn on a working operation in Val Verde County that no amount of good lighting was going to close. He said, “No offense intended.

You do good work for what it is. But we both know what it is.” The men at the counter could see through the window. The ranch hand by the tire rack could hear. Nobody said anything. They were waiting for what usually happened when someone said something like that to a man who was used to people treating him differently, which was that the man who was used to being treated differently would say something about it.

Wayne looked at Earl for a moment. You know that pause. The moment after a thing has been said plainly and the room holds its breath to see what the plain thing produces. The moment when the obvious response the defensive one, the one that pulls rank or calls a lawyer or reminds the room of certain box office figures is available and not taken.

Where are you watching from right now? Drop your state in the comments. I want to know how far this one travels. Wayne set his coffee cup on the hood of the hired car. He looked at the country around him, the caliche flat, the mesquite, the thin March light on the limestone outcrops to the north. He looked back at Earl.

He said, “How long has your family been in this county?” Earl said, “71 years. My grandfather came in ’87.” Wayne was quiet for a moment. He said, “Then you know something I have never known and will not know. I know how this country looks through a camera. That’s the whole of it. I’ve been borrowing what families like yours built for 30 years and putting it on a screen and calling it the West.

You’re right about the distance.” Earl looked at him. Wayne said, “I’d like to ask you something about the real version if you have a few minutes.” They talked for 40 minutes at the counter of the Magnolia Station. Wayne asked about the drainage patterns south of the highway, about the quality of the brush cover along the river, about what the limestone outcrops did to the sight lines on horseback.

He asked about the 1887 survey lines and where the original grant boundaries ran. He asked how the creek drainage behaved in March versus October, which draws held water longest, whether the river bottom changed character below the second bend or stayed consistent. He asked what the drought had done to the brush cover on the south section specifically.

These were not general questions. They were the questions of a man who understood enough about what he was asking to know whether the answers were accurate and who would know if they were not. Earl answered because the questions were real. A man can tell the difference between questions asked to fill a silence and questions asked to learn something and these were the second kind.

Wayne was not performing interest in the land. He was interested in the land. That was the thing that surprised Earl, not the questions themselves, but the fact that the asking of them was genuine. At the end of it, Wayne said he was looking for land that read like South Texas in the 1830s, ground that hadn’t been significantly altered, that still had the brush cover and the sight lines and the caliche terrain of the original country.

He said the Duggan land sounded like it might be what the picture needed. He said, “I have a problem that a piece of ground south of the Nueces might be able to solve. Yours might be the right piece. I’d like to send someone out to walk it in April, with your permission, and if it’s right, we’d pay a scouting fee for the access and a location fee if the production uses it.

” Earl said he’d allow the walk. He did not say anything further. He finished his coffee. He went back to his shift. The location scout came out in April of 1958. The Duggan ground was right. The brush cover was intact. The limestone formations were accurate. The river bottom terrain was what the picture needed for the exterior sequences south of the Alamo site.

The production paid Earl Duggan a scouting access fee of $1,200 in April and a location use fee of $4,800 in the fall of 1959 when the production came through for 3 weeks of background shooting. $6,000 across 18 months. Here is what $6,000 did in 1958 in Val Verde County, Texas. It serviced the note at the Laughlin Federal Credit Union for 22 months.

22 months of breathing room at the exact moment when the drought cycle was beginning to break and the county water table was starting to recover. It paid Earl’s two oldest children through the school year without the kind of calculation that makes children feel like a cost. It bought a new stock tank on the south section that the ranch had needed since 1954 and that changed the carrying capacity of the south pasture for the following decade.

But here is what the 22 months of breathing room actually bought. In 1960, the Duggans won a water rights case they had been in litigation over for 4 years. A case involving their access to the river bottom grazing during drought conditions. The case had been running since 1956. It resolved in the Duggans favor in February of 1960 and the water rights it confirmed secured the family’s grazing access to the bottom land in perpetuity.

If the note had gone into default before the water rights case resolved, the family would have sold. They would have sold the water rights with the land. The land the water rights now protect has been appraised at current market value in excess of $900,000. $6,000, a scouting fee and a location use fee paid by a man who said he had a problem that the Duggan land could solve, bought 22 months that contained a water rights case that the Duggans won and that they still hold.

Earl Duggan ran the ranch until 1979 when he turned it over to his son Robert. Robert ran it until 2003. Robert’s daughter Katherine manages it now. The fourth generation on the same 1300 acres. The same ground Earl’s grandfather walked off a survey in 1887. The operation runs 380 head on what has been expanded over the decades to just under 2,000 acres.

The location agreement from 1958, a single typed page with a production company seal and a dollar figure and two signatures, is in a frame in the ranch house on the south section. It hangs in the kitchen on the wall beside the window that faces the creek drainage because that is where the light is good in the morning and that is where Earl put it in 1959 and where it has been ever since.

The creek drainage is green in a wet year. The agreement is still readable. Both signatures are still clear. If you find yourself on US 90 coming through Del Rio, the Magnolia station is long gone, but the county road south of the highway that runs toward the Duggan property is still there. The land is private and still working and not a landmark, but the family is in the county and the agreement is on the wall and the creek is running this year, which is more than it was doing in 1957.

Some of you know what it means to hold something past the point where holding it made any financial sense because selling it would mean something more than losing money. Some of you know what a water rights case feels like when the outcome is still undecided and the note is coming due. If you know that kitchen, this story is yours.

John Wayne never mentioned the Duggan ranch in any interview about the Alamo production. Not in his accounts of scouting the Texas terrain, which were frequent, because journalists found the physical process of making the Alamo interesting and Wayne was willing to describe it. Not in any profile that covers the period 1957 through 1960, which was a heavily documented stretch of his career because the Alamo was the largest production he had ever undertaken.

And people were paying close attention. The location fee was a line item in a production budget that had many line items. And the scouting trip was one of dozens that year. And Wayne gave no particular emphasis to Val Verde County in any account that was written down or recorded. The one person who told the story in the right order, the gas station, the question, the 40 minutes at the counter, what the question meant and why it was asked, was Earl Duggan, who told it to his son Robert in 1971 when Robert was 18 and had just told

Earl he intended to run the ranch after school rather than go to college. Earl sat him down at the kitchen table and told him about the March morning in 1958 and the man at the counter and the one question the man had asked and what came after it. He told it because he wanted Robert to understand what the ranch had almost been and what it was instead and why those two things were different.

Robert asked what had surprised Earl most about the conversation. Earl said it was not the question itself. He said he’d been called many things by strangers over the years and had developed a reasonable theory of what kind of man produced what kind of response to being called a name. He said, “He agreed with me.

That’s what I didn’t expect. He said I was right about the distance. And he said he’d been borrowing what we built and he meant it. A man who means that kind of thing when he says it, it is a man who’s been thinking about it for a long time before he says it.” He looked at the agreement on the wall. He said, he asked me one question, and the question was real.

That’s the whole of it. If this story is worth keeping, pass it on to someone who would understand what it means. Subscribe so you don’t miss the ones still coming. There are more of them, and they all deserve to be heard. And unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.