Richie Coulon Devillier on Family

“My grandparents, Edward and Helen, lived in the house where my wife and I now live. My Aunt Lydia inherited the house and five acres when my grandparents died and she agreed to sell it to us in 1994, after we had leased it for a year. We’ve lived there ever since; the house was actually built the year I was born in 1963. The original home my dad and his siblings grew up in was a frame home on the same five acres. In the ‘50s, my grandparents retired from farming and ranching and purchased 450 acres in Ingram, Texas. My Uncle Louis’ 1100-acre hunting ranch was nearby. My grandparents built a beautiful home there and my dad took over the farming and ranching and moved into the house my grandparents vacated when they moved to the Hill Country. After a few years, my grandparents just couldn’t stand being away from family, so grandpa asked dad, ‘Can we come back home?’” laughed Richie. “So, they worked out a deal, and if I remember correctly, grandpa loaned dad the money to build a home over by the interstate and my grandparents moved back into their old home. They then proceeded to build the home that Wendy and I live in now, using rock brought from their ranch in Ingram. One of their neighbors, Mr. Beavers, was a stone mason and they hired him to bring a crew down here and hauled the rock from Ingram and built the house where we live now. The original frame house was moved into Winnie. My grandparents also built a home in Afton, Wyoming, which is about 50 miles south of Jackson Hole. Grandpa and Grandma both were avid hunters and fishers, in fact sometimes Grandma would outdo Grandpa,” chuckled Richie. “They loved to travel, loved the outdoors and hunting and fishing. 

 "When the first suburban came out, they bought one and drove to Alaska for a hunting and fishing trip. There was no highway back then, just a gravel road mostly following the pipeline they were building." 

Pictured above: Richard Coulon Devillier

“When I was growing up, my first memories are of big family, we had a big extended family in the area, mostly all in agriculture. There were lots of children, so lots of unpaid labor, but we got free room and board, so we got something out of the deal, “laughed Richie. “It was a great way to grow up. During harvest we would all get together and help each other harvest the crops, going from farm to farm as the crops matured. There might be 13-14 different combines out there and a bunch of us rugrats running around on the grain carts and rice trucks, but to us kids it was like a party. This went on for a lot of years but as we got older technology started changing, the harvesting equipment got a lot bigger and more efficient, so it didn’t take as much equipment to harvest 300-400 acres. So, the tradition of all of the families working together kind of came to an end and that is one thing that I lament, that my children didn’t get that experience, I wouldn’t trade that way of life for the world. Being a product of it, I don’t believe there’s any better environment for a child to grow up in. But that was my life so I might be a little biased,” he said with a smile. “There might be a better way, but I haven’t seen it. Growing up in my generation there were so many more people involved in agriculture, because it took more people. Now, technology is changing every day and becoming more efficient, and the genetics of crops, and fertilizers help us to do a lot more with a lot less labor, a lot less equipment, and a lot less footprint. The yields have gone up, so we are able to produce a lot more on less acreage. There’s not that many people farming anymore and each generation we get further and further away from that lifestyle. Whether good or bad, I happen to think its bad, but regardless of your opinion it is different and it makes the world different. In my opinion, the family unit is not strong like it used to be, and that is the root of a lot of the problems in this world, that unit is not lauded and its not desired. Progress happens and you’re not going to stop it, things change. The American dream is not what it used to be, in fact I’d like to go out and ask college students what the American dream is, in their opinion, because I don’t think that’s instilled in our children anymore,” Richie said sadly. “I don’t think it’s a good thing,” he added, “Our family structure has changed in such a way that it’s really done a lot of damage. I hope we can get back to some of the values that were instilled in our generations growing up,” he sighed.

“Growing up as a kid with all of my cousins around me, we were all really close. We were all the same family but from different branches, different clans. All of the family leaders were big personalities, every one of them larger than life. Growing up we used to go over to grandma and grandpa’s, the house we’re living in now, and I loved to visit with them and spend the night. But there were strict rules, if the weather was on, grandpa was in his favorite chair, and you knew not to make a peep. Same thing with the Lawrence Welk Show,” laughed Richie. “But the women and men alike had a great sense of humor and loved to be pranksters. I think that comes from their Louisiana heritage. I just went to Raine, Louisiana to pick up some parts for a land plane and it was like stepping back in time. I hear the accent, my grandparents could speak French, Cajun French, not the Parisian French. I really lament the fact that I did not learn that. One of the traditions we had was we had kinfolks come from Louisiana every year to go rabbit hunting. They would bring their camper trailers, the women, children, the whole families and set up four or five trailers around the shop. We would go out rabbit hunting every night and we would have piles of rabbits, hundreds of them every night. I can’t hardly find a rabbit anymore and we might be responsible for that,” he laughed. “It might not have been all our fault, but we put a dent in them, yeah, we put a dent in them,” he chuckled. “They would cook, and sing, and play musical instruments, oh my gosh, I’m starving thinking about the pot roasted rabbit and stuff like that. You don’t see that anymore, that’s a lost art too. But go back to Louisiana, like I said, it’s like stepping back in time, they still live like that. That was just part of the family tradition growing up and I miss it. Don’t get me wrong, I feel blessed each and every day, but I do miss those times and I do hate that this generation and future generations won’t get to experience that,” he said wistfully. 

Richard Coulon Devillier and Grandson McCain

“In the ‘70s, my dad, along with farming, was raising registered Brangus cattle. Along the way, he got brucellosis, or “bangs” in his herd. They had an eradication program and you had to pull blood on your herd and if they tested positive, they were quarantined for a year. Dad went through about three bouts of that back-to-back, economically it was just cleaning his clock, so that pushed him out of the cattle business. He sold all of the cattle and most of the horses and bought a bulldozer. We tore down every barbwire fence we had and started planting 300-400 acres of rice every year. He also planted 1,000 acres of soybeans and did really well with it for a several years. Soybeans did well in Chambers County back then until disease go into the soil and tanked the soybean farming. My dad had a huge love for cutting horses, he really had a passion for that. He bought a horse named “Joe Duhon” and he bought him to run on the track. He wasn’t all that fast on the track, so dad brought him home and made a cow horse out of him. He had an uncanny ability as a cutting horse, he would hold a cow just naturally, so dad trained him for that. He sent him to Matlock Rose for training and Matlock was the apex trainer back in the day, one of the finest. In 1968, when dad still owned Joe Duhon, he finished second in the state and fifth in the world. He won more than one buckle, but the one he got from the South Texas Cutting Association in ’68 or ’69, my son McCain still wears every day, every day to this day,” emphasized Richie. “He treasures it and so do I. Once dad retired he bought a few horses and would go almost every day to Derk Harmsem’s arena. Derk had a trainer there who trained cutting horses and dad had him do some training for him. I took McCain out there when he was about a year old and dad put him on the horse with him. That was the first time he’d ever sat on a horse, and McCain just had an affinity for riding from an early age. He ended up stealing a couple of my horses,” laughed Richie with obvious pride for his son. “I love my cattle and I love all the animals I care for, but horses are just different. Horses and man are almost kindred, they’re like parts of our soul, they just bond with you.”

“McCain grew up on horses, cattle, and tractors from a very early age, because my wife Wendy was a flight attendant and would be gone two or three days at a time on a flight. So, from the time McCain was a few months old, I was Mr. Mom, and I loved it. My mom helped a lot when I would be gone all day and couldn’t take McCain with me, but most of the time McCain was on a tractor or a horse with me. He grew up with a love for the ranching/farming life. After he graduated from high school, he enrolled at Tarleton State College in Stephenville, which is geared towards cowboys. When Imelda hit he insisted on coming home to help. He began riding some horses we had and training some outside horses. He felt a real passion for the work he was doing and decided to reach out to some cutting horse trainers around the Fort Worth area. Russ Westfall of Granbury, Texas contacted him and told him he had a job with him if he wanted it. I was really proud of him, mostly because he did it all himself. He worked there for two years, and it was hard work, working from three o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night. He mucked stalls for months before he ever got an opportunity to start training. But it was a great experience for him, even the tough times, and it enabled him to meet the network of people in the horse business. 

“That’s how he met Gregg Garvie from Calgary, Alberta. Gregg specializes in starting young colts for the performance people. The Garvies spent a couple winter weeks in Granbury two years ago; after spending time with McCain they invited him to come to Calgary and learn and train with Gregg. I helped McCain buy a little two-year-old filly named Martha Divine (Ash) through Hayden Upton for $15,000 and he took her to Canada and trained her. McCain just sold her for the amazing sum of $172,000 in 2023 at the Western Bloodstock sale during the NCHA Futurity at Will Rogers Coliseum, Fort Worth. My only regret is that Dad and Mom weren’t there to see him succeed at the skill he learned from my dad,” Richie sadly proclaimed.

“We knew the cause of the flooding that led to our troubles,” said Richie emphatically. “When you see the photos of the freeway after Harvey hit with the eastbound lane dry as can be and the westbound side looks like a bay, the cause of the problem is irrefutable. We were wiped out, we didn’t have flood insurance because we’re not in a flood plain, we still aren’t. The state has acknowledged there is a problem and they are going to get it fixed. They’ve opened up the barriers in some places, and that’s fine . . . but we still don’t know if it’s going to work or not. Before they finished the stretch of interstate in front of our property in 2000, the interstate bridged over the bayous. The change they made is they boxed it in with culverts, and they are woefully undersized,” Richie ascertained.  “I have all of the plans and studies from before the project was completed. The engineers are in agreement that the slope coefficient is wrong, and the sizing is wrong, so the water slows down when it hits the culvert. When the water slows down the sediment falls out. This afternoon I am going to go take pictures of all the culverts to show the sedimentation build up, I’ve done that every year since Harvey hit and I take them to TX-Dot and ask them to please clean the culverts and ditches. The culverts are undersized already and now they’re half-plugged up and there were good-sized trees growing in some of the ditches right next to the feeder roads.  Well, now they’ve cleaned out the feeder road ditches, and they’ve cleaned out one culvert by Stevie’s house, but not completely. They pulled out over 100 dump truck loads from that one ditch crossing underneath the interstate and they’re still not finished. There are still four other ditches and tributaries they haven’t touched since the work was completed in 2000, they’ve never maintained their assets,” exclaimed Richie. 

“When Harvey hit I was like a zombie, I didn’t know what to do, it was so surreal. Where do you start? You start taking one bite at a time. We were told it was a Biblical event and would never happen again. We got through that, we rebuilt, then two years later Imelda hit, now there’s no denying there’s a problem. I had picked up some friends the night before and brought them to our house thinking we were going to be okay and once again I stepped into 23-inches of water when I woke up. But I felt completely different when Imelda hit, I woke up with a sense of conviction that we were not going to stop until this was fixed. I still have the same resolve every morning when I wake up, it’s going to happen, we will not stop until it is fixed!” Richie exclaimed with certainty. “The government can take from us if they deem it is for the better good, but they cannot steal from us. When the government takes from its people and doesn’t pay for it that’s tyranny and we’re not going to let that happen here.  The older I get the more I’ve learned to recognize when God speaks to me, and I know He has spoken to me about this and I’m not going to ignore it.  After Harvey, Stevie and I didn’t get anywhere talking to TX-Dot. They just said they’re not in the flood business, they were in the road building business. If their roads flood they just build them higher, so we started looking for attorneys to bring a suit against the state of Texas. The lawyers agreed we had a pretty good case, but we would have to pay them and we had no money . . . we had been wiped out! A dear attorney friend of ours pointed us to Burns Charest Law Firm which had just won the Addicks-Barber flooding case in Houston against the Army Corps of Engineers. They believed we had a good case and took it in 2020 upon contingency. We sued in State Court under the Texas Constitution and also the fifth amendment under the United States Constitution. Everything went our way and then Texas asked it to be removed to Federal Court. I raise cows, I don’t know much about the law, but I’m smart enough to know you hire the best attorneys you can afford, and we have those, we have the best of the best and they are fresh off a big win. Our attorneys agreed to move the case to Federal Court and the magistrate of said court, Judge Andrew M. Edison ruled in our favor on everything, then the state of Texas appealed to the fifth circuit stating we didn’t have standing to sue under the United States Constitution as there was not a vehicle that allowed the State of Texas to be sued under the fifth amendment. None of that has ever made any sense to me at all. If the Constitution is not to protect every citizen, then who was it written for? I’m a staunch supporter of public property rights and the fifth amendment is very clear that the government cannot take private property without cause and if there is a cause they must compensate the landowner. Private property ownership, entrepreneurship, and agriculture is what made this county, this state. What fires me up and aggravates me without end is that the state of Texas, MY state of Texas, which in my opinion is the greatest state in the Union to grow up in (and I still feel that way) were trying to do this to me!  We went to the Fifth Circuit and they agreed with the state of Texas, so we appealed for an en banc hearing, which is the whole battery of judges and they denied it, so we had the wind knocked out of us again,” he exclaimed.

“The Institute for Justice, who routinely watch the cases in the appellate courts, contacted us and said they felt the ruling against us was wrong and they would like to petition to take our case before the Supreme Court. This group is pro bono funded by donors and the trial would cost us nothing. Praise the Lord for people who are willing to fund situations like this. I.J. took the ball and ran with it and they are a brilliant group of people. We went and spoke with them a couple of times about the case, and we saw the inner workings of how they put the case together. They would run mock trials in a courtroom. It was amazing and we were extremely lucky and blessed to have them in our corner.” Wendy and Richie were invited to a “meet and greet” conference in California by the Institute of Justice to meet their donors. The morning before the conference was to begin, Richie received a text at 6:00 a.m. from one of their attorneys back home congratulating them because the Supreme Court had granted their petition. The news was like divine timing, it couldn’t have come at a better time.” 

Laken, Loxley, Marc, and Parker Pullin

“When Wendy and I had McCain, we had made a conscious decision that we only would have one child. Personally, the older I got the more I regretted that decision. I believe children are God’s gift to us, but I also feel like they are our gift back to God. That’s my duty; my purpose. In 2020, I was riding on my tractor, working the fields and I’m having a conversation with God, apologizing for not doing my job. I told God, ‘I repent we made that decision; we have a wonderful child and we are totally blessed, but I’m sorry.’ I even discussed it with McCain and asked him if he felt cheated because we hadn’t given him a sibling. He nonchalantly replied no, he was okay with it. Two months later, Wendy and I rented a house on Bolivar Peninsula and were staying there with our son, McCain who was 19 at the time. It was Spring Break weekend, and I had some work to do on the ranch so I would leave them at the beach and drive back and forth to do the work. While I was working at the ranch in Winnie I got a call from one of my cousins, Kandy McBride, and she was nervously hemming and hawing and finally she said, ‘I don’t know how else to say this, but I have to tell you what’s happened. My kids have an Ancestry account, and this young man has reached out to them. He says he thinks you might be his father.’ I laughed in disbelief and told her there’s no way. She told me he was 37 or 36 and I did the math quickly in my head and my alarm went up a little. She said the guy is very nice, and he said he didn’t want anything, he just wanted to know, not just for himself, but for his three children. She said he told her his mother’s name was Carolina. I said no, I don’t know any Carolina. So, I rachet back down to low alert level and let it kind of roll off my back. I head back to Bolivar and Kandy texts me that she forgot to tell me, he said his mom went by Nina. I immediately go to DEFCON ONE,” laughed Richie. “I thought, this is a real possibility. I still have to go back down to the beach and try to tell my wife, this is what landed in my lap today. I did, my wife is an angel and a saint who has saved my life in more ways than one over the years and hopefully will continue to do so. We talked about it and prayed about it and decided he deserved to know and so did I. I contacted him and he assured me he was not trying to blow my life up and we both agreed we needed to know.” 

Marc & McCain

“When I got the results back, they were like 99.5% positive and there was no denying it at that point. Even without the results, if you look at him, there’s no doubt, he never looked like anyone in his family he grew up with. Actually, that is what started his search, his friends would question him and tell him he didn’t look like anyone in his family. He started questioning his mom and she finally told him. We met in person and all I can say is he’s our son, he’s a wonderful human being and a great father; it’s uncanny how quickly we bonded.  He and McCain knit together so beautifully . . . they’re brothers. He has another brother and sister and a father who raised him and I’m beholden to him for raising such a fine young man. I’m sad that I missed out on his years growing up, but God has His reasons for everything, and I definitely trust them.  After we found out for sure we had a big crawfish boil at the house so the family could all meet him. What is odd is, he was not raised around me, but he has my mannerisms, my animated way of talking, God put that in our genes,” Richie expressed with amazement. “My mom got to meet Marc, but I regret that my dad never had a chance to know him. Marc looks a lot like my dad and dad would have been over the moon about him. This has done nothing but strengthen and cement my faith because, truth be known, I’m the last person who deserves this blessing, but here it is, we have truly been blessed by God.” sighed Richie from a heart of genuine gratitude.