Philosopher, Outlaw, Poet, Robber: The History that Wrote RDR2

RDR2 makes rich use of history, featuring characters based on real outlaws, robber barons, and writers of the late 1800s. | Updated 23 July, 2025.

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game. This piece also contains spoilers for the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

A brief note: When I was “taking a break” from this project over the winter holidays, I began looking at possible historical influences on Red Dead Redemption 2. While many of these sources, like Albert Bierstadt, appear almost as cameos in the game, the story of John Sontag and Chris Evans is its foundation. The other influences I’ve identified here shape RDR2‘s retelling of that story, building on characters and themes, but it’s Sontag and Evans who are the most indispensable.
I originally published what follows as one essay in the section on various literary influences. I’ve also now separated it into two pieces for a better reading experience. I’m also placing it at the top of the Table of Contents, as I think it makes the most sense to consider the rest of the allusions with Sontag and Evans in mind (if only I’d known!).

The Fact of Blood

The history of the Wild West is so enshrouded in myth, lies, obfuscations, half-truths, and rumor that once these delicate layers are peeled back, the definite facts they’re mounded on seem scant enough to be scattered by a breeze — if they weren’t weighted with blood and gold. Famous figures like outlaw Emmett Dalton and Wyatt Earp’s wife, Josephine, intertwined the bare facts of their lives with legend. In the attempt to immortalize themselves, they erased themselves: it is not always clear whether something really happened, let alone how it happened or who did it. Speculation is punctuated with certainty, the hazy bloom of the past condensing into the stark facts recorded in early photographs: men, innocent and guilty, died. Men, guilty and innocent, killed them. Rough fingers grip the bodies of the dead by their coatsleeves, push the stiffening limbs and slack faces up for pictures that the townspeople will print and sell for a nickel.

The story of the outlaw who inspired the character of Dutch Van der Linde is well-documented, but its details are just as obscure as those in the ghoulish photographs of the dead: try to look closer, and the image dissolves. Only one book about him is now in print: Prodigal Sons: The Violent History of Christopher Evans and John Sontag. The author, Wallace Smith, was a history professor. One would hope that would mean the book is largely accurate. It isn’t. Smith’s version is heavily influenced by Evans’s adoring eldest daughter, Eva Evans McCullough. Eva lent Smith her unpublished memoir, An Outlaw and His Family, which was skillfully crafted to create sympathy for her father — her attitude, to slightly misquote the song, was “he didn’t do it, but if he’d done it, how could you tell him that he was wrong?” Regardless of their inaccuracies, Eva and Wallace’s portrait of Evans was essential to the creation of both Redemption games.

Christopher Evans was the most unusual of his kind: intelligent, charming, manipulative, a dreamer, a great reader, a skilled outdoorsman, supposedly capable of empathy and charity. Certainly capable of killing. If he couldn’t convince people that he was innocent, he would have had them believe that his crimes were motivated by a hatred of injustice — but how much that’s true, and how much it’s a self-justifying myth, is just one of the parts of his story that’s impossible to discern. This very uncertainty is what made him such a worthy model for Red Dead Redemption‘s great antagonist.

Evans’s friend James Leslie, who also knew statesman William Jennings Bryant, found the two alike. Both men, he said, had “charming personalities, vibrant voices, uncommon abilities, and qualities of leadership” (quoted in Smith, 75). Leslie could just as well have been describing Dutch. What Leslie doesn’t mention is Evans’s complexity. According to Eva Evans, her father once wept over a beloved horse who died after being driven too hard. That tender-heartedness belies her claim that Chris sought out the man who had leased and overworked the horse, and he beat him so badly that the man ended up in the hospital (78). (“I don’t know what Dutch would do if something happened to the Count,” Charles says in Colter.) The cliche that you never really know someone is true enough, but some people are harder to know than others. “Visalia’s Jekyll and Hyde,” the papers once called him.

Evans was born in Canada, near Ottawa, in 1847 to Irish immigrants (Edwards 10). Colm O’Driscoll is one of Dutch’s doubles; no doubt Evans’s heritage inspired his own. Evans said he left home as a teenager, just as Dutch did (Smith 16). Also like Dutch, Evans claimed he never saw his mother again (“Autobiography”).

Evans wasn’t a conman — so far as we know — but he still influenced Dutch becoming one, because he lied constantly, fluidly, always manipulating the narrative. In an autobiography partially published in the San Francisco Examiner, Evans says that the “great struggle for freedom was going on and I left my home and entered the Union army to liberate the slave.” Dutch might tell him he’s laying it on a little thick. According to Smith, Evans told his family he’d joined the army under an assumed name — which, all his life, he refused to reveal to them. It’s difficult to imagine why he would take a false name, or refuse to tell his own family what it was. Presumably, the truth would fracture the image he’d created of himself, one that was nobler, more heroic.

Evans’s claims about his service morphed over time: one story was that he served under Lt. Col. George Custer in his offensives against the Lakota. He couldn’t quite keep his story straight: Smith says the family was led to believe that he deserted on principle after Custer was briefly removed from command. However, that was in 1876, and Evans was working in California by then. Later, he allegedly said that “he felt that the Indians were being wronged and soon lost all interest in fighting them” (Smith 18-19). Like the people Custer persecuted, Rains Fall and his tribe are Lakota. Whether Evans really served or not, his claim to feel for them while actively harming them may have inspired the way Dutch uses the tribe for his own ends.

Wherever he’d really been, Evans ended up in California. There, he met and married Molly Byrd, the namesake of Molly O’Shea. Byrd, like O’Shea, was much younger than her partner: 15 to Evans’s 27 (23). The name “Josephine Byrd” appears on a tombstone outside Coot’s Chapel, which is just one of many indications that Evans served as inspiration for Van der Linde beginning with Red Dead Redemption. (It may or may not be a coincidence that one of Molly’s sisters was Sophia Josephine Byrd, who was a medical doctor. One of Sophia’s daughters also had the middle name Josephine.)

Evans, unlike Dutch, wasn’t a career criminal. A contemporary local reporter wrote that Evans was “one of our most upright and honorable men. He always worked hard and dealt fairly with everybody” (quoted in Smith, 142). No one, then or now, would say that about the wealthy men who all but ruled California. In 1885, years before he’d be accused of any robberies, Evans planned to support his growing family by farming beans. He got a quote for the cost to ship his crop to market from a railway agent. What he didn’t know was that the Southern Pacific Railroad kept “the custom of always increasing freight rates just before harvest time and lowering them when the farmers had nothing more to ship. In this way the corporation could always show the Railroad Commission that the average rate for the year was low” (47). When Evans had grown his crop, he returned to the depot. The agent informed Evans that the transport costs had ballooned. Because he had a binding contract with a firm in Oakland, he was forced to ship the beans at a loss: “Evans was ruined; and the railroad had made another enemy” (41-42).

That was his story, anyway.

The Outlaw Who Inspired Arthur and Hosea

Practices like these made the Southern Pacific Railroad broadly detested. As Smith tells it, it was the injustices of the railroad that brought Evans together with the man who helped to inspire both Arthur Morgan and Hosea Matthews: John Sontag. Sontag was “gentle in manner, soft-spoken, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, six feet tall” (67), which also describes Hosea. He didn’t look like Arthur — except in this particular illustration:

Sontag’s father died when John was only a small child (Koblas 6). Arthur’s father also died when he was young, and Hosea hardly knew his. Supposedly, Sontag’s mother wanted him to be a priest (Smith 66). Sontag wasn’t interested, but that story is still the source of Hosea, in camp dialog, mentioning that he once wanted to be one. Smith writes that Sontag’s character was marked by his “intolerance . . . towards injustice, his defiance of oppression, and his hatred for brutality” (92). He loved horses, and was unfailingly gentle with them. Smith also says that “Like many sensitive men, he resented insults and injuries, and anyone he hated was hated by an expert; by the same token he loved deeply” (91). Shades of this image of Sontag are easy to recognize in both Hosea and Arthur (who are doubles for one another).

In what would prove to be a pivotal decision, Sontag took a job with Southern Pacific as a brakeman. In 1887, he was the victim of a devastating accident: he was going to uncouple two cars when they smashed together, crushing his ribs. His injuries were so severe that initial reporting said he’d died ( “Fatal Railroad Accident”). Later, doctors would find that three of his ribs had been broken and not healed properly, the injury and scarring pushing his heart to the right (“Burial of Sontag”). Smith’s claim that Sontag lost a lung isn’t true, but considering the location of the injury, it probably affected his lung in some manner. This catastrophic lung injury is part of what inspired Hosea’s lung illness and Arthur’s tuberculosis.

Injuries impacting his heart and lungs naturally reduced Sontag’s physical abilities. Southern Pacific refused to find him a job in the company that he could still perform with his disabilities (Smith 48-49). Like Evans, he carried a grudge against them.

How Evans and Sontag met is one of many pieces of their story that isn’t particularly clear. Whatever the truth may be, Smith’s suspiciously poetic version is that a group of railroad workers Evans was chatting with asked him to tell Sontag about the Mussel Slough tragedy, a notorious incident of violence between railroad representatives and white settlers. As they spoke, the two men felt a sort of kinship with each other. Partly to help him out, Chris offered him a place to stay and a job looking after his home and family while he was away: his own job meant he was gone from his home in Visalia, California, for days at a time. Smith argues that Evans became a sort of father figure to the younger Sontag. As with Dutch and Arthur, Evans wasn’t realistically old enough to actually be Sontag’s father. All the same, perhaps the younger man, his own father long dead, looked up to him. John chose to use his stepfather’s surname, Sontag, instead of his biological father’s, Contant. We see father-hunger in Arthur, which may be a reflection of something the writers saw or imagined in Sontag. Whatever the timbre of their relationship, John must have quickly become like part of the Evans family — Molly and Chris named their next child John Christopher.

A Fool’s Game

In 1889, a series of train robberies began in Southern California, setting in motion the events that inspired the central conflict of RDR2. The robbers wore masks, but the men on the trains said that one of the men was tall and thin, the other short and stocky, which matched Sontag and Evans, respectively. At the first robbery, near Pixley, California, the men only managed to steal $400. A year later, two men — almost certainly the same men — robbed a train at Goshen. This time, they supposedly nabbed more than $25,000, although this was probably exaggerated (Edwards 25).

In both of these robberies, the bandits killed, apparently easily and without remorse: Deputy Constable Ed Bentley and railway employee Henry Gabert were murdered in the first holdup; a stowaway named Jonas Christiansen in the second. None of them threatened the robbers; they just didn’t know why the train had stopped and wanted to see what the problem was. In the context of RDR2’s piles of pixel corpses, three people seems like nothing, but these were real men, murdered for a little money.

A few months after the Goshen robbery, Evans and Sontag moved to Modesto and leased a large livery stable. Perhaps they intended for the Goshen robbery to be the last: they could use the money to go straight. Tragically, it wouldn’t work out that way. This was when — supposedly — Evan’s horse died of overexertion and he put a man in the hospital in retaliation. Smith suggests that what happened next was related, and if it was, it illustrates a major theme of RDR2: the futility of revenge. The stable burned down, killing 11 of Sontag and Evans’s horses and destroying their equipment. This fire inspired the line in Arthur’s journal about the one that destroyed his previous diary.

The Modesto blaze also killed someone: 16-year-old Jacob Claypool, whom Evans allegedly let sleep in the barn loft. Eva claimed that he was an orphan and that her father let him sleep in the barn loft to help him out; contemporary records indicate his father was still alive and don’t say who allowed him to sleep there (“Furious Flames!”). The idea that Evans helped an orphaned boy may have shaped Dutch’s relationships with John and Arthur.

The fire was in January 1891. Not long after that, Sontag, Evans, and his family returned to Visalia. They’d had insurance, but not enough to cover their losses (“Furious Flames!”). In September 1891, two men attempted to rob a train at Ceres, but were thwarted by the express messenger and railway detective Len Harris (who got himself shot for his trouble, although happily, he survived). Still, the robbers got away. Their efforts failed, but it wasn’t until the last robbery that Evans and Sontag really got into trouble — but it wasn’t the robbery itself that went wrong.

Off the Tracks

What went wrong was that John Sontag got his brother, George Contant, involved. (George used their biological father’s surname.) Perhaps this is why RDR2 makes a point of narrative beats in which Arthur and Hosea each make flawed judgment calls that propel the gang’s unfolding disaster: Arthur supports Dutch’s desire to go after Angelo Bronte; the bank robbery is Hosea’s plan. According to George’s later testimony, Sontag made a trip home to Minnesota, where he confessed to his brother that he and Evans had been the ones robbing those trains — and asked if he wanted in on it. Contant agreed; the pair robbed a train in Wisconsin of a few thousand dollars. They didn’t kill anyone, and they got away clean. Then Contant went to California with Sontag to meet Evans. Not long after, Evans went to Minnesota, where he and Contant attempted to rob a train together. The messenger thwarted their efforts by hiding the money and saying the train wasn’t carrying any. The failed robbery was bad enough, but worse, the two men drew too much attention in town. Suspicious railroad detectives had them followed — and at this point, they asked the Pinkertons for help (Edwards 35-36).

The notorious agency wrote to one of their people who wasn’t busy cracking the skulls of labor rights organizers and had him follow Contant. Detectives were suspicious, but they had no evidence — that is, until August 1892, when two men robbed a train at Collis, escaping with a few thousand dollars.

Contant — who no doubt contributed to Micah Bell’s DNA — was a loud-mouthed braggart. He blew through the saloons of Visalia, drinking heavily and talking a little too much about the robbery. A suspicious listener tipped off detectives, who brought Contant in for questioning. Soon after that, they returned to the Evans home.

Later, under heavy criticism for what happened, law enforcement officers claimed that they’d just come to get George’s trunk. Maybe that was true, but they didn’t ask for the trunk. They asked for John. One of the Evans girls said he wasn’t there, but the lawmen had just seen him go in. Railroad detective Will Smith pushed aside a room divider and there was John, loaded shotgun at the ready. Chris aimed his revolver at Deputy George Witty.

The lawmen ran. Evans and Sontag waited until they were out of the house, then they opened fire, wounding both men. It isn’t clear why they didn’t take the opportunity to kill them — maybe it was the children watching in the house. Leaving the injured men, they ran.

Naturally, many took this as evidence of their guilt (Smith 127-134; 441).

That night, unwisely, the two men returned to their home. According to Smith, Evans said he’d heard that George was going to be moved by train that night, and would be taken to Fresno to stand trial for the robbery at Collis. He and John were going to rescue him. Molly and Eva, for obvious reasons, thought this was foolish. Evans insisted. Eva claimed he said that “George would be framed and that nothing could save him, once he got into the clutches of the lawyers employed by the Southern Pacific railroad corporation” (136). This probably helped inspire the gang rescuing Sean MacGuire from bounty hunters in “The First Shall Be Last.” As it happened, Contant wasn’t taken to the station, and the men returned to the Evans home — again — alone. But the house, of course, was being watched. Another gunfight broke out, and this one left Deputy Oscar Beaver dead. Sontag and Evans escaped again into the night (137-139).

They fled into the Sierra Nevada mountains, which no doubt helped inspire the Van der Linde gang’s escape into the Grizzlies. One of Evans and Sontag’s early hiding spots was a cave, which may have contributed to the design and name of Beaver Hollow, especially considering the name of the man the outlaws killed as they escaped (147). The cliche “hillbillies” originally living in RDR2‘s Beaver Hollow are called the Murfrees, most likely named for Murfreesboro, Tennessee. When Evans and Sontag fled to the Sierras, some of the people living in the area helped them: hiding them, feeding them, giving them information. At that time, Smith claims, most of the inhabitants of the Sierras were originally from Tennessee (162).

A massive manhunt began, financed by Wells Fargo and Southern Pacific. They offered $5,000 for arrest and delivery of each of the men (140) — the price that Agent Milton tells Arthur is being offered as his bounty (“A Fisher of Men”). Like Arthur and the gang, Evans and Sontag had run-ins with some of the men hunting them. One in particular was fateful: at a remote cabin, Evans killed U.S. Deputy Marshal Vernon C. Wilson, who had reputedly threatened to kill the outlaws without giving them a chance to surrender (Smith 161). Perhaps this influenced Agent Andrew Milton’s actions in “Fleeting Joy,” when he tells his men, “Give them to a count of five, then give ’em everything. Actually … let ’em have it.” (Then again, a cop on a violent power trip is hardly remarkable.)

When Evans shot Wilson, Sontag shot posse member Andrew McGinnis. McGinnis had been on friendly terms with Evans, once. Nor was he the only friend or relative who would join a posse or offer information about Evans’s whereabouts. One has to wonder: if Chris Evans was as wonderful as Wallace Smith and Eva Evans would have us believe, why were so many of the people close to him willing to betray him?

“The Time for Folk Like Us Has Passed”

Despite the obvious risks, Evans and Sontag sometimes sneaked back into Visalia to check on the family. On one such occasion, Eva Evans said that Sontag told her: “I will never get out of this alive. Your dad is always cheerful, and talks hopefully about our future plans. I always agree with him, but I know that my days are numbered” (quoted in Smith, 342). It’s easy to imagine Arthur saying those words during one of the Companion Talks, and Hosea talks about knowing he doesn’t have long to live in several camp interactions.

Sontag wasn’t wrong. The duo dodged the law for over 10 months, but June 11th, 1893, the manhunt ended. Evans and Sontag were ambushed at a run-down cabin. In the course of the gunfight, both men were terribly hurt. A shotgun blast sent a buckshot into Evans’s head near the corner of his eye. Sontag took a brutal shot from the side that shattered his right arm (“The Inquest”); Smith claims it also clipped his lung. Both of these injuries shaped RDR2‘s plot. Evans’s head wound may have inspired the one Dutch receives robbing the trolley station, and Hosea being shot in the right lung was inspired by Sontag’s injury. Unfortunately, Sontag suffered for much longer than Hosea did: so much so that he asked Evans to kill him. Evans couldn’t do it.

But he did abandon him.

In a move that inspired Dutch deserting John Marston at both the bank and train robberies, Evans left the incapacitated Sontag behind so he could escape. The circumstances were different: both men were in real danger of dying. Evans had a wife and seven children to think of.

But he left him. The quixotic, bold hero didn’t stand by his miserably wounded comrade. He crept off in the dark. At dawn, the posse captured Sontag, who was clinging to life, but too badly hurt to move.

U.S. Marshal George Gard, leader of the posse, made comments on the matter that no doubt helped to inform the development of both Arthur and Dutch’s characters:

There is one thing to be said of Sontag — he is worth two of Evans. The papers have been talking as though Evans was the better of the two, but he is not. It was only because there was more of the dash and bluff to him, and he had a family. Sontag was much the gamier man.
The reason we did not go up to the straw pile [where Sontag was hidden] was because we thought that it was Sontag who had run away. We knew that he would never desert Evans, and thought he would shortly return with some means to carry his partner away, and it was for this reason that I watched during the night for his return. If it had been Evans who had been shot and not him do you think he would ever have left Evans? Well; never. He would have stayed there and died before he would have deserted him.

Quoted in the Los Angeles Herald, 15 June 1893

Even half-dead, probably barely aware of what he was saying, Sontag kept trying to protect Evans: Chris hadn’t been shot in the fight, he lied. He went on: “Evans regretted the Young’s cabin fight. He never wanted to kill anybody except blood-money detectives. Oh, no, you never will catch him. . . . When Chris fired at the officer I thought his gun went off accidentally” (“Caught in Death”).

Though he ran, Evans didn’t get away. He tried to hide at his in-laws’ house, but they turned him in. They had little choice: besides the buckshot in his head, Evans was badly shot in both arms. Once in custody, he had to have his lower left arm amputated. His right eye was blinded.

At several pivotal moments in RDR2, we see this last injury represented. In the first two of these scenes, Arthur is alone with Dutch — Evans — except for one other person, who’s a minor character. Despite the fact that they aren’t very narratively important, each of these characters is featured in a particularly striking shot that draws attention to their partial blindness.

The first is Thomas in “Country Pursuits.” His name is an allusion: Chris had a twin brother named Thomas Evans. At the beginning of the mission, Arthur sides with Dutch against Hosea and agrees to kill Angelo Bronte, sealing the gang’s doom. (Chris once assaulted a man named Alexander Bigelow — initials A. B. like Angelo Bronte — while Thomas held a gun on his partner. Boatman Thomas’s role is similar; an accomplice who doesn’t directly commit violence himself.) Thomas gives Arthur a lingering, unreadable look that clearly takes Arthur slightly aback; note his uncomfortable body language as Thomas walks away.

The second shot is of Gloria in “A Kind and Benevolent Despot.” Like Evans, Gloria is poor, covetous of wealth, and violent. She has a cataract in her right eye. Dutch’s murder of her is a turning point in Arthur’s relationship with Dutch, one of few moments when he genuinely questions his mentor.

The last time Chris Evans’s blinded eye is represented in RDR2, the player will either see it twice or not at all. In order for it to happen, we have to make the most nonsensical of our possible choices: earn high honor, and then turn back for the money instead of helping John escape. If the player does so, Arthur will slash Micah Bell across the left eye with his knife, an injury that will appear on Micah’s corpse even if he never received the injury in life.

The last action the player will take in the game’s story is killing Micah Bell. As with Thomas and Gloria, the only people in the scene are Dutch, the player character, and the character with the injured eye (with apologies to Sadie, who’s been dismissed from the action). Right before the game activates Dead Eye, Micah turns his head away from Dutch, toward John, revealing that scarred-over eye. As the credits soon show, Micah’s death is how Ross tracks the Marstons to Beecher’s Hope.

Because of when they appear, it’s tempting to think of these allusions to Chris Evans as warnings, but they’re more like signposts, marking the fatefulness of the decisions Dutch, Arthur, and John have made. They show up when it’s too late. The decisions have already been made, the tragedy written.

Despite the severity of Evans’s injuries, John Sontag’s had a more dire outcome. The shot that killed him needn’t have been fatal. The autopsy found that it was his shattered arm that killed him, the splintered bone shredding his flesh, allowing tetanus and blood poisoning to set in. That’s why the doctor who treats Arthur is named Joseph R. Barnes, for Joseph K. Barnes, one of the doctors who treated President James Garfield after he was shot. Garfield and Sontag both died not because the bullets hit organs or arteries, but because of infection. “Watching” from the age of antibiotics, the feeling of witnessing the deaths of Garfield, Sontag, or Arthur isn’t one of inevitability, but of stupid futility.

Evans seems to have rarely spoken of Sontag again. He spoke to reporters with apparent relish, but he didn’t say what Sontag meant to him, or what he was like, or whether he ever missed him. All he said was: “John Sontag died on the 3rd of July, asserting his innocence to the last, and was buried in the Catholic Cemetery on the 4th, where one lone cedar throws its shadows o’er his grave” (“Chris Evans’ Autobiography”). He repeated that image of the lone cedar and the grave in a note to reporter Henry Bigelow. It’s canned sentiment; nothing Evans is giving any real thought to. Maybe the men were never as close as Smith portrays, but within his narrative, this cold disconnect creates the same sense of unease that Dutch’s behavior towards the end of RDR2 does.

It’s hard not to wonder if they ever really meant it.

Prison Breaks, Failed and Not

While Evans and Sontag were roughing it in the mountains, George Contant was tried for the robbery at Collis. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

After the rest of the gang was captured, George made an attempt to escape from Folsom Prison that inspired RDR2‘s “Visiting Hours,” and, to a lesser degree, “Blessed Are the Meek?” According to contemporary journalism, before Evans and Sontag were captured, the prison warden had received “reliable information” that they planned to storm the prison and break George out (“Desperate Thugs”). That’s the piece that contributed to Arthur (John Sontag) breaking Micah (George Contant) out of jail, which is one reason “Blessed Are the Meek?” is set in part of the map based on California. It’s also why Micah tells Arthur that they’re “brothers” in that particular mission.

Obviously, Evans and Sontag weren’t available to help Contant. However, like John Marston, George had outside help: someone smuggled some guns to a group of the prisoners. Like Marston’s, Contant’s escape attempt occurred when the convicts were on work duty. And just as Arthur Morgan did, the convicts used a guard as a human shield. Unfortunately for them, their attempt failed when the guard broke away from the man holding the gun to his head, exposing the prisoners to the guards’ fire. They killed three convicts. Contant and several others were badly injured.

Down and out, George Contant decided to testify against Chris Evans. In exchange, he asked that the railroad and the express company support his life sentence being commuted, which they both agreed to and honored (Edwards 110). This betrayal helped to shape Micah Bell’s character. In fairness to George — who probably doesn’t deserve the comparison to Hitler that Wallace Smith makes — Evans was known to have killed several law officers; chances of his acquittal were slim (Smith 310-311). Although George testified that he, his brother, and Evans had robbed trains, Evans was never tried for the train robberies themselves. He was tried for the death of U.S. Deputy Marshal Vernon Wilson. He admitted to the killing, but argued he was defending himself from wrongful arrest. Contant’s testimony showed that Evans killed because he was guilty and unwilling to go to prison. He was found guilty of the murder, but it seems the jury wasn’t totally unsympathetic: instead of being sentenced to be hanged, Evans was handed a sentence of life imprisonment (340-341).

He had other plans.

False Gods, False Worshippers

The last of the men involved with Evans who helped inspire Micah Bell III is Ed Morrell. Morrell met Evans when he was in jail on a misdemeanor charge. Smith writes: “Morrell had developed an intense admiration for the older man. There are men who are naturally hero-worshippers; Morrell seems to have belonged to this type” (343). So does Micah. He kept a piece of Dutch’s wanted poster in his camp, and even at the end of “Red Dead Redemption” — when he must already know where the Blackwater money is stashed — he’s desperate for Dutch to go with him. In short, he’s a fan. Also like Micah, Morrell was prone to bragging to the point of telling outright falsehoods.

The final major similarity is that Morrell helped Evans out of a tight spot, just like Micah helped Dutch prior to the game’s beginning. The Evans family was able to order Chris meals while he was in jail awaiting sentencing. Using a false name, Morrell got a job as a server in the restaurant they ordered food from. Late in December, 1893, either Morrell or Mrs. Evans smuggled Chris a gun. Either way, Evans and Morrell held the jailers and gunpoint and made their escape back into the mountains. In Evans’s relationship with Morrell, in Dutch’s with Micah, there’s the sense of a fall: Sontag was family. Morrell was a follower. Sontag wasn’t innocent, but he at least appeared to have some sense of principle. Morrell was a sycophant, self-aggrandizing. When Evans first escaped with Sontag, some still believed them to be innocent — or they supported them anyway. When he escaped with Morrell, he’d been convicted of a crime, and it was one to which he admitted.

Deputies once came close to capturing the duo, but a blizzard blew in, and Evans and Morrell were able to escape (366-367). No doubt this event helped to inspire the beginning of RDR2. Smith claims that detectives finally had to stoop to subterfuge: Evans was lured back home with a false story about his youngest son being seriously ill. (The detectives of RDR use Dutch’s son to capture him, too, albeit in a different sense.) Like Dutch, Evans was prone to accusing people of betraying him rather than admitting he’d made a mistake: “[Evans] said he had once again been led into a trap and been betrayed” (“Evans is Again in Jail”). However, according to contemporary sources, Evans only came back to Visalia to get cash so he could leave the country: his plan was to go to Australia, one of the locations Dutch names before deciding on Tahiti (“Evans Captured” [Daily Delta]).

While he was home, Evans threatened to kill two of his brothers-in-law who he said had betrayed him. The threats were among his better behavior: a neighbor had been helping to look after the younger Evans children, and when her husband reported Evans and Morrell to the authorities, Evans threw her into a bedroom and kicked her in the ribs. Morrell had to stop him from kicking her again (“Evans Captured” [Daily Delta]). Evans had been violent in the course of his crimes. He had killed men. But hurting an unarmed woman out of sheer malice is a shocking fracture in the face he showed the world. Reading about it feels a lot like seeing Dutch kill Gloria.

With the house surrounded, Evans and Morrell surrendered. Sontag and Evans had managed to evade their pursuers for over 10 months in the mountains; Evans and Morrell didn’t make it 10 weeks. When Sontag and Evans were each brought in, there were crowds at the jail, but they were curious, not malicious. Evans and Morrell had to be spirited away to escape a lynch mob. Eva told the papers, “We told [papa] that Morrell would not stand by him like John. John would fight, in spite of what papa said about his new partner being better than Sontag” (“What Might Have Been”).

Unlike Dutch, Evans never had to make a choice between Sontag and Morrell. You still have to wonder if Evans ever realized, in the gray hours alone in his cell, that he had valued the wrong man.

Rage Against the Dying

Evans remained in prison until 1911, when he was paroled through the efforts of his family and due to his poor health. The papers wrote, “A blue-clad guard standing on the wall shifted his rifle long enough to wave the paroled man a God-speed” (Jungmeyer). The game echoes this moment with heavy irony in “Goodbye, Dear Friend,” with Colm once again as Dutch’s double.

Like Dutch — unlike most outlaws — Evans died an old man. On the surface, the circumstances of their passing are disparate: Evans died in a hospital bed; Dutch throws himself from a cliff. But the men shared an adherence to self-determination that puts their passings in parallel: Evans used to tell Eva, “They will never kill me” (Smith 342). Dutch echoes him when he tells the gang, “They won’t catch me.” For once, they were both telling the truth. Not getting killed or caught was little enough to accomplish among all their failures. Stealing didn’t redress the wrongs of the railway or the government, and they gained nothing by it. Their victories were Pyrrhic; selfish.

Before his death in 1917, Evans published a book, Eurasia, describing a Utopian society. Like Dutch, whatever his crimes, however little he truly cared about other people, he dreamed of a better world. Or said he did. That’s the thing about dreams: no one can know them but the dreamer. If they aren’t reflected in action, they’re lost in the wind.

How much Dutch ever really cared about Arthur is never really clear, but in the end, he shoots Micah. And Chris Evans kept a promise he made to John Sontag: he died Catholic, as he swore he would, one of those long, lonely nights the men spent together in the woods, with only each other for company.

Epitaph for a badman: once, he was true.

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A Note on Sources

If you wish to read about the outlaw duo further, the best source is Harold L. Edwards’s Train Robbers & Tragedies, which is sadly out of print. It was published by the Tulare County Historical Society; it might be worth politely expressing your interest in seeing it republished.

As I mention early on, Wallace Smith’s (and Eva Evans’s) account of the Evans and Sontag story is heavily biased. Eva was fiercely loyal to her father and wanted him to be remembered as a kind of noble victim; it was only in her private life she was willing to admit that he was guilty (O’Connell). Contemporary journalistic sources also sometimes sold a vision of Evans and Sontag as persecuted men, frequently shaped stories for dramatic effect, and printed rumor and hearsay. Everyone, from lawmen to journalists, told their own self-serving stories about what happened, whether to aggrandize or exonerate themselves. Eva Evans’s claims about John Sontag, whom she knew for only about 5 years when she was 11 to 16, should be treated with particular suspicion.

I’ve tried to verify the facts about Sontag and Evans presented here — and left out some of Smith’s more dubious claims, if they’re unrelated to the Redemption games — but my time and budget are limited. For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter: RDR and RDR2‘s writers used myths just as much as facts to write their stories.

Bibliography