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Evans and
Sontag constantly moved from one place to another and, since they knew the
mountain trails, it had the effect of exhausting the manhunters who were
following them. About a month after the battle in Visalia, the Apache trackers
picked up the trail that pointed in the direction of Sampson Flat where Evans
had his mining claim. Wilson's posse was getting low on food and the men were
very tired. Making their way to Jim Young's cabin one early morning they saw
smoke curling from the chimney and began to anticipate a breakfast that
consisted of something more than bacon and flapjacks.
Evans and Sontag had come to Young's place about a
half hour earlier and were preparing breakfast when Sontag, sitting by the
window with his rifle over his knees, suddenly exclaimed, "Look Chris, there
they are. It looks like that Wilson fellow that Eva told us about." Evans
peered out the window and sure enough there were a dozen men sauntering toward
the cabin, some walking and others still riding their horses. There was only
one door in the cabin and the only windows which might offer escape were in
plain sight of the posse. There could be no thought of surrender: to offer
themselves to the law and especially to the Southern Pacific was unthinkable.
So they waited, guns drawn, while the men of the posse, thinking of breakfast,
approached the cabin.
The men were now walking
and leading their horses with Wilson in the lead. When Wilson was within 10 or
12 feet of the cabin, Evans blasted through the window and the marshall from
Arizona fell dead. At the same moment, Sontag pushed open the door, his gun
blazing, and a deputy by the name of McGinnis from Modesto, and erstwhile
friend of Evans, fell to the ground badly wounded. The men of the posse
scattered and fell behind whatever protection they could find. Evans stepped
out of the cabin door an McGinnis begged for his life: "Don't kill me, Chis.
I'm already out of it."
Evans meant to concede
to his pleading as he turned his back to fire a shot at an Apache who had sent
a bullet singing past his head. But at that moment a blast came from behind him
and a bullet creased the side of his forehead. Staggering a little and with
blood gushing into his eye, Evans turned and saw McGinnis propped up on an
elbow preparing to make another shot. Chris Evans said not one word to the man
who had been his friend in other times and whose life he had just spared -- he
simply sent a shotgun blast into his head.
After
about five minutes of gunplay, with two men dead and two or three wounded, the
battle at Young's cabin was over. Evans and Sontag escaped through a corn patch
and were not seen again by officers of the law for many months. The Apache
trackers suddenly got homesick and after collecting their wages in Visalia, set
out for Arizona. The people of the valley got fresh exciting news and their
respect for the animal prowness of Evans and Sontag in defending themselves
measurably increased.
There was another flurry
of passionate intent to apprehend the outlaws and the mountains crawled with
manhunters, so much so that any man with a beard, crawling out of the brush,
was in danger of being shot at -- perhaps by a man with only a mustache and a
desire to collect the $10,000 reward with the Southern Pacific had benevolently
proffered.
The winter came to the mountains and
only Evans and Sontag -- of the hunters and the hunted -- were prepared for the
rigors of winter endurance. There were several places they kept as hideouts and
these places were constantly supplied with clothes, guns, ammunition and food
by friends and members of the Evans family. Deer and quail were plentiful and
they had no trouble keeping meat on hand. The menu for their Thanksgiving Day
dinner they sent down to the valley by messenger and it was published in
several valley newspapers. At Christmas time they slipped into Visalia and
enjoyed a clandestine celebration with Mrs. Evans and the children.
Spring came, and then early summer. The posses were
out again as a result of the pressures brought to bear by those interests of
law and order who had lost so much face in their failure to bring the fugitives
to justice. It was a day in June of this new year of 1893 that the outlaws came
upon a surprise situation that was the episode at Young's cabin in reverse.
This time it was the posse, resting over the weekend, that was ensconced in a
cabin at Stone Corral. And this time it was the fugitives who came sauntering
at eventide toward the cabin. The battle which ensued would have gone down as
the greatest of all heroics had it not been for the stigma of guilt which by
now had been placed upon Evans and Sontag as murderers and vicious and callous
offenders of California's new law abiding self-image.
It was at the widow Baker's otherwise vacant cabin, 18
miles north of Visalia, that the members of the posse were resting, most of
them sleeping, when the sentry at the window announced in an urgent voice that
two men were approaching. The sun had already set and it was a balmy June
evening. When the approaching men were near enough to be identified as the
bandits, one of the men of the posse let go with his rifle and the bullet hit
Evans in the left arm. Evans spun around, dropped his gun and fell to the
ground. "John," he said, loud enough for the posse to hear. "I'm done in." But
he wasn't nearly as "done in" as he thought. He scrambled behind a low straw
pile where Sontag had already dropped himself when the shot was fired.
During the next hour there was more than a hundred
shots exchanged. Sontag was fatally wounded but was still alive at dawn when
the posse felt safe enough to close in on him to make the capture. Evans
suffered severe wounds -- his right eye was permanently blinded by a buckshot
which entered his eye and lodged in his skull and his left arm was dangling at
his side. He escaped in the darkness after refusing Sontag's plea for merciful
death and after covering his dying companion with straw. Sontag was too weak to
lift the gun to his own head -- though there is evidence that he tried several
times. Evans, having lost a frightful amount of blood and suffering severe pain
in his mangled arm, as well as other bad wounds, staggered seven miles to the
house of a friend, arriving at daybreak.
He
washed his wounds at the horse trough, walked silently upstairs and crawled
into an empty bed without the residents of the house being awakened. The
residents found blood at the water pump later in the morning and, searching the
premises, found Evans in bed -- weak and dreadfully emaciated.
The presence of Evans in the home was an embarrassment
to the residents and they pled with him to give himself up. Evans consented
only when he received assurance the reward money would be given to Mrs. Evans.
Word was sent to Visalia that Evans was ready to surrender and a posse was sent
to the Perkin's ranch. I don't know who got the reward money but it is certain
that Mrs. Evans didn't get it.
Evans was lodged
in the county jail at Visalia where Sontag had been brought a few hours
earlier. Sontag, with the help of physicians, endured his condition for several
days before he died. Evans had a rapid recovery but had to face the remainder
of his life with one eye and one arm.
At this
point this story should be moving swiftly toward a conclusion. And so it will.
But in reality the fugitive life of Chris Evans is only half told. For he was
taken to Fresno, convicted of murder and was waiting for the sentence which he
knew would be at least a term in prison for the rest of his natural life. With
the help of an accomplice he broke out of jail and escaped to the mountains,
and for another hair-raising half year the ridiculous episodes of the hunters
and the hunted were re-enacted. Then on a day the following spring in 1884, he
was lured to his home in Visalia by what was purported to be a message from the
family indicating that one of his children were very ill. He was again captured
and sentenced to life at Folsom prison.
California has always been a maverick in the family of
American states. It declared itself a member of that family by creating a
constitution in 1848 and assumed that Congress would fall over itself to
welcome it with legal adoption. But Congress had multiple interests to consider
at the time and many months went by before California was admitted to the
Union. So the state was forced to pick up the pieces of the old Mexican regime
and fashion for itself a governmental structure which was adapted to its orphan
needs. Expediency and dispatch, the shortest distance to the desired goal --
that was the California way.
So California in
its adolescence was a healthy host to individualism. Its adolescent vitality
produced its rough-and-tumble growth until the turn of the century, and then
individualism came of age. The turn of the century marked the vital point
between the adolescent and the adult state. The old phased out and the new
phased in.
The phasing-out and phasing-in
period in any human situation is always abrasive and fraught with hazards. The
community courts in the gold fields dealing out swift justice by hanging, and
the citizen vigilantes of San Francisco protecting the populace from the lawful
immunities of the lawless: these could be allowed in their permissive
turbulence of earlier days.
Bandits like Murieta
and Vasquez could be exciting legends. But Evans and Sontag came too late to be
blessed by this indulgence. California had a new bloom on its face -- it was
preparing to assume the responsibilities of a vast parenthood.
What Evans and Sontag failed to do in terms of redress
and settling things right, with unspeakable grief to themselves and others --
Governor Hiram Johnson accomplished a decade and a half later -- with the same
belligerent audacity to be sure but in the framework of social and political
integrity.
Now don't get me wrong. California
has never spent much time in fussy introspection nor in preening before the
mirror of national respectability. By the nature of its depth of being. Its
red-blooded earthiness and its vaunted freedom to be itself -- concomitants of
the frontier -- It has always been a wayfarer, a pathfinder, an innovator.
California chortled a bit when one of its citizens, John C. Fremont, a resident
of the San Joaquin Valley, was selected in 1856 as the nominee for the
presidency by the first Republican National Convention.
It didn't mind much that he was defeated: It went
along with the party and Abraham Lincoln four years later. You never know what
California is going to do next -- what with the likes of Hiram Johnson, Herbert
Hoover, Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, a couple or more precocious Hollywood
actors and the maverick son of a former governor.
It isn't that California hasn't had its maladies. It
has indeed, and that is because it never really got through its phasing. It has
been called upon to absorb wave after wave of "Pikes," "Okies," and "Hippies,"
to say nothing of the continuous flow of the country's more sophisticated
huddled masses. It retains its genius to absorb and claim as its own all comers
and to proceed to higher and higher levels of creativity because it has never
believed that mediocrity is compulsory.
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