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The two men,
though unequal in age, seemed to compose a complement of characteristics. Evans
was stock and short: Sontag was tall, lithe and handsome. Evans was a committed
and faithful family man, moody and calculating. Sontag was unfettered, brash,
daring and reckless. They became good friends and worked together on the valley
farms and in the mountains, chiefly at Evan's mining claim at Sampson
Flat.
Evans was well known by the people in the
valley and all seemed to respect him. My grandfather, Charles Huddleston, had
worked with him in a logging crew at Millwood Flat in the Sequoia Lake area in
the summer of 1888 and told me that there was nothing unusual about Chris Evans
-- a hard-working quiet man.
On this warm August
day in 1892, Will Smith, the railroad detective, had every intention of playing
it cool and using his talents as a detective to snare the elusive train
robbers. He did well for a while. He enticed George Sontag to the courthouse
where the sheriff queried him about his knowledge of the Collis robbery. George
had already let it be known in town that he had been a passenger on the train
that was robbed. Then by a ruse, having become convinced that Evans and the
Sontags were his suspected quarries, Smith asked the sheriff's officers to
detain George while he and Deputy Witty went out to the Evan's home to persuade
John Sontag to comply with them to tell his story.
It was at this point that Smith's talents as a
detective came to be seriously questioned, and the tragedy that followed
competed in ambivalent emotion with the quixotic humor of a long
windmill-charging chase.
The Evan's home was
typical of thousands of homes in the San Joaquin Valley and half of the 100,000
inhabitants of the "Big Valley" lived in houses similar to theirs. It had four
rooms and possibly a screen porch running across the full length of the back
and an open covered porch in the front. It was a single-walled house made of
vertically-fastened boards and battens. The interior walls were lined with long
strips of butcher paper or simply newspapers. It was of extremely simple
construction, designed by topsy-like flamboyance with the west the westward
growing of the American frontier.
It could be
built by a man with a modicum of carpentry knowledge in a few days. And that he
could move his family out of the tent.
I was
born and grew up in a house like this. These houses would be called substandard
by modern social scientists and the people who lived in them would be adjudged
inmates of a subculture.
The Evans family
lived largely by the land they farmed and he garden they grew. Vegetables,
fruit, eggs, milk and meat were homegrown. Chris frequently worked for his
neighbors to augment the family income. At one time he had worked as a
warehouseman for the Southern Pacific. His children went to the Visalia Schools
and attended the Methodist, Episcopal Church, North.
Smith and Witty borrowed the sheriff's team and spring
wagon and made their way out to Evan's home. The Evans family and John Sontag
where preparing to leave for their summer vacation in the mountains and were
loading the wagon with groceries, bedding and other supplies for the trip.
Smith and Witty tied the sheriff's team to a fence post and walked up on the
front porch. Finding the front door open, they walked in and asked Eva Evans,
Chris' 16-year-old daughter, if John Sontag was there. Eva had thought that
John was in his room at the house next door and answered in the negative,
whereupon Smith, with the delicate nuances of his talent as a detective
exclaimed, "You damned little liar. I just saw him come into this house." And
indeed he had.
Startled by Smith's offensive
exclamation, as well as the visitor's uninvited entrance into the house, Eva
ran out the back door and told her father. Eva was Chris' eldest child and a
young woman at that, and if a man was looking for trouble he couldn't have set
things up better for it. Evans came into the house in a rage, picked up a
pistol laying on a dresser, put it in his pocket and confronted Smith and
Witty, who were still standing in the living room.
The events of the next 30 seconds are somewhat
confused in later historical reproductions, but it is certain that Smith and
Witty ran out of the house even more unceremoniously then they had entered,
with Evans and Sontag after them, firing their guns -- Evans with a pistol and
Sontag after them, firing their guns -- Evans with a pistol and Sontag with a
shotgun. Witty ran across the street to a neighbor's house and collapsed,
severely wounded. Smith, having thwarted one of Sontag's shots by stumbling
over a tomato vine, took Sontag's second blast of buckshot in the back and
right arm as he scrambled over the fence. He made his way into town and told
and believed for a whole year. And his story didn't have "you damned little
liar" in it. By the time of the trial, another version of the story couldn't
have made much difference anyway.
During the
time of this furious gunplay -- I didn't mention the shorts that Smith and
Witty fired over their shoulders -- the sheriff's team was rearing and plunging
with fright. Evans and Sontag in their own panic, seized upon the first
apparent means of escape and untying the team and mounting the rig drove wildly
away from town to the north. That afternoon a newspaper reporter for the weekly
Visalia Delta wrote: "The robbers made good their escape and a posse is after
them, with good chances of capturing them."
By
this incident Chris Evans and John Sontag were convicted of train robbery in
the minds of California residents and in the columns of the newspapers.
Whatever was one's attitude town the right and wrong of the robberies, at least
the 4-year-old suspense was over. The statewide excitement, held so long in a
condition of frustrating suspended animation, could spend hours and weeks and
months in the discussion of delectable pros and cons. Evans and Sontag
themselves never admitted to train robbery: the ultimate indictment against
them, much more easily substantiated, was that of murder.
This sudden flare-up of noisy violence in their town
and the unpleasant realization that outlaws had been for a long time nestled in
their community, offered the citizens of Visalia great excitement. And, as
little puppies will chase anything that runs, a great number of them took off
north to the hills. "A large number started out, some in carriages, on
horseback and afoot," relates the Delta.
And the
reporter who was writing a running account of the affair states, "Late Friday
night officers and men who went in pursuit of the robbers after the thrilling
scene enacted in the afternoon, returned home in groups, completely tired out,
horses jaded and without securing any trace of the murderous outlaws."
"The muderous outlaws" completely outsmarted the
posses that afternoon, and were hiding in a haystack a few miles north of
Visalia waiting for nightfall, and no one remotely suspected that there would
be, before the dawn of the next morning, another "thrilling scene enacted." So,
while scores of manhunters, including all but one of the resident officers,
were scouring the hills 20 miles north of town. Evans and Sontag were assessing
all the direful implications of the situation.
John Sontag had never been married, had always roamed
about bearing no primary social ties. But Chris Evans, with his close family
ties, had now fallen upon a terrifying moment of dual interests. The die was
cast. He knew that at least for awhile until public opinion arose to such a
strength as t make it safe for him to be at home -- he would have to live
defensively -- fending off the despised detectives of the Southern Pacific. For
at this moment in the afternoon of August 5, their only crime might yet be
proven to consist in two wounded detectives repulsed from the living room of
his home.
The defensive stance in all of us,
while supporting itself by a conviction of innocence, always invites challenge,
and sometimes disaster. And what one has prepared himself to do with all the
power of his image-making reveries, to defend himself, he will almost certainly
sometime have to do. I suspect that Evans and Sontag were emotionally too
well-prepared, too powerfully conditioned by thoughts of the possible necessity
for sudden, violent action to ride out a moment of temptation.
So the picture of possibilities in their minds,
powered by hate, could only wait for the moment in which to happen. And now it
had happened, out-pictured in reality.
They had
left the scene of the afternoon battle with only the clothes on their backs, no
food, almost no ammunition. Evans had left his family without having had time
to say a word to them about his plans, to talk over the exigencies of the
future. They decided to return home after the cover of darkness and do the
things that needed to be done to prepare for the occasion.
The total assumption by the populace that Evans and
Sontag had proven by their flight that they were the train robbery outlaws
caused the people to distort and exaggerate the outlaws' motives. Home was home
to Evans and he didn't feel guilty enough to make a desperate and final flight
away from it under these circumstances. The fact that almost nobody expected
them to return that night made their return simple. They had plenty of time to
make the necessary preparations, load the spring wagon with provisions and get
ready for a new and sensible getaway.
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