Chris Evans

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American farmer and teamster turned outlaw. He was accused of robbing the Southern Pacific Railroad in California between 1889 and 1892. After killing a member of a posse outside his home on the outskirts of Visalia, he fled to the Sierra Nevada mountains with his younger partner, John Sontag. While Evans and Sontag hid out, writers Ambrose Bierce and Joaquin Miller championed their cause in the San Francisco Examiner. The outlaws evaded capture for ten months. They had a shootout with a posse at the Young cabin which resulted in the death of Wilson, the posse leader, and McGinnis, a former friend of Chris Evans. Later, John Sontag was mortally wounded in what is called the Battle of Stone Corral. Evans was himself severely wounded at Stone Corral, having lost an eye and his left arm. He was taken into custody and convicted of murder and sentenced to life in Folsom State Prison in Folsom, California. John Sontag's younger brother, George Contant, testified against Evans and hence acquired the lifelong hatred of Evans' family. After Evans served for seventeen years at Folsom, he was paroled in 1911 by Governor Hiram Johnson, a liberal Republican, who had been elected on an anti-Southern Pacific campaign theme. Banished from California, he died in Portland, Oregon, in 1917, denying to the end that he had ever robbed a train and continuing to assert that he had killed only in self-defense. He also wrote a socialist book which calls for expanded government to check what he viewed as the abuses of the business community. Link to Wikipedia biography