The Scourge of the Railroad
The Sontags
As John and George Sontag and their cohort Chris Evans told the story, they were just poor boys pushed around by that big bully of a railroad, and all they were really doing was getting even. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that glib explanation aroused a lot of sympathy from the people of California’s San Joaquin Valley. The general distaste for the railroad was ignited by what were seen to be exorbitant freight rates and the seizure of much rich farmland for the railroad’s right-of-way. Then there was the burning memory of the Mussel Slough fight, which pitted some twenty local men against a railroad party, which included a deputy US marshal. Seven men died, in what many saw as more aggression by a brutal railroad.
That anger was understandable. But it did not do much to justify the brothers’ unrestricted violence, the dead men left in the brothers’ wake . . . or the widows and orphans. Their private war on the Southern Pacific was a good excuse for robbing trains, but it didn’t show much concern for the railroad’s ordinary employees, the men who were put at risk by the brothers’ jihad.
The boys were born of good parents up in Mankato, Minnesota, not far from Northfield, scene of the earlier James-Younger gang disaster. They came of good stock; their father, Jacob Conant, a carpenter and a native of Holland, was killed in an accident early in their lives. Their mother remarried; her new husband was Mathias Sontag, a German-born entrepreneur who served in the Civil War. Afterward he opened first a dry-goods store and later a hotel and restaurant, the Mankato House, which was the first hotel in the city.
He and his wife had several more children. Growing up, the boys got a good, solid parochial education, for the whole family was Catholic, but temptation wasn’t long in coming. George, the younger brother, got into trouble early, when at the age of fifteen he stole some cigars from his employer and spent some time in reform school up in Minnesota. A little later he did some more time in the pen in Omaha, Nebraska. Whatever lessons time in prison was supposed to teach didn’t take.
Meanwhile brother John was working for ol’ devil Southern Pacific out in California; he managed to get himself hurt on the job, and afterward he said the Southern Pacific had not given him the care he needed. Then, he said, the railroad wouldn’t rehire him after he healed up. Just who did what to whom when, and why, remains lost in the mists of time, but John’s fury with the railroad remained and only seemed even to increase with time as he brooded over it. Still angry, he went to work on a ranch owned by one Chris Evans, who was also an impassioned and vociferous critic of the railroad. They were made for each other.
The two men leased a livery stable in the valley town of Modesto, but in about a year a fire destroyed not only the structure but the horses as well. Whether they blamed the fire on Southern Pacific, too, they turned to crime as their next life’s work.
They found hiding places up around Susanville, then a comparatively remote area, places called Roop’s Fort or Fort Defiance. From these hideouts, they attacked the Southern Pacific, using the same simple, effective tactics. First they selected a suitable point to stage their robbery and stashed their horses there. Next they boarded the train; no tickets, of course, just a short period of hiding on the train from the inevitable railroad detectives.
The last act was also simple. At their predetermined point of attack, the brothers jumped out of their hiding place, shoved their guns into the engineer’s face, and directed an unauthorized stop. Then came the dynamite, tearing open the express car safe, and Sontag and Evans were on their way with a sack of booty.
Once George was out of jail up in Minnesota, Chris and John joined him there. The three tried another train robbery and were successful, although they didn’t get much loot. What they did get was the attention of the Pinkerton Agency, which contracted to oversee railroad security.
And they should have stayed in Minnesota, rather than returning to California. They tried another train, all three of them, but this holdup was a bust. All the cash there was, was some five hundred dollars; the rest of the loot was a heap of coin, too much to carry; worse still, the coins were Peruvian and Mexican, substantially worthless to the outlaws.
There was worse to come. In August 1892, the gang was in Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley, when the police finally found them. In a wild gun battle, George and Chris managed to shoot their way out, but John didn’t make it. Chris and George ran for it, into the rugged Sierra Nevada, with an estimated three hundred civilian possemen and assorted bounty hunters searching for them, in addition to regular peace officers.
The result was chaos. One lawman estimated that a proliferation of friendly fire clashes left “at least 11 deputies . . . seriously wounded by other officers. Anyone who went deer hunting during this time was in danger of being shot by over-zealous posses.”
But with so many pursuers in the field, inevitably the two outlaws ran into some of them. In September, in a wild eight-hour shootout that was later called the “battle of Sampson’s Flat,” an officer and a posseman died, and Chris Evans lost an eye to a round in the head. Badly hurt as Evans was, however, the pair still got away.
The hunt went on through the winter of 1892–93. Evans and Sontag evaded their pursuers. They had some help. So many people in the San Joaquin hated the Southern Pacific, that there were lots of chances for shelter and food and information. And there is a charming story about Evans’s daughter Eva, who followed a posse tracking her father and Sontag and boldly fired a shot to warn them the law was on their tracks.
But then, in the summer of 1893, some new leadership took over for the law. Marshal George Gard was underwhelmed by the mass of man hunters falling all over each other in the valley. He changed strategies, opting for a very small, select posse that could move, hunt, and gather information without alerting the whole countryside. The new tactics paid off. The marshal at last got some solid intel that his quarry intended to stop at Evans’s wife’s home, at a place on the Patterson ranch near Visalia.
There is a tale, probably apocryphal, that the outlaws, realizing they had worn out their welcome in the San Joaquin Valley, decided to flee, allegedly to South Africa. Evans contacted his wife with directions to “wire Sontag’s dad and ask for $100.” Somehow, the law learned of this and that the outlaws were going to “sneak back to the Evans’s Visalia home to pick up the dough. The sheriffs were waiting. . . .” Well, maybe.
The marshal and his men did not go blundering off to the Evans house, as some previous posses would have done. Instead, he set up shop nearby with three other men in an old cabin at a place called Stone Corral. Gard knew there was some measurable chance the outlaws might either come there or ride by, and so he and his posse remained out of sight and alert.
And at last he caught sight of the outlaws riding cautiously toward the cabin. The lawmen held their fire, but Evans saw one of them and opened fire; in the wild firefight that followed, Fred Jackson, a Nevada policeman, hit Evans with a shotgun round. The outlaws took cover, but the only shelter they could find was a haystack. It was pretty fair concealment, but it didn’t do a thing to stop bullets or shot.
All through most of the night the fight went on. The outlaws couldn’t run, and the officers dared not advance. One attempt by the marshal got him only a bad bullet wound in the knee. He sensibly called for reinforcements from Visalia and elected to wait for them and for daylight.
Sontag had been badly hit during the night, a round that tore through his belly. The pain was so bad that around dawn he pleaded with Evans to kill him. Evans refused, at which time Sontag told him to run for it and tried to shoot himself. He couldn’t manage that, only stunning himself; when he came back to consciousness, the pain was worse than ever. He lay suffering on a pile of straw and manure through the rest of the night.
Evans at last ran into the gloom and disappeared. He was carrying wounds to his shoulder and belly but still managed to walk some six miles to a homesteader’s cabin and asked the occupants to at least bandage his wounds. He took refuge there, but these homesteaders elected to send a message to the law. A large posse answered, prepared for a fight, but Evans had at last had enough and surrendered. Evans went off to jail in Visalia, the same jail where Sontag now lay dying. Evans had one arm amputated, and Sontag passed away on the third of July.
The story goes that after George Sontag learned of his brother’s death, he and four other convicts attempted to escape from Folsom. The escape was a disaster: Sontag and another con were wounded, and the other three were killed.
George did another fifteen years up the river, until he was pardoned by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1908. Like Cole Younger, he went on the road with a lecture all about “crime does not pay,” appearing in the Opera House at Mankato, his hometown, where he was “well received.” And in 1915 he produced a film, predictably called The Folly of a Life of Crime and starring himself. He topped that off with a ghostwritten book called A Pardoned Lifer. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Which left the indestructible Evans. In 1893 he got a life sentence in Folsom, but before he could be shipped there, he escaped and stayed on the loose for a month and a half. Then it was back to prison until the spring of 1911. He was paroled—one of the conditions of parole being “banishment” from California—and went off to homestead in Oregon. He died in 1917.