Jesse Evans

The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters

By Leon Claire Metz (2003)

The author modestly reminds us that it would be impossible to include everyone deserving mention. With over 500 entries, I think the author did an outstanding job.

This is a great reference book.

Following is just one of many items of interest contained in the book.

Evans, Jesse J. (1853 ?- ?)

Jesse Evans is one of the many enigmas relating to the Wild West. He claimed to have been born in Missouri in 1853. One who knew him, Frank Coe, believed he was half Cherokee. Otherwise, Jesse Evans was blessed, or cursed, with a common name. A belief even exists that Jesse Evans was a graduate of the College of Washington and Lee in Virginia.

Evans arrived in New Mexico around 1872 and worked as a cowboy for John Chisum. By 1875 he was a suspect in the Shedd Ranch murders of the Mes brothers in the Oregon Mountains of southern New Mexico. On New Year’s Eve, 1875, he and three other gunmen brawled with Fort Selden troopers at a dance. The soldiers won, but Evans and his friends returned around midnight and commenced shooting through the windows. A soldier and civilian were killed; another civilian and three soldiers were wounded.

Two weeks later, on January 19, Quirino Fletcher bragged that he and two friends had killed and robbed two Texans in Mexico. Later that night, a person assumed to be Evans put six bullets in Fletcher. In the meantime Billy the Kid fled Arizona, where he had killed Frank Cahill; while on his way to Lincoln, New Mexico, he paused for a few months in the Mesilla Valley, where he took up the practice of horse thievery. Both Billy and Jesse Evans may also have been involved in the subsequent El Paso Salt War, but at any rate the Kid went on to Lincoln and became a regular, while Jesse put in off-and-on appearances during the Lincoln County War. Jesse, for instance, signed up as a Lincoln County deputy, and was one of the posse members who put bullets in Englishman John Tunstall. A grand jury indicted Evans for murder, he being first on the list. At the trial, Jesse testified that he had not even been in the vicinity of the Tunstall shooting – and went free.

Shortly afterward, in mid-March, Jesse and Tom Hill tried ransacking the nearby sheep camp of a German herdsman, whom they shot and assumed they had killed. The herdsman made it to his rifle, however, and killed Hill. Then he shattered Jesse’s right arm. Evans took refuge in the Shedd Ranch and from there was taken under arrest to Fort Stanton. He was released soon afterward.

On February 18, 1879, Evans and friends met with Billy the Kid in Lincoln. The Lincoln County War was over by this time, its major participants either dead or scattered. The Kid sent Jesse Evans a note at Fort Stanton suggesting a talk. The two men, plus friends, met that evening in Lincoln and essentially agreed that from that moment on neither side would threaten or harm the other. Then, to celebrate the pact and to prove they were great friends, they went on a drunken spree, bumping into Houston Chapman, an attorney representing Susan McSween. By some accounts, Jesse Evans shot him, by others it was Billy the Kid. In this instance, not only did the bullet kill Chapman, but the powder set his clothes afire.

On March 5, Jesse Evans was arrested, charged with Chapman’s murder, and jailed at Fort Stanton. Within days, he escaped. He now fled to Fort Davis, Texas, robbed a store, and on July 3, 1880, engaged in a gunfight during which he killed a civilian and a Texas Ranger, George Bingham. The rangers captured Evans and tried him for murder. He entered the Huntsville, Texas, penitentiary on December 1, 1880. Then in May, while on a work detail, he escaped and vanished. All efforts to trace him from that moment on have come to naught.