The most feared man in the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas in the spring of 1880 remains, to this day, a man without a face. No verified photograph of him exists, his true name was never proven, and he used at least three aliases. Four counties in West Texas tried to capture him throughout that spring, yet no one could confirm his birthplace or even his real identity. On July 3, 1880, four men lay behind a rock ledge near the summit of an unnamed mountain in the Chinati Mountains, about 18 miles north of Presidio, Texas.
Four other men were climbing toward them in the open on exhausted horses. The distance was documented later as 40 yards—nearly point-blank range. The men behind the rocks fired in volleys, not single shots. One bullet clipped the brim of a ranger’s hat.
Another passed under his leg, split the leather of his stirrup, and struck his horse in the side. The horse remained standing and stayed in the fight. Two other horses fell and did not get up. Roughly 35 yards back to the left, a red-haired soldier from Missouri stopped returning fire.
For several minutes, no one noticed he was gone. The sergeant in charge stormed the ledge, took the position, accepted the surrender, and disarmed the men behind the rocks. They begged for mercy, and he granted it because he still believed at that moment that all of his men were alive. Another ranger then went looking for a knife he had dropped in the grass during the fighting.
He found the soldier instead—lying behind a bush, his rifle still in both hands. Weeks later, in a telegram to the governor of Texas, the sergeant who had accepted that surrender wrote a single sentence that followed his name for 146 years: had he known, he wrote, he would have killed them all. The man behind those rocks was the same man four West Texas counties had been trying to catch all spring. He called himself Jesse Evans.
He also used the names Jesse Graham, Will Davis, and Jesse Davis. Serious researchers who devoted entire careers to this period have never been able to confirm that Evans was the name he was born with. The best evidence suggests it was not. His earliest recorded appearance is fleeting.
In 1871, he was arrested in Elk City, Kansas, along with his parents, for passing counterfeit currency. He was released almost immediately. By 1872, he was in New Mexico Territory working as a cowboy. Everything before that is unknown.
Historians typically cite 1853 as his birth year. Some accounts say Missouri, others say Texas. He apparently never corrected anyone. A prison clerk described him as slightly under five feet eight inches tall, just over 150 pounds, with gray eyes, light hair, light complexion, and clean-shaven.
That is nearly the only physical record of him that exists. For a time, he worked for a rancher named John Chisum, who controlled more cattle than some nations had soldiers. The true nature of the job mattered: according to a sworn statement from 1878, Chisum hired him to track stolen horses. In practical terms, a sharp-eyed young man with a steady hand went out to find the people who had stolen something and came back without them.
By the fall of 1877, he had his own following. Newspapers called them the Jesse Evans Gang. They called themselves simply “the Boys. ” In October of that year, a skinny, buck-toothed, talkative young man was seen riding with them.
His name was Henry Antrim. He would later be known as Billy the Kid. In 1877, the Kid was a nobody. Riding with Evans is what made the Kid’s name—not the other way around.
A former governor of New Mexico Territory later described their relationship as teacher and student. One author writing in 1907, while some of those men were still alive, described Evans as being in his early twenties when he first came to the Pecos region, and so skilled with a weapon that people wanted to hire him. The same author recorded that Evans was one of the few men who was not afraid of Billy the Kid. Evans reportedly believed the Kid might outshoot him with a rifle, but with a pistol, Evans feared no living man.
The Lincoln County War followed. In the town of Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, two men named Murphy and Dolan owned the only general store—not just a store but the store itself. Small ranchers bought their flour from them, borrowed against their herds through them, and the army bought beef through them. Locals called the operation “the House.
” Then a young Englishman named John Tunstall opened a competing store with a bank and began offering better terms. The House hired gunmen. Evans was one of them. The Lincoln County War was, at its core, a fight over who had the right to sell flour to people.
On February 18, 1878, Tunstall was riding along a trail with a small group when a larger group of men overtook them. Evans was among that group. Tunstall did not survive, and the men who killed him left him where he fell in the open with his horse. Tunstall’s employees, including the Kid, formed a posse and began hunting down the men from that trail one by one.
Two of them, William Morton and Frank Baker, were captured alive in March and never made it to jail. Another man named Tom Hill was killed the same month near Tularosa by a sheepherder who tried to rob him. Evans was standing right next to Hill when it happened. He was shot twice, severely, through the wrist and lungs.
He crawled to the brush and survived. He was the fourth and only one still breathing at the end of the month. He surrendered a few days later. He was held at Fort Stanton while courts tried to decide what charges to file over the Tunstall case.
He posted bond and disappeared. The war peaked that summer in Lincoln itself. For five days in July, the town was a battleground. Buildings burned.
The army brought a Gatling gun and a howitzer, which mostly made things worse. Alexander McSween, who had taken over Tunstall’s side after Tunstall’s death, did not survive the final night. His widow, Susan McSween, came out from under the ashes and spent years refusing to let the cases drop. Exactly one year after Tunstall’s murder—February 18, 1879—a lawyer named Huston Chapman was walking through the streets of Lincoln at night.
Susan McSween had hired him to keep pushing for prosecutions. He wore glasses and had one arm. That night, he met a group of drinking men, including James Dolan and a man named William Campbell. Evans was standing there when it happened.
Chapman was shot dead in the street, and the men involved went to dinner afterward. That event detonated the situation. The governor of New Mexico Territory at the time was Lew Wallace, a Union general who was writing a novel in his spare time—Ben-Hur. Wallace had promised the president he would pacify the territory, and the murder of a one-armed lawyer in a public street made him look powerless.
He ordered arrests. Evans was one of those arrested. On March 19, 1879, he walked out of custody at Fort Stanton with the help of a guard known only as “Texas Jack. ”
In the spring of 1879, he crossed into Texas and began working around Fort Stockton and Fort Davis.
By then, the Far West Texas region had collapsed into chaos. A document in the Texas State Archives records everything that happened in Presidio County between June 1, 1879, and June 1, 1880. It is seven pages long and titled simply “Atrocities. ” It lists thieves who broke into a rancher’s home and escaped from jail, a man named George Claxton killed and robbed, an old settler who lost 14 horses to a raiding party, a man named Adolfo Reyes killed in late July whose killer escaped to Mexico.
On November 23, 1879, inside the Fort Davis jail, the deputy jailer, a man named W. Hanks, went to work and never returned home. The jailer himself was found near death but eventually recovered. The prisoners walked out.
The pattern was not violence but jails. Men were arrested and simply left. The county had laws. It had no way to hold anyone.
On January 26, 1880, Pecos County Sheriff Harry Ryan sent a long telegram to Austin. He had heard a cattle herd was about to be forcibly taken to New Mexico, and he feared that if the plan succeeded it would set a precedent. He called it a “cattle war” and asked whether he could count on the Rangers. Meanwhile, an entirely different struggle was unfolding in the same mountains.
In September 1879, an Apache leader named Búyé, remembered in history as Victorio, left the Mescalero reservation near Fort Stanton with a small band. He had not left to raid. He left because the government had decided to consolidate his people—the Warm Springs band—onto the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, hundreds of miles from their homeland and beside groups they had fought for generations. Victorio chose the other option.
Throughout the following year, he and between 80 and 150 followers kept ahead of two armies on both sides of an international border. Colonel Benjamin Grierson, commanding the 10th Cavalry—Black soldiers whom the Apache called “Buffalo Soldiers”—found the only strategy that worked. He stopped chasing Victorio. Instead, he put his men at every water source across 200 miles of the driest land in Texas.
No one outruns thirst. On August 6, 1880, after a 65-mile, 21-hour march, they reached Rattlesnake Springs ahead of Victorio and cut him off. He was forced back into Mexico and was killed in October at Tres Castillos by Chihuahua state forces. Those dates come only weeks after the battle on the mountain described at the start of this story.
In the same county, within the same eight weeks, one group of men fought for a homeland while the other rode the same valleys to rob a general store. On May 19, 1880, at midday in Fort Davis, three men walked into the general store of Joseph Sinder and Charles Sevensborn. Two more stayed outside to watch. When a man approached the store, the lookouts did not hide or scare him off.
They invited him for a drink, casually, so he would not walk inside while the robbery was in progress. They stole $1,000 in cash and about $100 in goods, and kidnapped two men who happened to be in the store. The following day, someone also broke into the home of August Diamond. For context, a Texas Ranger that same year earned about $34 a month.
The robbers walked out with roughly two and a half years of a lawman’s salary. Three of the men were identified on the spot. One was the man from New Mexico. The other two were brothers named Graham, already charged with murder in Williamson County, far across the state.
Panic spread faster than the bandits traveled. Two days later, on May 21, four different business firms in El Paso, more than 200 miles away, joined their names in a single telegram to the adjutant general of Texas. They had heard that a gang led by Jesse Evans, famous from Lincoln County, had robbed stores in Fort Davis in broad daylight and was heading their way to do the same. On May 24, the judge of Pecos County, George Milton Frazer, telegraphed the governor directly.
He said the robbers were camped near Pecos City and wanted ten Texas Rangers. He added a line: today he felt like a man who had reached the end of his patience. If the state could not send the men, it would be useless to ask for help again. Adjutant General John B.
Jones read the telegrams in Austin and did the only thing he could. He sent ten men from Fort McKavett in Menard County with 30 days of rations, money for horse feed, and orders to report to Judge Frazer and act against the outlaws. He told the judge they would arrive as soon as they could, and he was honest about the rest: he did not have a single man closer than Fort McKavett. The men who rode out were from Company D of the Frontier Battalion, commanded by Captain Daniel Webster Roberts.
Sergeant Ed Seiker led the detachment. With him rode Privates Samuel Henry, Richard Russell, D. T. Carson, and a red-haired man from Missouri named George R.
Bingham. They reached Fort Stockton on June 6. By the time they arrived, the citizens had already caught one member of the gang without their help. On June 1, just before sunset, Sheriff Harry Ryan and a group of townspeople surrounded a saloon in Fort Stockton and arrested a man named Bud Graham, known as “Ace Carr.
” Shots were fired during the arrest. None of them hit anyone. The rest of the gang escaped, and the Rangers arrived to find the locals holding a single prisoner in a town with no way to hold him safely while the rest of the gang hovered like a storm waiting for a chance to get him back. George R.
Bingham is known almost entirely through two descriptive rolls in the Texas Adjutant General’s records. He is listed as J. R. Bingham, born in Missouri, a stock raiser, five feet nine inches tall, with light skin, red hair, and blue eyes.
He was born around 1852. The other rangers called him “Red. ”
A Missouri census taken before the war shows a woman named Ann Bingham heading a household in St. Louis, with Missouri listed as the family’s birthplace.
No father appears in the record. No one knows what he did between Missouri and Texas. One report says he was in Dennison, Grayson County, for a time before heading west to Menard County. A Galveston newspaper later described him as a young man, an active and zealous officer, and a genial, beloved comrade.
That is almost everything known about him. He enlisted on August 6, 1878. His first term of service ended at the end of that month, and he was paid $34. The monthly service records of the Texas Ranger company list scouts: who led them, how many men went, how many miles they rode.
Red Bingham’s name appears in almost none of them. He participated in many scouts, but he was never the one in charge. There is only one arrest recorded in his file. On April 30, 1880, he and another private rode from Camp San Saba to Fort McKavett and arrested four men for disturbing the peace.
The charges were not pursued, and all four were released. The whole matter took one day and ten miles on horseback. That is the complete law enforcement record of George R. Bingham of Missouri.
According to the written account in those files, he never once drew his pistol on another human being to force a surrender in two years of border service. That happened only on his last day. Meanwhile, in Fort Davis, the Rangers made a decision that was either the most logical thing heard or the strangest part of the entire story. Sergeant Crouch, while working in town, discovered the gang had people inside Fort Davis supplying them with information.
The main man was known as “Captain Tyson. ” Crouch dug deeper and found Tyson’s real name was John Selman, and he was wanted for trial in Shackelford County. Crouch wrote to Austin believing Selman was the leader of the entire gang. The Fort Davis jailer had just resigned, so Crouch made John Selman a deputy sheriff and jailer.
They gave the man they suspected of running the gang the keys to the prison holding the gang’s prisoner. Crouch’s logic was cold and practical: he could not hold Selman on any charge yet, Selman was nervous and about to run, and this way Crouch at least knew where the man was every hour of the day. It nearly ended in disaster. Ace Carr came very close to getting out of that jail.
Newspapers later noted dryly that the Fort Davis jailer had since been identified as belonging to the same gang. The Rangers decided the Fort Davis jail would not hold anyone. On June 18, they moved Ace Carr to Fort Stockton, where the walls were stronger. The gang found out—they had a man wearing a jailer’s badge—and set an ambush in Olympia Canyon, a narrow rocky pass where the road had no choice in direction.
Seiker never went that way. He had a feeling, took a completely different route with his prisoner, and delivered him without a single shot fired. There is no monument to that decision, but it is the reason four rangers were alive in July instead of dead in June. Seiker finally arrested John Selman and tried to deliver him to Shackelford County, where the indictments had been issued.
The sheriff there, William Kruger, refused to take him. His justification was blunt: he said he could not guarantee Selman’s life if the man were brought to Albany, the charges would not hold up in court anyway, and if Selman were delivered to the county seat, the odds of a mob hanging him before any trial were nine to one. That was Texas law in 1880 in three sentences. On June 29, word arrived that some gang members had been seen near Presidio del Norte, about 100 miles south of Fort Davis at the river.
On the night of July 1, the Rangers rode out. Sergeant Seiker took Bingham, Carson, Henry, and Russell. Sergeant Crouch joined them. They took a local guide named Cleto Heredio because none of them knew the country.
At Presidio, the man they were chasing did something interesting. He walked into a store in public, where people could see him, and bought himself a new pair of boots. Buying boots openly in a border town meant the man was telling anyone watching that he was about to cross into Mexico and did not care who knew. Then he headed northwest, away from the river, toward a hideout in the Chinati Mountains.
He rode most of the night, roughly 70 miles. At midday on July 3, the Rangers stopped to water their horses at Cibolo Creek, about 18 miles north of Presidio. One of them looked up and saw riders on a distant hill, sitting still, watching them. They brought out field glasses.
As they looked, the riders on the hill began to move away. That was the critical moment: two groups of men separated by a long distance, realizing at the same instant who the other was. There were four men there with a pack horse, heading toward rough ground. The Rangers took up the chase.
The four scattered and ran, then turned and fired, turning the pursuit into a running fight covering a mile and a half of broken ground. Then the four climbed a large mountain, and the Rangers followed. By the time the Rangers reached the top, they had been strung out. Sergeant Crouch was so far behind he was never in the fight at all.
Private Henry’s horse had gone lame, so he was riding a mule with the pack animal behind. That left three men crossing that crest. Three, while the four they were chasing had already reached a rock ledge. The first thing they met was a heavy volley.
At 40 yards in the open, everything described earlier happened within the next few minutes. The hat brim, the stirrup leather, the horse hit under the leg. Two horses fell. Carson kept firing even as his saddle came apart beneath him.
Seiker’s report says one of the men behind the rocks was hit early but did not stop. He kept firing over their heads. Seiker, lying in the open with no cover at all, waited until the man appeared and put a single accurate shot into him. That was the end.
The other three watched what happened from four feet away. They had nothing left. The Rangers stormed the ledge and took the position. The three men behind the rock surrendered and were disarmed.
Only then, in the quiet after the battle, did someone go looking for a knife that had fallen somewhere down the slope. Crouch found him behind a bush. From his position and the placement of his hands on his rifle, the men who found him believed he had been loading another cartridge when it happened. He had been hit in that first volley, 35 yards back and to the left, and he had never cried out.
He was about 28 years old. No one was entirely sure. Seiker wrote that sentence then: had he known about Bingham’s death, he would have killed them all. But they had already been disarmed before anyone knew.
Then he wrote that they begged for mercy. Seiker did not touch them. Whatever he felt standing on that mountain, he had given his word two minutes before he knew, and he kept it. He delivered the three prisoners alive to a jail 100 miles away, and it weighed on him.
He wrote about it to the governor of Texas. They sent the guide, Heredio, to Presidio del Norte to bring back a coroner. He returned with one the next day. The inquest concluded that Bingham had died in the line of duty.
They buried him where he fell, beside the trail on a mountain a mile above sea level, because there was no other option in July with the nearest town 100 miles away. Seiker wrote that their small detachment showed him every possible respect. They lined up and fired three volleys over the grave. The people of Fort Davis were overjoyed.
They said the Rangers had ended the reign of terror in the country. They said Bingham’s remains should be brought back and buried in town. On February 11, 1881, seven months later, four men rode out of camp in Musquiz Canyon and returned to that mountain. They exhumed his remains on February 17.
They were moved to Fort Davis. On February 20, Sergeant Crouch reburied him in the town cemetery. He is still there, at the Pioneers Cemetery at the foot of Mount Livermore in Fort Davis, Texas. Today only a few stone markers remain standing.
Adjutant General John B. Jones wrote the only epitaph for Red Bingham. He said the poor man’s death was a matter of very deep regret. Then he said the honest part: it was the fate every man faces when he engages in this kind of service.
On July 7, four days after the battle, the three prisoners went before a judge named Duke and were committed to jail without bail for the murder of Private Bingham. That created a new problem: the Rangers now had to guard that jail until court opened in October, and there were not enough honest men in the county to help. In late September, a man named Captain J. W.
Graham arrived from Georgetown, Texas. He was the father of the Graham brothers. He hired a lawyer, and by the time court opened on October 4, that lawyer had gotten his sons out on bail. The moment the shackles came off, they both disappeared.
No one could determine what became of either of them. The man from New Mexico had no father coming from Georgetown. He was tried alone. He was convicted for his part in the Sinder and Sevensborn store robbery and convicted for the murder of George Bingham.
He received ten years for each charge. On December 1, 1880, he walked through the gates of the state penitentiary in Huntsville and became prisoner number 9078. In that place, where a man has nothing to do but talk, he apparently did not. People who have studied those records say he simply did not discuss where he came from: not his birthplace, not his family, not his name.
The most famous prisoner in that building had nothing to say about himself. He served about 18 months. On May 23, 1882, he was outside the walls with a work crew and left. That is the last confirmed fact in the life of Jesse Evans.
There is no death certificate, no grave, no later arrest, no confirmed sighting anywhere by anyone ever. Researchers have built entire careers hunting for it. The number 40, so often attached to his name, did not come from official records. Court records show 15 arrest warrants, one acquittal, and one conviction.
That is what the state could prove. The specific number 40, so often repeated in Texas gunfighter stories, belonged mostly to someone else entirely: John Wesley Hardin, a Texan who claimed a similar number and spent 17 years in the same Huntsville prison because of it. On August 19, 1895, in a saloon in El Paso, John Wesley Hardin was killed. He never saw the attack coming and never got his hand on his pistol.
The man who did it, then a policeman wearing a badge, was John Selman—the same John Selman the Texas Rangers had hung a jailer’s badge on in Fort Davis in 1880 because they had no one else and no place to put him. Selman had eight months to enjoy it. On April 6, 1896, U. S.
Deputy Marshal George Scarborough shot him in an alley behind another El Paso saloon, and Selman died the next day on an operating table. A final thread exists. In December 1961, historian Eve Ball, who spent her life collecting oral history in that region and was trusted with things people told no one else, wrote a letter about an elderly man she knew who claimed to be Jesse Evans’ nephew. He told her his uncle had died about seven years earlier on a large ranch in Texas.
And he told her how his uncle had lived there: the man had not set foot outside the house in daylight for 40 years. Neighbors lived close enough to see smoke from the chimney and never knew a second man existed in that house. Ball clearly wrote that she could not guarantee the truth of it, that the man would not allow her to publish it out of consideration for his family, and that everything he told her matched the records. Another theory, presented openly as a theory and not a conclusion, was published in 2009 by two researchers, one a historian with the U.
S. Marshals Service. Their argument was that the man’s real family name was Davis, and that after 1882, he simply went back to being who he always was. The two candidates they identified are significant for who they were.
One was Harrison Woodbury Davis of Sano, Texas: a churchgoing family man, married in 1879, who donated land his community used as a cemetery, rarely traveled anywhere, and died in January 1929. His father and three uncles had served in the Texas Rangers. The other candidate was a relative named Sam Lockhart Davis, who lived in Fort Worth for about 40 years with his wife and family. The 1900 census records his birth as May 1853 in Missouri—the same month, same year, and same state.
From 1915 to 1924, Sam Davis lived on a street in Fort Worth named Jesse. He died in June 1945 from a bleeding ulcer, an old man in a city surrounded by his family. Two men from Missouri climbed a mountain in the Chinati range on July 3, 1880. One was a red-haired cattleman who joined the Rangers for $34 a month, never drew his pistol on anyone in two years of service, and was buried under his real name at the foot of Mount Livermore in a cemetery with only a few stones left.
The other may have lived 60 more years and died in his own bed. What the Texas Rangers truly feared was never a number. It was that they could not prove who he was: they could not photograph him, could not catch him, could not make a charge stick against a man with no acknowledged past and no face anyone could put on a wanted poster. You can fight a man.
You cannot fight a rumor with a body.