The Saga of Molly Byrd

She was the daughter of a drunkard, a successful actress, a rancher, a
prisoner’s rights activist, a woman who came to own a portion of
Redwood Canyon, the wife of a man who was destined to gain
international fame - Molly Byrd came into this world in the year of
1859 and, if infants could contemplate the possibilities that life
might serve up to them as the decades unfolded, she would still never
have been able to even wildly imagine what Fate had in store for her
during what were to be her eighty-five years here on this Earth.

Molly grew up at a home called Rattlesnake Ranch, about twenty-five
miles northeast of Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley, the daughter of
a rancher who had built a struggling yet successful business from the
ground up but who later developed a reputation for his frequent hard
drinking and abusive behavior, eventually driving his wife and
children away from him. She was also the daughter of a loving mother
who stood by her during a large portion of those interesting and
eventful eighty-five years, years which would lead Molly to all parts
of the west coast of the United States, including to what is now Kings
Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

When Molly was fifteen years old she fell in love with a man who
worked as a teamster hauling lumber down to the valley from a mill
high up in the Sierra. The teamster’s name was Chris, and although he
was twelve years her senior the attraction was instantly mutual and
the chemistry between them was said to be palpable. Both felt that it
was Love at First Sight, and both knew that it would last forever.
After a brief courtship Molly’s parents gave their blessing to the
union and they were married at Rattlesnake Ranch in November of 1874.

Chris owned a piece of property near Dry Creek, but instead of moving
there he worked out a trade for land higher up in the mountains; one
hundred and sixty acres in what is now known as Redwood Canyon in
Kings Canyon National Park. He and Molly named the place the Redwood
Ranch. They moved up there to what they felt was their own personal
Garden of Eden to make it their home, and Molly became pregnant with
the first of what would eventually be nine children. But after a
riding accident the baby was born prematurely and died within a day.
Baby Eugene was buried there at Redwood Ranch, beneath a giant Cedar
tree next to a small spring of running water, and rests in that grove
of Sequoias to this day next to a cousin who also died as an infant.

The search for work led Chris to cross the Sierra on foot to Inyo
County, while Molly returned to Rattlesnake Ranch and gave birth to
their second child several months later. Then it was back to the
valley, then to San Francisco, Seattle, and back again to California
to farm near a place called Mussel Slough. Then they moved west to
Adelaide, and the children kept coming, eight more in all after Eugene
– Eva, Carl, Elmer, John, Joseph, Louis, Winifred, and Ynez. While
Chris and Molly started a ranch at Adelaide trouble erupted at their
former home of Mussel Slough between the farmers and the Southern
Pacific Railroad, and although they weren’t involved in that fighting
the Southern Pacific branded Chris and Molly as troublemakers because
they had friends at Mussel Slough who had taken up arms against the
railroad. Never mind that the farmers had lost that battle – once you
were an enemy of the railroad, the railroad never forgave or forgot.

When Molly, Chris and the children moved back near Visalia to start a
farm, Chris was still on the railroad’s Hit List. So when train
robberies started happening in the San Joaquin Valley in the late
1880’s, the Southern Pacific decided that they would point the finger
of blame at Chris and his friend John, even though they didn’t have a
shred of evidence that either of them had ever been involved; even
though they knew for a fact that the Dalton Gang had committed at
least some of those train robberies. They began watching Chris as well
as Molly, and they weren’t subtle about it. The family was being
harassed, but the Southern Pacific was the most powerful thing in
California – a law unto themselves – so they could get away with it.
One day when Molly wasn’t home a railroad detective, accompanied by a
sheriff, rode up and walked into their living room with their guns
drawn. Their oldest daughter, Eva, ran out the back door to tell her
father that two men were in the house threatening to either arrest him
or shoot him. Unable to tolerate this threat to his family in his own
home Chris picked up his own gun and went in to confront the two men.
Shots were exchanged and the railroad detective and sheriff took off
back to town at full speed. Chris and John knew the trouble wasn’t
over and they in turn took off for the mountains, back to the security
of Redwood Ranch, but leaving Molly and the children behind for their
own safety.

Molly Byrd was now thirty years old and deeply in love with her
husband, the mother of eight more children after little Eugene had
died, and she was no fool. She knew that the railroad would never give
up on trying to destroy her family and kill her husband. She was
right. The railroad posted a team of spies on Molly’s farm and posted
a reward of ten thousand dollars on her husband’s head – dead or
alive. The railroad had basically issued a Death Warrant on a man who
had never been convicted of a crime.

Thus began a saga which ran on for the next two years. Chris and John
hid out in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, alternating between the
Redwood Ranch and a mining claim they had several miles north of the
ranch. The area was familiar to them as Chris had worked as a logger
and as a teamster in the area, and both men had numerous friends who
helped them out. Molly, meanwhile, took on the tasks of running the
family farm and raising eight children, while at the same time fending
off frequent visits from the sheriff and suffering constant threats
and intrusions from the railroad. One of those railroad detectives, a
man by the name of Will Smith, took to watching the family so closely
that he decided that he was in love with Molly’s eldest daughter, Eva,
and wanted to marry her. But Eva told him off in no uncertain terms,
and in language which was quite explicit, explaining in detail how she
would never have anything to do with a man who had sunk so low in life
as to take a job as a railroad detective. She was most definitely as
strong willed as Molly, and just as opinionated. Molly was proud of
her. Chris would sometimes sneak down to the farm and pay a visit to
Molly at night and then leave before morning light. The railroad
detectives also suspected Molly of sneaking food up to her husband in
the mountains, and although they were very vocal in their accusations
they could never prove anything. During these years Molly had the
continuous support of her mother – Grannie Byrd to the children – who
lived nearby in Visalia.

Chris and John were finally captured after a year and a half in the
mountains and after a fiery shootout with a possee. John died from
wounds shortly after the gunfight, and Chris was charged with the
murder of two deputies who had died. Chris stood trial and was
convicted of murder while Molly attended court every day, watching the
legal process of her husband being railroaded into jail. Chris pled
self-defense, saying that the men he had shot had been illegally
hunting him to collect an illegal bounty put on his head by the
Southern Pacific, yet he was convicted of murder nonetheless. But
Chris escaped from the county jail before he could be sent to Folsom
Prison and was free in the mountains again for several months after
someone smuggled a gun into his cell. Again Molly was implicated, and
again nothing could be proven. But she was a woman who stood by her
husband and no one doubted her resolve to do what she felt needed to
be done.

But since Molly was being watched so closely by the railroad, it was
also thought that she used her oldest daughter, Eva, to communicate
with her husband. On one occasion Eva was seen to saddle up and follow
a possee out of town at a discreet distance. Later she admitted to
sneaking up to their campfire to listen to what was being said. When
she heard that railroad detective and would-be lothario, Will Smith,
say that they thought they had her father trapped in a box canyon, she
went back to her horse and rode around the possee and up the box
canyon to find her father and warn him. She did find him, and they
managed to climb out the steep end of the canyon and escape while it
was still dark. It became clear to both the sheriff and to the
railroad that Chris’s repeated escapes and continued freedom would not
have been nearly so successful without the help of Molly and Eva.

After Chris was captured, Molly was refused entrance to the jail to
visit him for an entire week. During that time Chris’s left arm was
amputated by the doctor, supposedly because of an infection. Yet there
were some who felt that it was, in reality, a not-so-subtle message
from the Southern pacific - 'Stop Pissing Us Off, Or We’ll Cut Off
Even More Pieces'. Molly took this with her usual courage, and then
she and Eva came up with an ingenious idea as to how to raise money
for his appeal. They wrote a stage play about the supposed escapades
of Chris, starred in it themselves, and it opened in San Francisco to
a packed house and standing ovations. Of course it didn’t do so well
when it toured Central California – Southern Pacific Country – and
soon had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Molly. Even with her husband shipped off to
Folsom Prison in leg irons to serve a life sentence, Molly refused to
give up. Chris said that he was innocent, and that was enough for her.
So for the next seventeen years Molly worked tirelessly for his
release. She wrote letters to politicians, raised money, gave
speeches, and filed for appeals. Finally, after Chris had been in
prison for seventeen years, Molly convinced the governor of California
to grant him a pardon due to his continually declining health, and her
husband was released from jail in 1911. But this was immediately
followed by a demand that Chris and Molly leave California immediately
and never return. That, of course, was the railroad talking – still
giving orders through the mouths of politicians. The railroad never
forgave and never forgot. So Molly and her husband moved on up to
Oregon where she and Eva took care of Chris until he died six years
later in 1917.

Molly lived on until 1944 when she passed away at the age of
eighty-five. She had lived through what most people would consider to
have been a hard life, with both the Southern Pacific Railroad and the
State of California setting their combined wills against her and
determined to destroy her family. Looking back Molly sometimes
couldn’t help but wonder just where the trouble had all begun – Mussel
Slough? Perhaps, but Molly and Chris hadn’t even been present for that
battle. The Train Robberies? Again, perhaps – although Chris swore to
his dying day that he had never robbed a train in his life, and Molly
echoed that conviction. Molly always felt that at least the state
could have given him a fair trial on that charge, but they didn’t.
They couldn’t, because there was just no evidence that he had ever
robbed a train. But Molly Byrd stood by her husband for their entire
lives. She had married the man who was destined to become known as the
notorious Chris Evans – the leader of the Evans and Sontag Gang of
train robbers; a train robber who was never charged or tried for train
robbery. But the Southern Pacific Railroad never forgave or forgot
anyone they considered an enemy.

Having begun her marriage with the premature birth and death of her
first child, Molly was destined to repeat that sad experience with
another son, Louis. In February of 1925 Louis, now living in Oregon,
borrowed a car from a friend. He planned on taking his mother out to
dinner and wanted to make the evening special by giving her a ride in
an automobile, an event which was still a novelty for Molly, who was
always more comfortable on a horse. After dinner Louis suggested a
ride in the country because it was such a beautiful evening, and Molly
agreed. But unused to driving a car, especially at night on unlit
country roads, Louis lost control of the vehicle and it skidded and
then overturned. The top was torn off the car as it continued to
tumble.  Molly was thrown out of the vehicle but suffered only mild
abrasions. The force of the accident also threw Louis out of the car,
but he had the misfortune to land on his head. He died three days
later of brain injuries. Molly walked away from that crash relatively
uninjured but she had lost another son, this one at the young age of
only thirty-eight.

The Redwood Ranch, the beloved home of Molly and Chris at which they
had begun their marriage so many years before, passed out of their
care during the time of Chris’s imprisonment in order to raise much
needed funds for the family. In a complicated transaction which began
with Molly deeding the property to her mother, and Granny Byrd then
deeding it to a friend who in turn deeded it to another friend, the
Redwood Ranch was eventually deeded to the United States Government
and became attached to the Sequoia National Forest. The whole process
was a complicated title laundering scheme more typically conceived in
the mind of a railroad lawyer, but apparently Molly felt that the
elaborate subterfuge was necessary in order to disguise the fact that
the money was eventually coming to her, perhaps fearing that if the
government knew they might balk at providing income for the wife of a
train robber. So, as an intelligent woman with a calculating mind, she
planned carefully to avoid that possibility.

Yet the fact that the land should go to the federal government was
important to Molly and Chris because they both still loved the ranch
and wanted to see it protected from logging and development. In return
for the gift the government deeded a piece of land of equal size to
the man who had donated the ranch to them, and he in turn sold it and
passed the money on to Molly who used it to move out of Visalia and up
to Oregon, taking the children with her. Had Molly lived longer she
would have been happy to see Redwood Canyon, including the land which
had once been her beloved ranch, become a part of Kings Canyon
National Park, where it achieved a more complete and lasting
protection.

Molly lived life with no excuses, few regrets, and without ever
backing down. And even though Molly couldn’t personally continue to
stay in the mountains she was comforted by the memory that a part of
her nevertheless did manage to linger there; a small part, buried
there at Redwood Ranch, just beneath a giant Cedar tree next to a
small spring of running water; her first child, still resting in that
grove of Giant Sequoias to this day.