Outlaw or Ghost? The Search for Jesse Evans

The Wild West Extravaganza

Wild West Josh

Education, History

4.8 • 833 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What really happened to Jesse Evans, the outlaw who once rode with Billy the Kid and helped ignite the Lincoln County War? He shot up dance halls, rustled cattle, and left a bloody trail from New Mexico to Texas, only to vanish without a trace. And to this day, nobody knows his true fate. Was Jesse Evans really a childhood friend of Billy the Kid? Did he spend his final years as Joseph Hines in Florida, or die hiding out on a Texas ranch? Join me as I attempt to separate fact from fiction and explore every wild theory about Jesse’s origins, his crimes, and his legendary disappearance. Buy Me A Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/wildwest Check out the website! https://www.wildwestextra.com/ Email me! https://www.wildwestextra.com/contact/ Billy the Kid - https://www.wildwestextra.com/billy-the-kid-compilation/ Free Newsletter! https://wildwestjosh.substack.com/ Join Patreon for ad-free bonus content! https://www.patreon.com/wildwestextra Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:15.1	Jesse Evans wrote with the likes of Billy the Kid and John Selman.
0:18.6	He shot up dance halls, rustled cattle, helped to spark the Lincoln
0:21.7	County War, and left a trail of dead bodies all the way from New Mexico to Texas, only to then
0:26.9	vanish without a trace. And to this day, nobody knows for certain what became of him. Who was the real
0:33.1	Jesse Evans? What was his life like before he became an outlaw? Now true are the stories about
0:38.0	Billy the kid being afraid of him. And did Evans really live to be an old man in Florida, known as
0:42.7	Joseph Hines? Stick around and find out. My name's Josh, and this is the Wild West extravaganza. Jesse Evans was born in Missouri in 1853, or was it Texas?
1:03.2	According to some, Jesse was part Cherokee and had received a college education back east.
1:08.2	Others maintain that he was a childhood friend of Billy the Kid,
1:11.5	and that he and his parents had been arrested in Kansas for passing off counterfeit money. The truth is we know very,
1:17.0	very little about Jesse Evans. We don't even know for sure if that was his real name. What's more,
1:22.4	there are no authenticated photos of Evans. Don't get me wrong, you can find photos online and in books, but none of them
1:29.4	have yet to be authenticated. We'll circle back to the origins just a bit, but thankfully,
1:35.2	once Evans arrived in New Mexico in the early 1870s, things do start to clear up.
1:40.7	Is there where he found employment as a genuine cowboy, working for several different outfits
1:44.9	before securing a job with the famous John Chisholm, which ironically might just be how Evans
1:50.1	got to start stealing horses. Look, there's not much in life that's certain, other than death,
1:55.0	taxes, and the fact that almost everyone in New Mexico in the 1870s was still in livestock,
2:00.5	including the esteemed John Chisholm.
	...

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