𝙹𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚛 𝙴𝚜𝚌𝚞𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚊

Javier Escuella was born in a small village in Nuevo Paraíso, Mexico. His father was a drunkard who worked as a laborer on land owned by the uncle of Agustín Allende, while his mother was a devout Catholic who tried to keep her son on the right path. When Javier was young, he witnessed a horrific act that shaped his view of the world: his uncle and four other men were castrated and fed to pigs for daring to suggest that local peasants deserved fair wages. The brutal punishment left Javier bitter, while his resentment deepened when his mother continued to accept life as it was, even after her brother’s death.

As he grew older, Javier became known as both a bounty hunter and a revolutionary, taking up arms against what he saw as a corrupt system. In the summer of 1894, he killed a powerful former army officer in Punta Orgullo during a dispute over a woman he loved. Fearing that his family would be targeted if he stayed in Mexico, Javier fled north into the United States. Unable to speak English, he quickly found himself destitute, starving, and struggling to survive.

In 1895, while trying to steal chickens, Javier encountered Dutch van der Linde, who was doing the same. The two men laughed at their shared misfortune, and Dutch offered Javier food, clothing, and a place in his gang. To Javier, the Van der Linde gang was more than just a refuge — it became his true family. He admired Dutch deeply, idolizing him as a revolutionary figure and pledging his unwavering loyalty to the man and his ideals.

Javier served as a gunman for the gang and took part in numerous robberies and crimes across the frontier. One of the most notable was a bank job in Tucson, Arizona, carried out with Arthur Morgan and Karen Jones in the mid-1890s. Karen disguised herself as a nun to infiltrate the bank, hiding two pistols beneath her robes, while Javier and Arthur completed the heist successfully.

On another occasion, sometime before 1899, Javier and Arthur attempted to rob a stagecoach after receiving a tip from a crooked lawman in Reno, Nevada. When they discovered that the coach was carrying only women and children, they chose to let it pass. The next day, however, the O’Driscoll Boys robbed the very same coach and murdered everyone aboard, leaving Javier and Arthur frustrated and disgusted.

At some point during these years, Javier received word that his mother had passed away and that his sister had married. Despite missing them deeply, he knew that returning to Mexico was impossible; discovery would almost certainly mean his death.

By 1899, the Van der Linde gang had made its way to West Elizabeth, camping near the growing town of Blackwater. When Dutch heard of a ferry carrying a fortune, he planned an ambitious robbery. Javier joined the heist, and alongside John Marston, he witnessed Dutch execute a defenseless young woman named Heidi McCourt before the Pinkertons ambushed the gang. The botched job erupted into a bloody firefight, forcing Javier and the others to flee. The survivors escaped north into the snowbound mountains of Ambarino, barely clinging to survival as they tried to stay ahead of the law.