Red Dead Redemption: Why John Only Went After SOME Gang Members

In Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, John Marston is blackmailed by the government into hunting down several of his former gang members, many of which players later met and become acquainted with in Red Dead Redemption 2. John hesitantly agrees, knowing that the lives of his wife and son are on the line.

Over the course of the game, John tracks down and kills Javier Escuella, Bill Williamson, and the gang’s former leader Dutch Van der Linde. But there were many more members of the Van der Linde gang than just those three, and as such, it may seem perplexing as to why John was tasked with hunting down only those members.

Red Dead Redemption 2, acting as a prequel to the original game, sheds light on what happens to the other Van der Linde gang members and reveals why they weren’t high priorities for the government. It may seem like a plot hole, but there is good reason as to why the government had him focus on the main three remaining members of the gang.

Why John Didn’t Go After All the Van der Linde Members

Many of the main gang members died before the end of Red Dead Redemption 2, including Arthur Morgan, Lenny Summers, Sean MacGuire, and Micah Bell. That only left a few main members for John to go after. He likely would’ve been pressured to hunt down Sadie Adler and Charles, but both of them supposedly left the country at RDR2’s close (Sadie talked about going to South America and Charles wanted to go to Canada). So, that can explain why the government didn’t task John with searching for those associates, since they were so far out of their reach.

Then again, the government did have John go to Mexico to hunt Javier and Bill, so perhaps players are meant to accept that Sadie and Charles weren’t as high a priority as the other gang members who had been associated with the Van der Lindes for longer. There are other Van der Linde gang members — Simon Pearson, Reverend Swanson, and Josiah Trelawny — who weren’t as active in the gang’s heists but were still members, yet the government supposedly wasn’t concerned with tracking them down. This signifies the government was mainly concerned with the gang members directly responsible for orchestrating and committing the worst of the heists.

Even more, most of the women in the Van der Linde gang stayed out of the heists and missions, including Mary-Beth Gaskill, Tilly Jackson, and Karen Jones, who were able to evade the law and go on to have somewhat normal lives after the gang disbanded. Other female members, like Susan Grimshaw and Molly O’Shea, died before RDR2’s end. Similarly, even though Abigail Marston managed to escape the government raid on the ranch, it appears they never tried tracking her down, likely because they knew she (nor her son) was not culpable for the heists her husband committed. Even though it may seem perplexing as to why John only hunted down a few select members of the Van der Lindes in Red Dead Redemption, it makes sense given that they were the ones directly responsible for the criminal activities.

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