User blog comment:Sammyrock0087/Big Plot Hole in RDR 2 **SPOLIERS**/@comment-27656000-20181203164411

Well, it's kinda complicated. Technically John never says when he left the gang, it was a bunch of assumptions made based on evidence that was only available in the first game. There's the fact that Dutch allegedly died in a fire during a robbery that went awry in 1906, as an example.

Also, for a long time the Red Dead community thought that John was shot and left for dead at the ferry heist due to the fact that the stranger mentions the ferry job as "The one you were shot on" when mentioning Heidi McCourt. The insinuation was that this was the robbery that went south, due to the way the stranger said it, and many also thought that it was the same Dutch "died" during. This is because the stranger refers to this event and Heidi's death as being "a few years ago."

So it was never outright said when John left, though the implications that it was 1906 and due to the ferry job were definitely there. It's even kind of addressed in RDR2, by having John as one of the ones shot during the ferry heist, though not in any major place apparently. He's also shot during the train heist and left to die by Dutch, and Javier is one of the men riding with Dutch when this happens, which addresses when John confronts him in RDR and says something like "You and Dutch left me to die." I think this is probably the biggest anomaly personally, since Javier in RDR2 doesn't at all seem the type to leave someone behind. They had to do it to fit with what John said, it's just a shame they didn't develop his character more in that direction.

Basically Rockstar did a soft retcon of the events, so to speak. They didn't actually have to change anything, they just erased answers that already filled in the blanks and replaced them with something else. It wasn't so much that events were changed, it was more the story writing equivalent of someone saying "No, what I actually meant was..."

As for Dutch's alleged death in 1906, we can only assume that was something he did with another gang, maybe the one we see in the first game, maybe with Micah's. Seems like this is more an oversight though, since John and Sadie mention not hearing anything about Dutch in a mission, even though the epilogue is in 1907 so they should have heard of him being killed a year prior.