The Shootists

JOHNNY RINGO

The King Of The Cowboys?

By Joe Poncho

It was a hot summer’s day by the bank of Turkey Creek, Arizona, when a lumber worker came across the corpse of John Ringo slumped beneath an old Oak tree. There were two wounds to the dead mans head. One was a bullet hole to the right temple which had probably been put there by the Colt pistol in Ringo’s right hand. The coroner’s jury verdict was suicide because of this.

The other wound was to the forehead and was put there, apparently, with a knife after his death by person or persons unknown. Some say it was a scalping attempt and that the grotesque individual was disturbed and ran away.

This was the finding of the Coroner’s jury:

“John Ringo committed suicide on the 14^th. Day of July 1882.”

Dig a little deeper and you will see that the above verdict is a nonsense. If Johnny Ringo had committed suicide then why was there no powder burns to the right temple if he’d blasted his brains out with his own gun? Who carved up his forehead and for what reason?

His gun belt was wrapped about his waist upside down – again, why?

And why were his boots removed and his undershirt tied about his feet?

It is reckoned that there were more tall stories and good old yarns appertaining to Johnny Ringo at the time than there ever was about Billy The Kid, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and all the others.

Jack Burrows exposed the Johnny Ringo myth for exactly what it was in his excellent 1987 book, JOHN RINGO – THE GUNFIGHTER WHO NEVER WAS, a myth – nothing more.

It was claimed that he (Johnny Ringo) was a brave and honourable gun man and the fastest quick draw artist in the South West. According to the legend, he had ridden with Quantrill’s Raiders and was a personal friend of both Frank and Jesse James. Some say he was even related to the James boys and the Youngers!

It was said the he was well educated and read Latin and that he had a collection of all the great classics in his home. He was the black sheep of a noble Southern family and often could be found quoting Shakespeare and reciting poems in Latin.

Walter Noble Burns in his 1927 book, Tombstone, even went so far as to call him, “…a man born for better things who stalked the streets of Tombstone, a Hamlet among Outlaws…”

The truth is much less romantic.

John ‘Johnny’ Ringo was born on May 3^rd. 1850 (Could he really have ridden with Quantrill when he was only 14 when the war ended in April 1865?) in Greenfork, Indiana.

He was a drunkard and a blackguard and, according to some reports, psychotic. He never took part in a face-to-face shoot out during all his time in Arizona.

His father, Martin Ringo had headed west with his wife, Mary and three daughters, Fanny, Mary Enna and Mattie and his sons Martin Albert and John. They were heading for Liberty, Missouri and harbouring the hope that the better climate there would relieve Martin’s tuberculosis but he never completed the long, hazardous journey. Two months into the trek on July 30, 1864 he was dead.

The Liberty Tribune newspaper out of Missouri reported the following eye witness account of his death thus:

“…Just after daylight…Mr. Ringo stepped out…of wagons as, I suppose, for the purpose of looking around to see if Indians were in sight and his shotgun went off accidently in his own hands, the load entering at his right eye and coming out the top of his head. At the report of his gun I saw his hat blown up 20 feet in the air and his brains were scattered in all directions.”

His wife, Mary made this entry in her diary:

“May no one ever suffer the anguish that is braking my heart, my little children are crying all the time and I – oh, what am I to do?”

She eventually settled down in San Jose, California and tried her very best to keep her family in the one place together but John took to the booze and used it heavily. In 1869 he left the family home to become a cowboy down in Texas. He was 19.

The only officially documented case of anyone dying by Ringo’s hand occurred during his 10 years in Texas. He became a hired gun hand in the (in) famous “Hoodoo War” a bloody and violent range war that was fought in Mason County in the 1870s.

His first killing came when he and a fellow by the name of Williams went to the home of one James Cheyney. They called Cheyney out on to the porch of his own home in a friendly manner and then proceed to shoot the man dead.

A week or two after this shocking event, Ringo was riding with the little known Scott Cooley Gang who have been described by one Historian as “Human coyotes,” when they killed a man named Charles Bader. It is believed that the gang’s actual target was Charles’ brother, Peter but it is debatable as to weather or not it actually mattered to the cold blooded killers. Indeed, Cooley was so evil that he carried the scalps of several earlier victims about his own person.

For his part in the murder, Ringo was captured and jailed but managed to escape and was recaptured and eventually indicted for Cheney’s murder. Now Ringo’s tracks become somewhat blurred with the passage of time. He did not serve time in jail for the killing and, maybe, managed to escape once again. No one really knows anything about this short period in the gun mans life. What is known is that he fled Texas in an all mighty hurry sometime in 1879.

Ringo next turned up in a place called Galeyville, Arizona – a wild and desolate little shanty town in the Chiricahua Mountains. It served as the headquarters of a gang of murders, cut throats and villains that terrorised the South-West region of the area.

Some members of the gang were the notorious ‘Cowboys’ who’s long and bitter war with the Earp Brother would lead directly to the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26^th. 1881. Ringo had no part in that particular fight but he was a frequent law breaker. In the December of 1979, he gunned down and severely wounded a man called Hancock.

The Arizona Miner reported it thus:

“It appears that Ringo wanted Hancock to take a drink, and he refused, saying he would prefer beer. Ringo struck him over the head with his pistol and then fired, the ball taking effect in the lower end of the left ear, and passed through the fleshy part of the neck. Half an inch more in the neck would have killed him. Ringo is under arrest.”

Hancock survived the terrifying encounter.

In the following decades writers turned the story any which way claiming that the encounter took place in Tombstone and that Hancock was actually killed.

Three months after the event, the Pima County Sheriff, Charles Shibell, received a letter from Ringo stating that he could not appear before the grand jury that was looking into the Hancock case because “I got shot through the foot and it’s impossible for me to travel for awhile(sic).”

Some folk say that he shot himself in the foot either by accident or design. No on really knows which it was and we never will.

He made the news once again on 11^th. August 1881 when the Tombstone Nugget published an account of a bar room fight in Galeyville. He had lost heavily at Poker and stormed out of the saloon.

The Nugget reported what happened next thus:

“He returned with a companion named David Estes, one being armed with a Henry rifle and the other with a six-shooter. The players were promptly ordered to hold up their hands. And the cowboys proceeded to ‘go through’ the party, securing in the neighbourhood of $500.”

At other times in his life, Ringo’s appearance in saloons and bars could, oddly enough, be remembered with some kindness. In his written reminiscences, Arizona Rancher A.M. Franklin wrote of a time when an armed fellow was doing all he could to goad the rancher into a fight.

Ringo came into the the bar and observed what was going on. According to Frankin, “He (Ringo) heard enough to catch the drift, then he sauntered to the bar and announced, ‘All of Franklin’s and my friends have a drink.’ No one dared insult him by refusing and they all had a drink - the obnoxious fellow included.”

Another of Franklin’s written stories went thus:

“At another time a crowd was trying to start something in the store…Ringo took in the situation at a glance. Stepping up beside me and slamming his gun on the counter, he remarked, ‘If there is going to be a row, I think I would like to be in on it.’ Everyone suddenly decided they had business elsewhere.”

Some of the supposed misdeed involving him and Curly Bill Brocius and the (in)famous Clanton family were never proven. Many, for instance, believe that he was directly involved in the murders of storekeepers Ike and Bill Haslett in Eureka, New Mexico in June 1881 and that he participated in a raid on a Mexican pack train in Skeleton Canyon in the August of the same year. Some stated that he held up the Bisbee stage in January, 1882.

None of the above was ever proven.

Wyatt Earp, a long held enemy of Ringo’s, believed that he was involved in the shooting and crippling of his brother, Virgil in December 1881 and in the murder of his other brother, Morgan in Febuary 1882.

The truth on that matter, of course, will never be really known.

In January 1882 he and Doc Holliday allegedly had an altercation on the streets of Tombstone. Both were drunk and called each other out for a gunfight but common sense apparently prevailed and both men were disarmed by the ‘local police’. Exactly who disarmed them we don’t know.

Shortly after the above incidents, Johnny Ringo was dead.

The Epitaph had no doubt that he had killed himself and proceeded to put forward the theory that Ringo had been on a drunken spree when he died; an “Extended Jamboree” as they called it. They stated that he had lost his boots and his horse and had wrapped his shirt about his feet so as to be able to walk better. However the heat and booze had gotten to him and a fit of melancholy had overcome him. He had then sat down beneath the spreading Oak tree and shot himself.

The Star’ headline on reporting the outlaws death read:

“The King Of The Cowboys Sends A Bullet Through His Head.”

For many years there have been all kinds of rumours and theories put forward as to who may of actually killed Ringo.

In the frame were notorious characters Johnny-Behind-The-Deuce, Pony Deal, Buckskin Frank Leslie, Doc Holliday, Lou Cooley (No relation to the previously mentioned Scott Cooley) and Wyatt Earp.

Josephine Earp claimed that her husband, Wyatt shot Ringo in her autobiography. Many have found her story leaky to say the least. The mystery of Johnny Ringo’s death remains.

We may never really get to know the truth behind the death of…

“The King Of The Cowboys.”

Steven J.C. Forber 2008.

References:

Tombstone Chronicles Volume 5. Tough Folks, Wild Times

And the books mentioned within the article itself along with various magazines including True West & Guns Of The Old West.