Short Stuff: Johnny Ringo

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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff Josh, Chuck, Jerry, and for Dave, and we are quick on the draw.

You're on short stuff.

Peep, peep.

That's not lasers though.

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OK.

Good point, but not in the old West unless it's Westworld, I guess.

Because we're talking about the Old West, and we're talking about a lesser known Old West gunslinger by the name of Johnny Ringo.

Yeah, not Johnny Angel, Johnny Ringo, although you can substitute his name for that for Johnny Angel in the song.

If you sing it in your head, that you could.

He is, he was at the time, very well known.

He was an outlaw.

He was one of those cowboys.

He was the, he was a higher gun.

He was a mercenary, which I guess is a higher gun.

He also ran gangs that were known to murder and that kind of stuff, but he wasn't like a bank robber.

He wasn't a train robber, even.

He just seems to have been a guy who just kind of made his way from town to town,

ended up in kind of famous situations and did nefarious things here there just enough to make a name for himself.

Yeah, he was born in May 1850, and what is now Green's fork, Indiana, shout out to Green's fork.

And eventually got tangled up, like you said, he sort of found himself getting tangled up with various more famous people.

That included early on the younger brothers who were led by Jesse James and Frank James, the bank robbing group.

But he was had a pretty awful incident happen to him that when he was a teenager that seemed like it really kind of shaped the rest of his life.

And how could it not?

Absolutely.

He, his parents and his brothers and sister were all on the trail to move from Missouri to California and partway through.

Martin Ringo was, I'm not sure what he was doing with his rifle or shotgun.

I saw both, but it went off when it happened to be pointing up at his head from his chin.

And he died instantly, obviously in a very gruesome way right in front of Johnny.

And you can basically explain the rest of Johnny Ringo's life from that incident because it does matter as 1850,

1050, 2050, if his son sees his dad die in that manner, that's going to shape your life pretty much single handedly.

Yeah, for sure.

He was obviously traumatized.

They had to, you know, they were moving, like you said, to California.

So they just had to kind of keep going.

They buried him along the road, kept that wagon train going.

And by that age, he was, he was a pretty good shot himself.

He was pretty good with a quick draw, good with a rifle.

They landed in San Jose, his mom and his brothers and sisters.

And he was there until about 1870 when he moved to Mason County, Texas,

where he kind of fell in with a bad gang of cattle rustlers.

Yeah, it almost seems like, so he was 20 then.

It seems like he just basically moved to Texas to look for trouble.

And he found it very quickly.

There is a Texas Ranger, well, a former Texas Ranger turned outlaw named Scott Cooley.

And they just kind of hit it off pretty quickly.

They became friends.

And this is where Johnny Ringo really kind of started to become known

as like a outlaw gun slinger.

Yeah, for sure.

Because Mason County, you know, if you've ever seen like the three amigos,

you know, had Germans in it.

And you kind of don't really think about the old west having like,

you know, British people and German people.

But they did.

In fact, Mason County was mainly colonized by German and British descended cattle people.

And the tensions between them were pretty rough between those groups.

They were often accusing one another of stealing their stock and taking their cows and rustling horses.

And then in 1875, it really sort of launched when a couple of the Brits,

including a guy named Tim Williamson,

were pulled out of jail by these Germans and killed in retaliation for a cattle theft.

Yeah, and they were being transported by a deputy sheriff named John Wardley.

And these Germans assumed Germans who killed Tim Williamson

and took some other guys and hung them and shot them.

Scott Cooley, who was friends with Tim Williamson and some of the other guys,

he assumed that John Wardley had allowed this to happen that he was basically in on it.

So this kicked off what became known as the Mason County War

or the Who Do War.

And the first victim in this war after Williamson was John Wardley,

who was killed by Scott Cooley,

who not only killed him, but scalped him on August 10th, 1875.

That feels like maybe a time for a break?

I think so.

All right, we'll be right back with more on Johnny Ringo right after this.

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All right.

So when we left you the Houdu War had kicked off.

John Warley had been killed and scalped.

This was 1875, and Ringo was a part of this war.

And you know, it seems like he was sort of just a side man

supporting his buddy, Cooley, and whatever he wanted.

He was friends with the guys in his gang.

He was part of the gang essentially.

And when a guy named Moses Baird,

who was a part of the gang, was killed in that Houdu War

about a month later in September of that year.

Ringo went on the attack big time.

Shot two of the guys that he suspected

was involved in the murder.

A guy named Dave Dool and another guy named James Cheney

went to their houses and shot him.

And he actually went to jail for this one,

but because it was the Old West,

he escaped not too long after.

Right.

So I mean, like he's really starting to build on his legend

as a black hat outlaw, right?

He spends the next few years moving around,

looking for new cattle wars, new Mexico, Arizona, Texas.

He was known to do things like he pistol whipped

and then shot a man who he offered to drink to

and the guy refused.

He murdered another man that he saw her asking a woman,

robbed a poker game that he had just left

because the players wouldn't loan him any money

so he could stay in and keep playing.

But his, I guess if anybody has heard of Johnny Ringo,

it's because of he crossed paths.

It's his association with the guides

from the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona,

Doc Holiday and Wyatt are in Virgillard.

Can't forget Virgill.

Yeah, I mean, if you've seen the movie Tombstone,

you were probably yelling like guys.

We've heard of Ringo.

He was in the movie, it was Michael Bean, right?

Yeah, John Connor's dead.

Yeah, that's right.

So Ringo didn't like these guys.

He didn't like Holiday and Urb, either Urb.

And eventually they did like a real Old West sort of

high noon showdown in the middle of the town streets

and it was pistols were gonna be drawn for sure,

but local constable came in, intervened

and nothing happened at that point.

But that was about a year before Johnny Ringo

would be found dead against a tree.

Yeah, and I have never understood

what that I'm your Huckleberry meant.

So I looked it up, do you know what it means?

I've never seen Tombstone believe it or not

all the way through.

I haven't either.

I just know that that Val Kilmer says that.

Yeah, that's a whole for me for sure.

He says I'm your Huckleberry.

And I guess that was the old time you wait

at the time of saying like, I'm the man for the job.

I can do this.

And I guess he was saying I'm the man who can kill you

essentially or take you down or at least gunfight you.

Okay.

So at any rate, he didn't fight Doc Holiday and Wyatt Urb.

He wasn't there at the famous gunfight at the okay

Kerala.

Apparently he was out of town that day.

And I'm sure he was quite upset when he came back

to town and found out what had happened.

Because he definitely would have been on the side

of the other guys.

And like you said, all that happened about a year

before he was found dead just outside of Tombstone

up against a tree on July 14th, 1882.

He had a single gunshot wound to his head

and a Colt 45 revolver in his hand.

So it seemed like it was probably a pretty clear cut case

of suicide.

He'd been known to have been deep in the drink at the time

was very depressed.

And he'd given an interview to the Tombstone

Epitaph newspaper just before his death

that he said that he was going to be run down

or killed at some point.

And a local historian named Bob Bowes Bell

said that he certainly sounded down in the interview.

So you could make a pretty good case that it was suicide.

Yeah.

Other people say it was probably in the movie at least.

It was Val Kilmer.

It was Doc Holiday.

And that historian Bell was like,

everyone thought pretty much this was a suicide

until that movie came out.

There were, of course, whispers that it could have been

holiday and erp in the gang.

But it was really that movie that kind of solidified it

in the minds of people because it was a big Hollywood movie.

Yeah, but there's some problems with that one.

Doc Holiday was almost certainly in Pueblo County, Colorado

a few days before Ringo's death and after

because he had to appear in court

and he's on the record as having been there.

It's a 1,500 mile trip in three days

that I guess you could make.

But that seems like a lot of trouble to go out of your way

when Doc Holiday could have just killed them basically

at any time.

And then why at earth?

He did claim credit for him, right?

Yeah, he for sure did.

But this seems to be one of those things

where I think this kind of happened a lot in the Old West

where it was a badge of honor and you could claim

that you murdered someone when you didn't at all.

And that seems like it had some pretty big holes.

Like the account of his killing

wasn't, it didn't line up with like how the body was found.

And he also recanted later and was like,

you know, I didn't really kill that guy.

Yeah, and there was another piece of evidence

that just kind of at least it's circumstantial

that was written later by Doc Holiday's common law wife,

Big Nose Kate Cummings.

And not only does it kind of support the idea

that he died by suicide,

it also really paints him as a tragic figure.

If you'll indulge me, will you chuck?

Yes.

So Kate Cummings wrote,

Ringo was a fine man anyway you look at him.

Physically, intellectually, morally,

he was six feet tall, rather slim and build,

although broad shoulders, medium, fair as the complexion

with gray blue eyes and light brown hair.

Okay, so far so good.

His face was somewhat long, okay?

He was what might be called an attractive man.

So she described him physically as basically handsome

and then she says,

his attitude toward all women was gentlemanly.

He must have been a gentleman born.

Sometimes I notice something wistful about him

as if his thoughts were far away on something sad.

And he would say, oh well, inside,

then he would smile,

but his smiles were always sad.

There was something in his life

that only he himself knew about.

He was always neat, clean, well dressed,

showed that he took good care of himself.

He never boasted of his deeds good or bad.

The trade I have always liked and meant.

John was a loyal friend and he was noble

for he never fought anyone except face to face.

Every time I think of him,

my eyes filled with tears.

Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a guy who was haunted

by seeing his father blow his head off by accident.

Absolutely.

And I think it says a lot that that was Doc Holiday,

his sworn enemies wife who wrote that about him.

Yeah, for sure.

So that's Johnny Ringo, kind of a murder mystery,

but not necessarily.

And anyway, you slice it.

One of the unsung outlawed bandits of the Old West.

That's right.

Chuck said that's right,

which means short stuff is out.

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