Johnny Ringo remains one of the most compelling and misunderstood figures of the American West. His name carries a certain captivating aura, one that ranks him lower in the historical pantheon than legends like Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid, yet he is still widely acclaimed and aligned with the infamous Cowboys of Cochise County. Over time, his image has been significantly skewed and romanticized by Hollywood, particularly in films like The Gunfighter in 1950 and Tombstone in 1993.
While popular culture often labels him a gun master, a cold-blooded outlaw chief, or a brooding intellectual, the truth is far more complex. Johnny Ringo was a charismatic enigma, a man whose intensity forged a legendary and timeless presence in the lore of the Old West. This presence, coupled with his mysterious and untimely demise, has cemented his legacy as one of the most fascinating characters of the frontier.
Here are seven facts about Johnny Ringo that you will not learn at the movies.
Johnny Ringo’s life was marked by tragedy from a very young age, beginning with the accidental death of his father. John Peters Ringo was born on May 3, 1850, in Wayne County, Indiana. According to historian Casey Teffertiller, when Ringo was around fourteen years old, his parents decided to move west to California in search of a new life.
The journey along the westward trail, however, took a tragic and devastating twist on July 30, 1864.
While the family was traveling with a wagon train, Ringo’s father, Martin, died in a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 accident. The Liberty Tribune reported that at about dawn, Martin had left the wagons to scout ahead and look out for Native Americans when his shotgun accidentally discharged. An eyewitness gave a harrowing account of the incident, stating that at the report of the gun, he saw the man’s hat blown twenty feet into the air and his brains scattered in all directions.
The witness described it as a heart-rending sight, and the distress and agony of the wife and children were painful in the extreme. Mr. Ringo’s death cast a deep gloom over the entire company of travelers.
He was buried on the wayside, and Mary Ringo, Johnny’s mother, was left a widow with several children. In her grief, she wrote that if she had no children, she would gladly lay herself down with her dead. The exact impact of his father’s death upon the young Johnny Ringo is unknown, but one may presume that his life may have turned out quite differently had his father survived the journey.
Despite this early tragedy, Ringo and his family completed the journey west and settled in San Jose, California. At this point, Ringo fell out of the historic record, only to re-emerge around 1874 in the Texas Hill Country. From this point onward, reports and recollections about Johnny Ringo emphasize his dark magnetism and his ability to command attention in any room.
He was also considered to be well educated, a trait that set him apart from many of his rough contemporaries.
While the Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters asserts that Ringo did quote Shakespeare, it should be noted that watching the Bard’s plays was a form of popular entertainment in the 19th century, and many people of average education were familiar with his most famous lines. It is unknown exactly how much formal education Ringo actually had, but it was probably not so much that he would trade barbs in Latin with Doc Holliday as he did in the movie Tombstone. Still, there was a certain theatrical charisma about him that was captured vividly by Big Nose Kate, the common-law wife of Doc Holliday.
Kate wrote a detailed and surprisingly affectionate description of Ringo, noting that he was a fine man any way you looked at him, physically, intellectually, and morally. She described him as six feet tall, rather slim in build but broad-shouldered, with a medium fair complexion, gray-blue eyes, and light brown hair. His face was somewhat long, and he was what might be called an attractive man.
She remarked that his attitude toward all women was gentlemanly, and she believed he must have been a gentleman born. She often noticed something wistful about him, as if his thoughts were far away on something sad. He would sigh and then smile, but his smiles were always sad, suggesting there was something in his life that only he himself knew about.
She noted that he was always neat, clean, and well-dressed, showing that he took good care of himself. He never boasted of his deeds, good or bad, a trait she always liked in men. She concluded that John was a loyal friend and was noble, for he never fought anyone except face to face.
Every time she thought of him, her eyes filled with tears.
Johnny Ringo was a cowboy, but not in the normal sense of the word. After Ringo moved to Texas, he became involved with a renegade former Texas Ranger named Scott Cooley. Together, they took part in the intermittent and bloody feuding between German and non-German settlers in the region, a conflict that became known as the Mason County War or the Hoodoo War.
The violence was brutal and personal, and during this period, Ringo and Cooley were jailed for their involvement. They were eventually broken out of jail by their fellow supporters.
After the conflict in Texas, Ringo migrated to Southeastern Arizona in 1879, an area that was to become Cochise County. It was there that he fell in with the so-called Cochise County Cowboys. These Cowboys were essentially cattle rustlers who raided Mexican stock and then sold it in the United States.
Never a fully cohesive gang, the Cowboys were more of a loose confederation of outlaws who shared a common interest in evading the law and making money through illicit means. In those days, to be called a cowboy in Arizona was to be called a criminal. Ringo was once called the King of the Cowboys, but in truth, he seemed to be just a prominent outlaw among equals and probably one of the more famous cowboys in general.
Despite his fearsome reputation, Johnny Ringo was not a good gunfighter in the traditional sense, but rather a good back shooter. Ringo had the reputation of being a dead shot with a revolver. This might have been true, as contemporaries reported that he won shooting contests by firing his revolver into the open neck of a beer bottle.
However, being a good shot at a target is not the same as being a good gunfighter in a fair fight. The first murder attributed to Ringo was that of James Chaney during the Mason County War. Cheney left his house to wash his face in a basin on his porch when Ringo and another man gunned him down without warning.
In another instance of gun violence, while drunk at a saloon in Safford, Arizona, Ringo fell into a conversation with a man named Lewis Hancock. Ringo offered to buy him a drink, and when the man refused, Ringo became angry, pulled his revolver, and shot the man without warning. Hancock miraculously survived the attack.
Also in Safford, Ringo, again drunk, heard a man insulting a woman on the street. He marched up to the man, pistol-whipped him, and then shot him through the neck, killing him. In no case was Ringo ever involved in a real, face-to-face gunfight, so his skills as a duelist are probably over-attested.
He was, however, an excellent back shooter. It is interesting to note that while imprisoned in the Travis County Jail in Texas, he did meet the expert gunfighter and killer Wes Hardin. It is unknown if Ringo picked up any tips from the infamous gunfighter, but at least according to Outlaw Tales of Texas, Hardin complained about being confined with such a vicious man as Johnny Ringo.
Johnny Ringo was not just an ordinary outlaw; he was also deeply interested in politics. Even before moving to Arizona, he won an election as a Mason County constable in 1878. After moving to Arizona, he wedged himself into local politics.
For the 1880 election, he was appointed a delegate to the Pima County Democratic Convention, despite the fact that he had no legal residence in the area. He was then appointed, along with Ike Clanton, as an election official for the San Simon District. These appointments were subsequently officially revoked because of the residency problem.
However, this was not a setback for Ringo, who steamed ahead to oversee a very interesting and highly suspicious election.
The San Simon District only had up to a dozen legitimate voters. However, the election results showed 103 votes for the Democratic candidate and only one for the Republican. This fraudulent result gave Democrats control of the territorial legislature.
This legislature subsequently formed Cochise County and also proved vital in overriding plans to send out the state militia against the Cowboys. This allowed violence in the territory to increase unchecked, making Arizona truly an emblem of the Wild West. It was in this politically charged and lawless atmosphere that the famous gunfight near the OK Corral occurred in 1881.
Johnny Ringo famously feuded with Doc Holliday. It was during this time in Tombstone that Ringo came into direct conflict with the tubercular gambler. Tensions were incredibly high between the Earp and Cowboy factions, and the situation threatened to boil over into violence at any moment.
Many figures on the Earp side of the feud pointed fingers at Johnny Ringo as a primary instigator of trouble. This was especially true for Doc Holliday, who simply hated Ringo with a burning passion. Ringo himself was implicated in a stagecoach robbery in January 1882, though he was never formally charged.
After this, Ringo became a more frequent and drunken visitor to Tombstone, which certainly ratcheted up Holliday’s ire.
The two squared off directly on January 17, 1882, snarling at each other and grabbing their revolvers. Wyatt Earp convinced Holliday, who suffered from tuberculosis and was in a weakened state, to back off, while Jim Flynn physically grabbed Ringo to restrain him. But there seemed to be no end to the violence.
When Morgan Earp was gunned down in a billiard parlor, Holliday was convinced that Ringo was one of the gunmen. This came just months after Virgil Earp was ambushed and shot by three Cowboys in a dark alley in Tombstone, leaving him permanently crippled.
John Ringo’s death still remains a mystery to this day. On July 14, 1882, a teamster driving through Turkey Creek Canyon found the 32-year-old Johnny Ringo sitting at the base of a tree. A bullet hole had cut cleanly through the outlaw’s head.
In his hand, he clenched his revolver. His boots were off, but his cartridge belt was upside down. What was even more bizarre was that it appeared that he had been scalped.
A coroner’s jury ruled that Ringo had died by suicide, though many in the community found this dubious. The verdict was hotly debated, with many people claiming they had heard Ringo threatening many times to take his own life over the years.
Over the years, there have been several theories posited as to what actually happened to Johnny Ringo. One theory is that a frontier vigilante rancher killed him, as described in the rancher’s journal shortly before the rancher himself was killed. Several other individuals then came forward to claim that they had killed the famous outlaw, but most of these accounts have been debunked or at least thoroughly questioned, leaving the matter inconclusive.
Another popular theory is that Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp killed him, but neither man was in the territory at the time. Doc Holliday was in court in Pueblo, Colorado, on July 11, putting him definitively out of range to commit the murder.
So, was it suicide? What about the scalp wound and the upside-down cartridge belt? It is possible that the scalping may have occurred due to an animal scavenging the body after death, or from the percussion of the wound itself.
As for the belt, that remains unexplained. It seems clear that the mystery and magnetism of Johnny Ringo will carry on as long as stories of the Old West are told. His life was a tapestry of tragedy, charisma, violence, and political intrigue, making him a figure far more complex than the simple outlaw portrayed on the silver screen.
