I didn’t know then if Ringo was a made up character or was based on a real outlaw from history.
And who would have thought that I was related to the guy?
It turns out that the storyline of the song lyrics is pure fiction. The real John “Johnny” Ringo was an enemy of Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, and he rode with the Clanton gang, “The Cowboys”. Cattle were rustled, stagecoaches were robbed, and there was drinking and gambling. Johnny was reported in the papers to have shot and wounded a man in a bar once, for not drinking whiskey with him. This was all in and around Tombstone, Arizona in the early 1880’s. For all that, there’s no record of his being involved in a stand up one on one shootout in the middle of the street, as is often shown in westerns.
Photo from the Wikipedia article (see below)
Johnny Ringo was found dead of a bullet wound to the head, and his death was officially ruled a suicide. There are also four murder conspiracy theories; some say Wyatt Earp shot him from a distance, others that Doc Holliday did it. Other theories involved either “Buckskin” Frank Leslie as the murderer, or a gambler known by the nickname “Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce”. For all of that, you can read the details here
...and you’ll also find more about his days in Tombstone, and his prior involvement in the “Hoodoo Wars” in Mason County, Texas (1875, I think), and his earlier life. Wikipedia also has this article.
Now for the genealogy angle. As I mentioned in my last post, the Ringo family has been thoroughly researched, and there are postings on genealogy boards online. I particularly like this comment by Jim Ringo, from Ancestry.com:
“…Was out to Tombstone, AZ in March 03 to interview with the local Newspaper, Tombstone Tumbleweed. The purpose of the visit and interview was to let people know what a nice family the Ringo's are. Not sure they bought it…”
There’s some disagreement between researchers about which is the best book on the subject. Some say, “John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was”, by Jack Burrows, others maintain that “John Ringo”, by David Johnson is more accurate. My library had neither one, but it had “The Life and Death Of Johnny Ringo”, by Ray Hogan, so I checked out and read that. Mr. Hogan admits up front there is some mystery about the life and death of John Ringo, but he took the facts he found and wrote his book “…narrated in a fictional form to make its presentation more appealing. It has been a matter of clothing a skeleton with flesh…it could have been the way he lived and died.”
Ray Hogan presents John Ringo as having more education than most around him; smart enough to stay away from some of the more extreme plans of the Clanton gang (he was apparently not at the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral). At times Johnny would go off by himself, which was likely as much a result of his lonely, sometimes morose nature. He had few friends.
Also mentioned in the book was some years Johnny spent raising cattle. Even though he showed restraint at times, John Ringo was not what you’d call a good guy (but I suspect if you read much about Doc Holliday or the Earp brothers, you’d find they weren’t angels either). I gather that the citizens of Tombstone quickly learned who Ringo was, and knew it was wise to keep at a distance from him.
John Ringo was also a descendant of Philip Janszen Ringo (the Pirate – see my last post), but on an different branch of the family than I (I’m related to the Ringo’s through the Bird family, who married into the Yoakam family, who married into the Wingate’s). So if I’ve figured this right, Johnny Ringo was a fifth cousin three generations removed from me, on my Dad’s side.
Genealogists have told me before that it’s actually kind of fun to find a black sheep you didn’t know was in the family, a “skeleton in the closet” as the saying goes. They were right.
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