John Ringo, King of the Cowboys: His Life and Times from the Hoo Doo War to Tombstone, Second Edition

Chapter 1. "A Hamlet among outlaws"

1 1 C H A P T E R “A Hamlet among outlaws” IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING HIS DEATH, John Ringo has fascinated readers. Ringo’s legend “began to slowly sprout and take root” only four days after his death.1 The seeds of that legend were sown in Texas’ bitter Hoo Doo War. At the time he was no different from dozens of other men engaged in the conflict, each with his own story. Yet unlike most of them, Ringo was destined to become a legend. Walter Noble Burns can be credited with almost single-handedly popularizing John Ringo. From his pen emerged a tarnished knight errant who rode out of nowhere and died mysteriously. In 1927 Burns wrote, “John Ringo stalks through the stories of old Tombstone days like a Hamlet among outlaws, an introspective, tragic figure darkly handsome, splendidly brave, a man born for better things, who, having thrown his life recklessly away, drowned his memories in cards and drink and drifted without definite purpose or destination.”2 With that single, emotional sentence, Burns set the stage for the romantic myth of John Ringo. Unfortunately for history, Burns allowed his desire to write a marketable book interfere with historic truth. Tombstone, An Iliad of the Southwest mingled folklore with fact to the point that the entire volume 2 JOHN RINGO, KING OF THE COWBOYS is suspect. One writer characterizes the book as “seriously flawed.” “When Walter Noble Burns wrote Tombstone in the style of his time, the question followed: Is this history or is it a novel?”3 In creating the mythical John Ringo, Burns also created a target for later historians and writers to either assail or glorify. Ringo was far more than a creation of Burns, however. In the pre-Tombstone gunfighting West he was recognized and respected. John Wesley Hardin, Texas’ number one shootist, made Ringo’s acquaintance in the Travis County jail in Austin. Hardin apparently liked the man. William Preston Longley, a gunman of equal notoriety, also knew Ringo but disliked him. Any number of men tried to enhance their own reputations by boasting that they killed Ringo while he was passed out from a binge lasting several days. Little glory attaches itself to killing a sleeping man, and the historian must ask why so many have made the claim. Part of the answer lies in Ringo’s Texas years. He fought in the Hoo Doo War and arrived in Arizona with garbled accounts of that feud yapping at his heels. In his abbreviated account of the feud, Burns confused Ringo’s actions with those of fellow feudist John Baird. “While he was little more than a boy, he became involved in a war between sheep and cattle men. His only brother was killed in the feud, and Ringo hunted down the three murderers and killed them.”4 Burns doubtless drew that succinct and over-simplified version from one of his informants. It was what people in Arizona believed and, inaccurate as it was, Ringo could not escape his reputation. He was the feudist who destroyed his enemies, the remorseless gunman who killed savagely and emerged unscathed. In contrast, the men who knew Ringo generally liked him. Grace McCool, who interviewed Ringo’s acquaintances, asserted, “All the old timers, who knew him, liked him, and spoke well of him.”5 For more than a century, John Ringo successfully eluded serious biographers. Never reluctant to let facts interfere with a good story, pulp writers and folklorists either invented or repeated settings and events that, given the dearth of factual evidence available, at times had “A Hamlet among outlaws” 3 the ring of truth. There is a copious amount of these fictions beginning in the 1920s and persisting to the present. Unlike the knight errant portrayed by Burns, John Ringo did not ride out of nowhere. His family may well be one of the best-documented in America. They were Dutch Walloon in origin.6 Jerome B. Collins recognized the Dutch origin in 1880 when he referred to John Ringo as Ike Clanton’s “Dutch friend.”7 Ringo’s name and lineage, however, have proven troubling to writers.8 John Ringo’s great-grandfather was Major Ringo, who with his wife Elizabeth Hazelrigg moved to Kentucky in mid-1789, ultimately settling in Montgomery County no later than 1797. He and Elizabeth had eleven children prior to his death...