That's probably why so many scriptwriters and Western novelists named characters, especially those of the dashing Western outlaw variety, Johnny Ringo. Movies, a TV series or two and even a number one pop song, all used the name without much fidelity to the facts. The entertainments might as well have been about Ringo Starr as Johnny Ringo.
John Peters Ringo was born in Indiana, but his family moved to Missouri, and then to California, before Ringo made his way to Texas. We know that he spent Christmas of 1874 in this state because he was arrested in Burnet on Christmas Day of that year for firing a shot across the city square.
Though his reputation today rests mostly on his associations and willingness to take sides in a bloody feud in Tombstone Arizona, where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were antagonists, he already had a reputation when he arrived in Arizona. The reputation came as a result of his involvement in the Hoodoo War, sometimes called the Mason County War, though its bloody trail extended into several Central Texas counties.
The Hoodoo War started, as so many feuds in those days did, with a dispute over the ownership of certain cattle. The factions split along ethnic lines and pitted recent German settlers against American-born men in neighboring counties. Many of the German settlers had supported the North during the Civil War, which bred resentment and hostility in the area.
Well into the hostilities of the Hoodoo War, Ringo and a man named Bill Williams visited a man named Jim Cheyney, who lived along Comanche Creek in Mason County. Cheyney didn't know he was a marked man, so he invited Ringo and Williams to have breakfast with him. After breakfast, while Cheyney was washing his face, Williams and Ringo shot and killed him.
The pair then rode to Mason, where they approached David Doole's store and demanded that Doole come outside, presumably so they could shoot him too; Doole wisely declined. Ringo and Williams moseyed on over to the Lace Bridges Hotel, where they engaged in some Old West trash talk about "some fresh meat up on the creek" and then they rode away.
Ringo and another participant in the Hoodoo War, Scott Cooley, were arrested in December of 1875, possibly in connection with the old charge against Ringo for his Christmas Day gunplay the year before. Ringo and Cooley were shuttled back and forth between Austin and Burnet, attracting much attention along the way, before being taken to the jail in Lampasas to await trial.
Allies of the pair determined that they should be removed from the jail as quickly as possible, mob violence being what it was in those days. Four men showed up in Lampasas on the night of April 30, and captured the jail guard and tied him to a fence. They tried to cut a hole in the jail but failed. They took the jailer down the road a few miles toward San Saba and released him unharmed.
Four days later, they tried again. This time they secured the keys to the jail at gunpoint and released Cooley and Ringo, without a lot of trouble, and rode back to Joe Olney's ranch in Llano County, where Ringo was staying.
Ringo was arrested again the next year for the Cheyney killing. He spent most of 1876 and 1877 in jail awaiting trial, before the case was dismissed. He settled in Loyal Valley for a time and records indicate that he was elected Constable in that community, but he served little if any time in that capacity.
By 1879, he was in Arizona, where he shot a man named Louis Hancock for ordering beer when Ringo had specifically told him to order whiskey. In Tombstone, Johnny Ringo was known as "King of the Cowboys" in reference to his standing among the group that opposed Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday in that town.
In the 1993 movie "Tombstone," Ringo is killed by Doc Holliday in a gunfight, but not before Ringo sprouts off some Latin phrases at him. Though there is a great deal of disagreement over exactly how Ringo ended up with a bullet in his head -- Holliday and Earp are sometimes pointed to as the cause -- most sources hold with the "official" version, that the last person Johnny Ringo killed was himself.
