Cheyney was washing his face and while his face was covered with a towel they gunned him down in cold blood. All he heard was the two gunshots that took his life. Ringo and Williams were later tried for murder but the charges were dismissed. In December , soon after he arrived in Safford, Arizona, Ringo shot and wounded another unarmed man named Louis Hancock because the man refused to have a drink with him.
Nobody knows how many Mexicans he killed in cold blood while stealing cattle below the border. If you have a question, write: Ask the Marshall, P.
Box , Cave Creek, AZ or email him at marshall. Box , Cave Creek, AZ Skip to content. My Account Blog. Post Views: 3, Related Posts.
The legend of Johnny Ringo is just that. Ringo was born in Indiana, not Texas. In truth, Ringo was not a formally educated man, and he came from a struggling working-class Indiana family that gave him few advantages. Yet, he does appear to have been better read than most of his associates, and he clearly cultivated an image as a refined gentleman. By the time he was 12, Ringo was already a crack shot with either a pistol or rifle. In , Ringo resurfaced in southeastern Arizona, where he joined the motley ranks of outlaws and gunslingers hanging around the booming mining town of Tombstone.
He haunted the saloons of Tombstone and was probably an alcoholic. Not long after he arrived, Ringo shot a man dead for refusing to join him in a drink.
Somehow, he again managed to avoid imprisonment by temporarily leaving town. He was not involved in the infamous gunfight at the O. Corral in , but he did later challenge Doc Holliday one of the survivors of the O. Corral fight to a shootout. Holliday declined and citizens disarmed both men. He seems to have become despondent in , perhaps because his family had treated him coldly when he had earlier visited them in San Jose.
Witnesses reported that he began drinking even more heavily than usual. On this day in , he was found dead in Turkey Creek Canyon outside of Tombstone. It looked as if Ringo had shot himself in the head and the official ruling was that he had committed suicide.
The truth remains obscure to this day. After a stay in San Jose, California, John left his mother, brother and sisters in and gravitated east to Texas, where he ultimately made quite a name for himself in the Hoodoo War an ethnic-cattle feud in the Mason section. Indicted for one killing and reportedly involved in several others, he came out of Texas in the late s with a reputation as a notorious and dangerous man. After shooting a fellow drinker over his choice of liquor his only known shooting in Arizona , Ringo took up residence in San Simon but also stayed in Galeyville, where he held up a poker game resulting in the third formal charge against him.
He missed the Fremont Street fight with the Earps and Doc Holliday, but tried to make up for it two months later in a failed showdown on Allen Street. At the time of his death, Ringo was one of the most well-known men in the territory and considered by the press to be the leader of the cow-boys.
The lone shot also argues against a gun battle, as described by Wyatt Earp, wherein he claims after a protracted exchange of gunfire, Earp got Ringo with a lucky shot at 75 yards also unlikely given the trajectory of the death wound, which was upward at a 45 degree angle between the right eye and ear. It probably did not occur to them that more than a century later, people would be debating the particulars of their descriptions. Blood and brains [were] oozing from the wound and matted his hair.
There was an empty shell in the six-shooter and the hammer was on that. I called it a suicide fifty-two years ago, I am still calling it suicide. A trail of hyperbole gives us a clue:. They now fill thirty-two graves … although he had many competitors in his line, he had no true rivals, and Curly Bill and Billy the Kid will not bear comparison with him. He had a college education, but was reserved and morose. He drank heavily as if to drown his troubles; he was a perfect gentleman when sober, but inclined to be quarrelsome when drinking.
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