Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Johnny Ringo

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

You might be familiar with the outlaw Johnny Ringo from the movie Tombstone. He was indeed a real-life black hat gunslinger, and a tragic figure at that.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Pee-Pew. That's not lasers, though. You can draw a laser S-ConSola. Oh, okay. Good point. But not in the Old West, unless it's Westworld. I guess, because we're talking about the Old West, and we're talking about a lesser-known Old West gunslinger by the name of Johnny Ringo. Yeah, not Johnny Angel, Johnny Ringo, although you can substitute his name for that, for Johnny Angel in the song if you sing it in your head.

I bet you could. He was at the time, very well-known. He was an outlaw. He was one of those cowboys. He was a hired gun. He was a mercenary, which I guess is a hired gun. He also ran gangs that were known to murder and that kind of stuff. But he wasn't like a bank robber.

He wasn't a train robber even. He just seems to have been a guy who just kind of made his way from town to town, ended up in kind of famous situations and did nefarious things here or there, just enough to make a name for himself. Yeah, he was born in May 1850, and what is now Green, Greens Fork, Indiana. Shout out the Greens Fork. And eventually got tangled up, like you said, he sort of found himself getting tangled up with various more famous people.

That included early on the younger brothers who were, you know, led by Jesse James and Frank James, the bank robbing group. But he was, had a pretty awful incident happen to him that when he was a teenager that seemed like it really kind of shaped the rest of his life. And how could it not? Absolutely. His parents and his brothers and sister were all on the trail to move from Missouri to California. And partway through, Martin Ringo was, I'm not sure what he was doing with his rifle or shotgun. I saw both. But it went off when it happened to be pointing up at his head from his chin. And he died instantly, obviously, in a very gruesome way right in front of Johnny. And you can basically explain the rest of Johnny Ringo's life from that incident because it doesn't matter was 1850, 1050, 2050. If his son sees his dad die in that manner, that's going to shape your life pretty much single-handedly. Yeah, for sure. He was obviously traumatized. They had to, you know, they were moving, like you said, to California, so they just had to kind of keep going. They buried them along the road,

kept that wagon train going. And by that age, he was, he was a, pretty good shot himself. He was pretty good with a quick draw, good with a rifle. They landed in San Jose, his mom and his brothers and sisters. And he was there until about 1870 when he moved to Mason County, Texas, where he kind of fell in with a bad gang of cattle rustlers. Yeah, it almost seems like, so he was 20 then. It seems like he just basically moved to Texas to look for trouble, and he found it very quickly. There was a Texas Ranger, well, a former Texas Ranger turned outlaw named Scott Cooley. And they just kind of hit it off pretty quickly. They became friends. And this is where Johnny Ringo really kind of started to become known as a,

like, an outlaw gun slinger. Yeah, for sure, because Mason County, you know, if you've ever seen, like, the three amigos, you know, had Germans in it. And you kind of don't really think about the Old West having, like, you know, British people and German people. But they did. In fact, Mason County was mainly colonized by German and British descended cattle people. And the tensions between them were pretty rough between those groups. They were often accusing one another of stealing their stock and taking their cows and rustling horses. And then in 1875, it really sort of launched when a couple of the Brits, including a guy named Tim Williamson, were pulled out of jail by these Germans and killed in retaliation for

cattle theft. Yeah, and they were being transported by a deputy sheriff named John Worley. And these Germans, assumed Germans, who killed Tim Williamson and took some other guys and hung them and shot them. Scott Cooley, who was friends with Tim Williamson and some of the other guys, he assumed that John Worley had allowed this to happen, that he was basically in on it. So this kicked off what became known as the Mason County Warwick. or the Houdoo war. And the first victim in this war after Williamson was John Worley, who was killed by Scott Cooley, who not only killed him, but scalped him on August 10, 1875. That feels like maybe a time for a break?

I think so. All right. We'll be right back with more on Johnny Ringo right after this. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is Ickerel. You may know me from my It Girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years. Well, I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success,

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Listen to no grip on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so when we left you, the hoodoo war had kicked off, John Worley had been killed and scalped. This was 1875, and Ringo was a part of this war. And, you know, it seems like he was sort of just a sideman supporting his buddy Cooley and whatever he wanted. He was friends with the guys in his gang. He was part of the gang, essentially. And when a guy named Moses Baird, who was a part of the gang, was killed in that Houdoo war about a month later in September of that year, Ringo went on the attack big time, shot two of the guys that he,

suspected was involved in the murder, a guy named Dave Duel and another guy named James Cheney went to their houses and shot him. And he actually went to jail for this one, but because it was the old West, he escaped not too long after. Right. So, I mean, like, he's really starting to build on his legend as a black cat outlaw, right? He spends the next few years moving around looking for new cattle wars, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas. He was known to do things like, He pistol whipped and then shot a man who he offered a drink to and the guy refused. He murdered another man that he saw harassing a woman. Robbed a poker game that he had just left because the players wouldn't loan him any money so he could stay in and keep playing.

But his, I guess if anybody has heard of Johnny Ringo, it's because he crossed paths. It's his association with the guides from the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, Doc Holliday, and Wyatt are in Virginie. or can't forget Virgil. Yeah, I mean, if you've seen the movie Tombstone, you were probably yelling like, guys, we've heard of Ringo. He was in the movie. It was Michael Bean, right? Yeah, John Connor's dead.

Yeah, that's right. So Ringo didn't like these guys. He didn't like Holiday and Earp, either Earp. And eventually they did like a real Old West sort of high noon showdown in the middle of the town streets. And it was, pistols were going to be drawn for sure. but a local constable came in, intervened, and nothing happened at that point. But that was about a year before Johnny Ringo would be found dead against a tree.

Yeah, and I have never understood what that I'm Your Huckleberry meant. So I looked it up. Do you know what it means? I've never seen Tunes Stum, believe it or not, all the way through. I haven't either. I just know that Val Kilmer says that. Yeah, that's a hole for me for sure. He says, I'm your Huckleberry.

And I guess that was the old-timey way at the time of saying, like, I'm the man for the job. I can do this. And I guess he was saying, I'm the man who can kill you, essentially, or take you down, or at least gunfight you. Oh, okay. So at any rate, he didn't fight Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. He wasn't there at the famous gunfight at the O.K.C. Apparently, he was out of town that day, and I'm sure he was quite upset when he came back to town and found out what had happened, because he definitely would have been on the side of the other guys. And like you said, all that happened about a year before he was found dead, just outside a tombstone, up against a tree on July 14, 1882.

He had a single gunshot wound to his head and a colt 45 revolver in his hand. So it seemed like it was probably a pretty clear-cut case of suicide. He'd been known to have been deep in the drink at the time, was very depressed, and he'd given an interview to the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper just before his death that he said that he was going to be run down or killed at some point. And a local historian named Bob Bow's Bell said that he certainly sounded down in the interview. So you could make a pretty good case that it was suicide. Yeah. Yeah, you know, other people say it was probably, you know, in the movie, at least, it was Val Kilmer. It was Doc Holliday.

And that historian, Bell, was like, you know, everyone thought pretty much this was a suicide until that movie came out. There were, of course, whispers that it could have been Holiday and Earp and the gang. But it was really that movie that kind of solidified it in the minds of people because, you know, it was a big Hollywood movie. Yeah, but there's some problems with that. One, Doc Holliday was almost certainly in Pueblo County, Colorado, a few days before Ringo's death and after, because he had to appear in court, and he's on the record as having been there. It's a 1,500-mile trip in three days that I guess you could make, but that seems like a lot of trouble to go out of your way when Doc Holliday could have just killed him basically at any time. And then Wyatt Earp, he did claim credit for him, right? Yeah, he for sure did.

But this seems to be one of those things where, and I think this kind of happened a lot in the Old West, where it was a badge of honor and you could claim that you murdered someone when you didn't at all. And that seems like it had some pretty big holes. Like the account of his killing wasn't, it didn't line up with like how the body was found. And he also recanted later and was like, you know, I didn't really kill that guy. Yeah. And there was another piece of evidence that just kind of, at least it's circumstantial, that was written later by Doc Holliday's common law wife, Big Nose Kate Cummings. And not only does it kind of support the idea that he died by suicide, it also really paints him as a tragic figure. If you'll indulge me, will you, Chuck? Yes. So Kate Cummings wrote, Ringo was a fine man any way you look at him. Physically, intellectually, morally, he was six feet tall, rather slim and build, although broad-shouldered, medium, fair as to complexion, with gray-blue eyes and light brown hair. Okay, so far so good. His face was somewhat long, okay? He was what might be called an attractive man.

So she describes him physically as basically handsome, and then she says, his attitude toward all women was gentlemanly. He must have been a gentleman born. Sometimes I noticed something wistful about him, as if his thoughts were far away on something, sad. And he would say, oh well, and sigh. Then he would smile, but his smiles were always sad. There was something in his life that only he himself knew about. He was always neat, clean, well-dressed, showed that he took good care of himself. He never boasted of his deeds, good or bad, a trait I have always liked in men. John was a loyal friend, and he was noble, for he never fought

anyone except face-to-face. Every time I think of him, my eyes fill with tears. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a guy who was haunted by seeing his father blow his own head off by accident. Absolutely. And I think it says a lot that that was Doc Holliday, his sworn enemy's wife, who wrote that about him. Yeah, for sure. So that's Johnny Ringo. Kind of a murder mystery, but not necessarily. And anyway, you slice it, one of the unsung outlaw bandits of the Old West.

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