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

by David Johnson, Chuck Parsons (Foreword)

Few names in the lore of western gunmen are as recognizable. Few lives of the most notorious are as little known. Romanticized and made legendary, John Ringo fought and killed for what he believed was right. As a teenager, Ringo was rushed into sudden adulthood when his father was killed tragically in the midst of the family's overland trek to California. As a young man he became embroiled in the blood feud turbulence of post-Reconstruction Texas.

The Mason County "Hoo Doo" War in Texas began as a war over range rights, but it swiftly deteriorated into blood vengeance and spiraled out of control as the body count rose. In this charnel house Ringo gained a reputation as a dangerous gunfighter and man killer. He was proclaimed throughout the state as a daring leader, a desperate man, and a champion of the feud. Following incarceration for his role in the feud, Ringo was elected as a lawman in Mason County, the epicenter of the feud's origin.

The reputation he earned in Texas, further inflated by his willingness to shoot it out with Victorio's raiders during a deadly confrontation in New Mexico, preceded him to Tombstone in territorial Arizona. Ringo became immersed in the area's partisan politics and factionalized violence. A champion of the largely Democratic ranchers, Ringo would become known as a leader of one of these elements, the Cowboys. He ran at bloody, tragic odds with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, finally being part of the posse that hounded these fugitives from Arizona. In the end, Ringo died mysteriously in the Arizona desert, his death welcomed by some, mourned by others, wrongly claimed by a few.

Initially published in 1996, John Ringo has been updated to a second edition with much new information researched and uncovered by David Johnson and other Ringo researchers.

Genres: Westerns, Biography

384 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2008

About the author

David Johnson has received degrees from Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University. He is the author of John Ringo, King of the Cowboys; The Horrell Wars; The Mason County “Hoo Doo” War; and The Cornett-Whitley Gang, all published by the University of North Texas Press. His 1996 edition of John Ringo was a finalist for best biography of the year by the Western Writers of America. He lives in Zionsville, Indiana.

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent book when it's dealing with the life and times of John Ringo. Johnson has obviously put a great deal of solid research into this subject. The Ringo that emerges from myth still has his mysteries but is clearly a good man with the required strong sense of honour and loyalty who was caught up in difficult times. Lots of attention is paid to the context (e.g. of Mason County, TX or the San Simon Valley, NM) which I feel is necessary for the reader to then be able to take a fresh look at Ringo. There are whole chapters in which he isn't even mentioned, but then we return to Ringo and can better understand Johnson's presentation and interpretation of the man himself. Without the context it would be harder to envisage a John Ringo shorn of the myths and fictions that have been attached to the resonant name.

However, I feel Johnson does both Ringo and his own work a disservice when it comes to the Earps. I think most of us by now see the Earp brothers as each a mix of saint and sinner - just as Johnson presents Ringo himself as. But Johnson is not as even-handed in his approach to the Earps, and simply presents the most negative aspects and interpretations of their part in the story. He does not do the scholarly work to back this up as he does with Ringo, so this approach rather undermines the whole project. Some of Johnson's interpretations of the Earps' actions and motivations are actually rather interesting - but without Johnson doing the work to support his take on the story, and without considering the Earps as anything more than sinners, in the end it's hard to take seriously.

Maybe Johnson was making a point: that tomes on the Earps tend to put the effort into presenting them as fully rounded beings while presenting their antagonists as one-dimensional villains. If so, that's fine, but why undermine his own excellent work on Ringo by scoring such a point...?

So, in the end, I find this a valuable book in relation to John Ringo, and worth five stars - but I'm docking two stars for its flaws. Whether scholars and readers love John Ringo or love Wyatt Earp, surely we can all appreciate a complex story well told without taking one side or the other?

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a two or three part magazine article stretched to a book with extraneous and polemic material. It has many footnotes, but the feeling a reader gets is similar to reading a student's thesis that is on a subject too thin, so he pads it with everything remotely connected to meet the minimum length.

[SB · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book looking for a balanced biography of John Ringo and that's very much not what this is.
Since most of the work I've read on Tombstone and the surrounding space and time has been from the Earp perspective I was well aware a biography of one of the 'Cowboys' of Tombstone would have a different view on events there than I'm used to.
This book makes no bones about being pro-'Cowboy', or not really? According to Johnson there was never really a "Cowboy" problem (he might be right, I don't find his evidence conclusive but worth looking at). So if it's not pro-'Cowboy' let's call it what it is, anti-Earp.
For a book that's supposed to be about Ringo I got far less about his life and far more opinion about the Earps than I expected.

I don't want to write a long review of problems I had with this book, so here's a quick list:

- Reinterpreting sources: Johnson will cite a source as having said something negative about the Earp faction and if you look it up in that source you'll find he's right- they do say something negative. Often to then refute that point with several pages worth of evidence. So that's not exactly convincing.

- Using Glen Boyer's work as a Primary Source: Boyer's work has been discredited. A lot of his primary sources he manufactured out of thin air, so the fact Johnson cites primary sources from Boyer? It's appalling. Passing off Boyer's work as the words of someone who was there is an egregious mistake, and not one I can forgive considering this book was published after Boyer was discredited.

- Implication to Fact: Johnson will imply or present a possible conclusion on one page, then state it as a fact on the next. If you haven't proved it convincingly the first time you can't claim it as a fact after that point.

- Focus: Ringo is supposed to be the focus of this book, and he is for the first half, but in the entirety of the second half you've really only got a few pages on him in-between Johnson's focus on the Earp drama.

- Consistency: A historical actor is unreliable unless they agree with Johnson's perspective, and Johnson will go to great lengths to make sure you understand someone is unreliable but barley mention why they become reliable when they agree with his version.

- Incorrect 'Facts': The most obvious? Wyatt Earp died of chronic cystitis not prostate cancer. If that's the kind of mistake Johnson can make on an easily verifiable fact it's no wonder his interpretation of the more nuanced facts of Earp's life are questionable.

Overall I can't recommend this book unless you've done buckets of additional reading to support or contradict what Johnson's saying with your own conclusions. He has valid points but they get buried in straw man arguments and circular logic, which is a pity for a well researched book on an interesting topic.