Ringo was born in Texas. 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. His vengeance satisfied, he left the country to escape the law, and for years was a vagabond through the West, living by his wits, his six-shooter, and his dexterity at cards, and wandering finally to Arizona, where he threw in with Curly Bill. This was Ringo’s own story of how he came to drift into outlawry. It was told in a rare mood of confidence to William Fyffe, a Mormon rancher on Five Mile Creek in the Chiricahuas, at whose home he often stopped overnight on his trips between Tombstone and Galeyville.
Ringo came by his reckless courage honestly. He was a second cousin of the famous Younger brothers of Missouri, whose exploits as guerillas under the black flag of the bloody Quantrill and as bank robbers with Frank and Jesse James, fill a red chapter in Western history. The Youngers were of Missouri and Kentucky stock and were perhaps forced into lawlessness as a result of the savage hatreds that grew up on the Missouri-Kansas border during the war between the North and South. The Younger family is an extensive one, and numbers many men throughout the country of honourable and distinguished name in business and the professions. Ringo’s three sisters, to whom he was devotedly attached, lived in San José, California, with Col. Coleman Younger, his grandfather.
Once, while riding through Sulphur Springs Valley with Deputy Sheriff William Breakenridge, Ringo drew a letter from his pocket. He had read the letter before, perhaps many times, but he read it again with an air of deep abstraction. When he had folded the missive and put it back in its envelope, he fell into momentary silent reverie. He shook his head sadly as he held out the envelope to Breakenridge.
“Seems strange,” he said, “for a tough, no-good fellow like me to get a letter like this.”
“Sweetheart?” queried Breakenridge, noting the superscription was in a woman’s hand.
“My sister,” said Ringo solemnly. “She writes to me regularly. Thinks I’m in the cattle business out here and doing fine. Doing fine. Humph! Dear little sister, I hope she never learns the truth.”
Curly Bill, since the killing of Town Marshal White, had given Tombstone a wide berth. Ringo, the Clantons, McLowerys, and others among the outlaws still dropped in occasionally, and as long as they conducted themselves quietly, the Earps did not molest them. The outlaws were Sheriff Behan’s problem, and as long as he saw fit to remain amiable and tolerant, Wyatt Earp preserved an armed neutrality. Ringo did not approve of the Earps. Under the administration of these six-shooter Puritans, the fatal peace of a New England village seemed settling upon Tombstone. Things had come to such a pass that, in the decadent serenity of the camp, a man almost felt called on to explain his thirst, and when decent outlaws, in the enjoyment of their constitutional privileges, wished to shoot out the lights, they must retire to such provincial places as Charleston and Galeyville. This sort of injustice rankled with Ringo. He stood for the wide-open frontier of old tradition, and as an apostle of spiritual liberty, he felt called on to regenerate Tombstone and restore it to its lost prestige as the toughest town in the Southwest. The whole question, it seemed to him, might be settled by ordeal of personal combat between himself as champion of the outlaws and Wyatt Earp as champion of the law and order crowd.
Ringo’s appearance in Tombstone became a challenge.
“Everybody looked for a fight every time Ringo came to town,” said William Lutly, freighting lumber over from the Chiricahuas in those days. “He was plainly spoiling for a fight. He’d swagger up and down Allen Street, looking mighty hostile with his big, ivory-handled guns buckled around him. Or in cold weather, he wore a great shaggy buffalo-skin overcoat, a six-shooter, of course, in each pocket. Then he looked like a giant. If he saw the Earps standing on a corner, he made it a point to walk past them and stare them in the eye. Or he would stroll into the Oriental, the Earp hangout, and take a drink as cool as you please with the place full of Earp men and maybe one or two of the Earps talking with Doc Holliday at the other end of the bar. It was fine, impressive swashbuckling, and the way everybody figured it was that Ringo was willing to get killed for the privilege of taking one or two of the Earps with him. His chances in a single-handed fight against the Earps would have been about the same a jackrabbit would have in a pack of lobo wolves. The Earps and Doc Holliday were as hard, desperate men as he was.”
Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday stood one day in front of Bob Hatch’s saloon and billiard parlour chatting with Mayor Charles N. Thomas. Directly across Allen Street John Ringo, Ike, Finn, and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLowery lounged in front of the Grand Hotel. The situation appealed to Ringo as ideal for putting into effect his obsession for settling the enmity between Earps and outlaws by personal combat between individual champions. He stalked across the street.
“Wyatt Earp,” he said, “I’ll make you a proposition. We hate you and you hate us. If this feeling keeps up, there’s going to be a battle some day, and a lot of men’ll be killed. You and I can settle
