Americans love tall tales, and Old West legends are prone to embellishment—none more so than the story of outlaw and gunfighter Johnny Ringo.
These are the known facts: John Peters Ringo was born in 1850 in Indiana. His family moved to Missouri in 1856, to Liberty and then onward to Gallatin in 1858, where he attended grade school and grew into his teens.
At the time, Gallatin was a rough-hewn town with fewer than 2,000 settlers, many still living in log houses. By the time Ringo turned 14 in 1864, Gallatin had become the center of nearly continuous warfare between Northern troops and Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War.
His father, suffering from tuberculosis, decided the climate out West would be better, and the Ringo family joined a California-bound wagon train. But en route, his father’s shotgun accidentally discharged, killing him and leaving his pregnant wife to provide for the family. She eventually settled in a carriage house on a relative’s San Jose horse ranch.
Five years later, Ringo drifted to Texas, and in 1876, he and Scott Cooley were indicted for killing a man in a cattle war, but the case against Ringo was eventually dismissed.
Ringo next surfaced in Tombstone, Arizona, where he joined a band of killers and rustlers in a bitter feud with the lawman Wyatt Earp and his brothers Virgil and Morgan, along with John “Doc” Holliday.
It was in Tombstone that the “fakelore” of Ringo took root, and some Western history enthusiasts have swallowed it whole. Ringo was habitually closemouthed, and people rarely gleaned details about his life when talking to him. They assumed his reclusive nature concealed dark secrets.
Stories abounded, each wilder than the last: Some claimed Ringo was a college graduate, perhaps a professor. His supposedly wealthy family in California shunned him because of some foul deed he’d allegedly committed. He was said to have read the classics in Greek and Latin and to be able to quote Shakespeare. He did own a few books, but stories transformed those into an extensive library. He was an alcoholic, and people said he “drank to forget.”
Word spread that Ringo was blindingly fast and unerringly accurate with a six-gun, with a trail of dead men to prove it. While suspected of being among those who ambushed and crippled Virgil Earp and fatally shot Morgan Earp, this was never proven.
Ringo is confirmed to have shot only one man. This happened when he offered to buy a man a whiskey, and the man replied that he preferred beer. Ringo then clubbed him with his pistol and shot him in the neck. The wound was superficial, and the man lived.
Ringo’s death at 32 still remains a mystery. He was found dead in a remote location outside of Tombstone, seated against a blackjack oak, pistol in hand, with entry and exit wounds in his head.
Ringo had occasionally spoken of killing himself and had been despondent and drinking steadily for days. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.
Some have refused to believe Ringo would have taken his own life. Over time, potential killers—including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday—have been suggested. Still, sometimes the most obvious answer is true.
As biographer Jack Burrows writes, “For the record, his man-tally stands at one: himself.”
That lilting name, Johnny Ringo, still has cachet. His character appears in films, including Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Gunfighter, as well as several TV series. In the 1950s, Bonanza’s Lorne Greene topped the music charts reciting the ballad “Ringo.”
John Peters Ringo may have lived and died a depressive, whiskey-sodden outlaw, but the legend of Johnny Ringo— shaped as much by imagination as fact—endures. And the story began on Missouri soil.
• Ron is a historian, educator, and author of two books. His eclectic career has been as a teacher, museum curator, artist, and concert guitarist. He has master’s
degrees in education and American folk culture. • Ron Soodalter
This article was orginally published in the May 2026 issue of Missouri Life.
