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It
didn't play out quite like a scene from "Gunsmoke," but two of the Old West's
more notorious characters faced each other in Austin's
red light district in 1881.
What happened that May 3 netted only one long
paragraph on an inside page of the Austin Daily Statesman. What could have happened
would have been big news all over the Southwest.
Evidently not one to
spend the Sabbath in spiritual reflection, a man the newspaper identified as "Mr.
John Ringo" had been "passing his time down in a house in the jungles" that Sunday
morning. The "jungles" was Victorian journalistic code for an area of brothels
and saloons along Second Street in the Capital City, just above the then-wild
bed of the Colorado River.
As the newspaper reported, "Along about 4 o'clock
[presumably that morning, though Ringo could have been at it all day that Sunday]
he missed his purse, and stepping out in the hall where some three or four of
Austin's nice young men were seated, he came down upon them with his little pistol
and commanded them to 'up hands'…"
Ringo, whose notable name had been
bandied about as a material witness following a little dust up in Arizona on March
8 in which one Dick Lloyd had been shot to death, held the two Austin men at gunpoint
while he searched them for his absent money.
"Not finding his purse he
smiled beamingly upon the young men, and retired to his room while they quietly
slid out and reported the facts to the police," the Statesman related.
Shootist-turned-lawman Ben Thompson answered the call. That city marshal Thompson
would choose to handle the situation himself, rather than dispatching one of his
officers, indicates that he knew the pistol packer was Ringo. And he definitely
knew who Ringo was.
Born
in Indiana in 1850, Ringo and his family moved first to Missouri and later to
California. Orphaned when his father accidentally killed himself with a rifle
in1864, Ringo headed for Texas five years later. In 1875, he became embroiled
in the Mason County Hoo-Doo War, a violent
feud that bled (literally) over into Burnet, Llano and Lampasas Counties. Ringo
spent some time behind bars in Burnet,
Lampasas and Austin,
escaped a murder rap when the case was dismissed and after about a decade in the
Lone Start decided to move west to Arizona.
Not long after arriving in
the Territory, Ringo wounded a man in a saloon shooting. In the modern vernacular,
he seemed to have had issues with alcohol and anger management.
Thompson,
no goody two shoes himself, knew Ringo by reputation if not acquaintance.
When the mustachioed, British-born marshal knocked on Ringo's door in the red
light dive, the Texas-raised gunman must have replied with an impolite 19th century
version of "Go away…I didn't order a pizza." Sans warrant, Thompson "cheerfully
kicked open the door, and to the infinite disgust of Mr. Ringo scooped him in."
(As in arrested him.)
Whether Ringo made an effort to go for his gun went
unreported, but the marshal disarmed him without busting any caps. Thompson may
have responded to Ringo's reluctance to be taken into custody by gently tapping
his head with the barrel of his six-shooter, but again, the newspaper was silent
on the subject. Given the amply documented temperament of either man, had Ringo
thrown down on Thompson, only one of them would not have been left standing when
the smoke cleared.
By this time, one of Thompson's officers had arrived
as a backup and "marched him [Ringo] to the station."
The
newspaper story did not say if Ringo spent the night in the clink, but the next
day he was fined $5 and costs for disturbing the peace and $25 and costs for carrying
a pistol. (A pretty stout fine: Based on the Consumer Price Index, that $30 would
be equivalent to $648 in today's dollars.)
Having lost his "purse," Ringo
must either have had some cash hidden in one of his boots or managed to come up
with a fast loan. He paid his money to the city court and, in the words of the
Daily Statesman, "left a wiser if not sadder man."
Ringo split for Missouri
but by the fall had returned to Arizona. Following the OK Corral gunfight in Tombstone
that October, he became leader of the gang opposing Wyatt Earp. On Jan. 17, 1882
Ringo challenged Earp and John (Doc) Holiday to a fight, but a police officer
intervened before anyone pulled a trigger.
History bears out that a shooting
match between Thompson and Ringo would have been the frontier equivalent of King
Kong versus Godzilla. Less than a year later, someone shot Thompson to death in
a San Antonio vaudeville house in a case that officially remains unsolved. And
on July 13, 1882, someone found Ringo dead in Arizona of an apparently self-inflicted
gunshot wound.
The coroner concluded his suicide climaxed a long alcoholic
toot, but some maintained his death had been a murder, revenge for being a player
in the anti-Earp crowd. | | |
