Nature of parenting: That’s a question being asked these days by those trying to understand the motivation of criminals. Can a person be born bad? Or is the seed of his destruction sown in his formative years? Johnny Ringo, famous after his clashes with the Earps, certainly had a rough time when he was young.
John was born on May 3, 1850 in Wayne County, Indiana. In 1864, the young man was excited about the first real adventure of his life when his parents, Martin and Mary Ringo, decided that the family’s future lay in California. They packed up their five children, John, Martin, Fanny, Mary, and Mattie, and headed west.
They set out on the Fort Leavenworth Military Road with 68 other wagons and headed for Fort Kearny.
The journey was to be fraught with hardship. On June 7, fourteen-year-old John was involved in an accident when a car rolled over his foot, seriously injuring him. And then, that same day, he saw another boy fall under a car that killed him. They say trouble comes in threes and they certainly did that day, for later a wagon driver accidentally shot one of his drivers in the head, killing him instantly.
John witnessed both accidents and his mother Mary (pictured) recorded it in her journal. The next day, John, still limping from his broken foot, accompanied several men on a buffalo hunt and participated in the slaughter of several of the creatures.
On June 13, the Ringos scooped up Great Platte River Road. The next day, Mary wrote that John had a chill and was seriously ill throughout the night and for days afterward. He but he recovered when they reached the Cottonwood Springs military post. Here the soldiers stopped the caravan and searched for horses bearing the American brand, but found none, so the wagons continued on their journey.
On June 25, the wagons stopped at The South Platte Crossing, where they were forced to remain for two weeks as heavy rains and strong winds lashed them. Mary wrote that during the stay several Indians came to the camp and that one carried a saber that he said he had taken from a soldier he had killed. Independence Day passed without celebration, and it was July 9 that it was deemed safe to cross the river that led to the North Platte.
On July 16, several of the animals in the caravan became ill from the alkali in the water they had been drinking and died. And then two of the oxen also died of the disease. By now there was a very real threat from hostile Indians and soon the caravan came upon the corpse of a white man with his scalp half eaten by vultures.
On July 30, John’s father, Martin, was standing in one of the wagons, looking for Indians when he accidentally discharged his shotgun, sending the load to his own head. John and his traveling companion William Davenport witnessed the grisly event.
“Hearing the shot, I saw his hat fly 20 feet into the air and his brains were scattered everywhere.” Davenport wrote.
John helped dig a grave and his father was buried and left on the road. Mary’s diary contains details of this fateful day and she recorded that her own heart was bleeding as the caravan moved on, leaving the grave behind them.
On August 1, the railway carriage arrived at Platte Bridge station, but misfortune struck the Ringo clan when the eldest girl, Fanny, suffered a fit of what Mary called “cholremorbus”. The term cholera morbus was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to describe both non-epidemic cholera and other gastrointestinal diseases.
On October 7, the Ringo clan was in Austin, Nevada and Mary gave birth to a stillborn son with a deformed face. Her shock at the death of her husband was said to have traumatized her and caused both the deformity and stillbirth. John looked at the hideous face of the dead baby and turned away in disgust.
On the last day of October, the family arrived in the Sacramento Valley just before the first snowfall and stayed with relatives for some time. A year later, Mary moved her family into a house on Second Street in San Jose. The Younger Ringo: Martin died in 1873 of tuberculosis, only 19 years old. Fanny and Mattie grew up and got married. Maria the Younger became a school teacher, and the mother Maria died in 1876.
It has been said that John Ringo was forever affected by seeing his father blow his brains out and that seeing his deformed stillborn brother pushed him over the edge. He started drinking heavily when he was 15 and ran away to Texas and eventually ended up in the Arizona Territory, where he joined the Clanton faction and became the infamous Johnny Ringo.
He was assassinated, as we all know, in July 1882.