Johnny Ringo

            On Sunday my hip still bothered me but no worse for having ridden my bike around the neighbourhood the day before.

            I started working out the chords for “Frankenstein” by Serge Gainsbourg and found that it’s more complicated than I’d thought, but not too hard.

            I spent a lot of time catching up on my journal.

            I cleaned my toilet and the bathroom floor.

            I had a cheese, tomato, cucumber and lettuce sandwich for lunch.

            I weighed 90.5 kilos in the afternoon.

            I made a video from my July 27, 2017 song practice of me performing “Young Women and Older Men” but decided to wait until Monday to upload it to YouTube.

            I wanted to start frying an egg at 20:30 but I couldn’t get the big element on my stove hot enough. It can't be the fuse because sometimes it comes on and sometimes it doesn't. I kept on switching it on and off to try to make it connect. Strangely, when I started using a smaller element the big one came on and I switched the pan over but when I lowered the temperature it went too far down to use. I finally finished it with the small element.

I had an egg with a piece of toast and a beer and watched two episodes of Stories of the Century. One goofy thing about the fictional detectives, Matt Clark and Frankie Adams is that these stories, based on real events, take place sometimes fifty years apart, but Clark and Adams look the same age in every story.

The first story is about Johnny Ringo and begins with an investigation of the theft of $10,000 in silver dollars that had been stolen from the railroad. Ringo has his base in Galeyville, Arizona. Ringo has a reputation as a fast gun and so someone is challenging him to make a name for himself. Ringo’s duelling method is to have the other man hold one end of his handkerchief while he holds the other and so it’s a close range shootout. Ringo wins. Ringo is with two of his men planning a train robbery when his sister shows up and tries to get him to come home. When she finds out he’s a criminal she vows to stop him. She overheard him talk about a train stopping for water at a certain time and only one train in the area would do so. An ambush is set up. Ringo escapes across the desert but he dies before he reaches Mexico.

Here’s the much more interesting real story. When Johnny was 14 his father accidentally killed himself with a shotgun while the family was on route to California. In his 20s Ringo went to Mason County, Texas, which was made up of mostly German ranchers. Ringo made friends with the son of one of the non-German ranchers. The Germans were victims of cattle rustling and blamed ranchers and cowboys from outside their ethnic group for the crimes. The Germans began taking the law into their own hands and began lynching rustlers, often dragging them out of jail to do so. Ringo became part of the group that retaliated against the Germans. This was known officially as the Mason County War but locally as the Hoodoo War. After the war subsided Ringo worked as a constable for a while. Ringo moved to Tombstone, Arizona where he became enemies with Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. Earp was a deputy marshal at the time but when his brothers were ambushed with the result that one was killed and the other paralyzed he went renegade. Ringo joined a posse to bring him and Holliday in. On July 14, 1882 Ringo was found dead in the West Turkey Creek Valley with one bullet hole in his temple and his gun in his hand. It had been reported that he had threatened suicide on several occasions.

The second story was about the Dalton brothers. They started out as deputies but when their brother Frank was killed they turned outlaw and began robbing trains. Planning on stealing a shipment of gold from a train they intercept a telegraph wire indicating that the shipment was being switched to a stagecoach. They rob the coach but in the getaway it goes over a cliff into a river. The authorities recover the gold and put it in one of the two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas. The Daltons decide to rob both banks at the same time. One of the banks had a new safe that the manager said he couldn’t open until 9:30 because it was on a timer and so they waited half an hour but that was long enough for the town to rise up and fight the brothers. Only Emmett survived and was sentenced to life in prison. According to the written story the manager had tricked Bob Dalton by telling him about the time lock and that all he would have had to do was turn the handle and the safe would have opened.

In the real story the Dalton’s turned to crime because they weren’t being paid as deputies. Another brother, Bill Dalton was a member of The Wild Bunch. They were related to the Younger brothers through their mother. It was their oldest brother Frank that first became a lawman and he encouraged his brothers to also uphold the law but after he died there was no one to keep them in line. When the brothers were in California a train was robbed and although there was little evidence that the Daltons had done it, Grat Dalton was later arrested and sentenced to twenty years. As the train was transporting him he somehow got free of his cuffs that were attached to a sleeping deputy and he dived through the train window into the San Joaquin River. He floated downstream and rejoined his brothers. Between 1891 and 1892 they held up four trains. Bob Dalton had the ambition to outdo the reputation of the James Gang and decided to rob two banks at the same time in broad daylight. The story about the bank employee tricking the Daltons by convincing them they had to wait for the time lock is true. Emmett Dalton was shot 23 times but survived to serve life in prison. He was pardoned after 14 years. He moved to California where he became a real estate agent, an author and an actor and died in 1936. He wrote “Beyond the Law” and portrayed himself in the film version. He also wrote “When the Daltons Rode” which was also made into a movie.