November 21, 2025
Still overcast today and we had some heavy cloud storms roll through.
Dramatic Clouds Over Sugarloaf
Paul Andrew Hutton is in town and about to do a talk on Billy the Kid at the Scottsdale Museum of the West at 6 p.m. tonight. He will also be speaking tomorrow at two on his new book, "The Undiscovered Country." See you there!
Paul Hutton, Fess Parker and David Zucker
a long time ago
I asked a knowledgeable friend of mine to sum up the Johnny Ringo mystery and this is what he said.
Daily Whip Outs: "Ringo Composites"
(including a Ringo star!)
A Very Suspicious Secret
"Like many others, I find the circumstances of Johnny Ringo's death bizarre and highly suspicious. Wyatt Earp wanted Ringo dead, but he told a Denver newspaper reporter in 1893 that Ringo was killed by someone else. More than three decades later, however, Wyatt claimed that he did indeed send Ringo to eternity. I find it hard to believe him. And I don't think Doc Holliday had a hand in it, either, although there was no love lost between the two. The fact is, there's convincing evidence that both Wyatt and Doc were in Colorado at the time of Johnny's demise. As for who may have killed Ringo, the Tombstone Prospector stated in 1890 that, 'There is more than one man living in Cochise County who knows who did it, but with them the mystery is a secret.' Now nearly 143 years since Johnny's lifeless body was found leaning against a twisted blackjack oak, that secret is as good as ever."
—Mark Lee Gardner, author of "Brothers of The Gun: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and a Reckoning in Tombstone"
Don't recall ever meeting the fellow but Fess Parker appears to have been the genuine article, a simple man, a good man.
ReplyDeleteThe kind of man who'd kept his coonskin cap handy by his front door.