“Why, Johnny Ringo… you look like somebody just walked over your grave.” – Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, from the 1993 film Tombstone. Ringo’s legend is inexorably tied to Holliday and his compatriots, the Earp brothers. During the last two years of his life, 1881-1882, Ringo tangled with them multiple times, and it’s suspected that one of them may have gunned him down in the Arizona Territory’s Chiricahua Mountain Range in the summer of 1882. Officially, however, Ringo’s death was ruled a suicide. The Colt SAA revolver that reputedly fired the fatal shot by Ringo’s own hand was listed by serial number in the coroner’s report, and it’s been kept track of perfectly for the last 139 years. Now this well-documented piece of wild west and firearms history is headed to auction.

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Provenance is critical in auctioning a gun like this. The “Johnny Ringo Suicide Colt” has phenomenal documentation, including the 1882 coroner’s report confirming by serial number that this gun was found in the dead outlaw’s hand.

Johnny Ringo was no stranger to gunfights and trouble prior to facing off against Earp and Co. In 1875, when he was twenty-five years old, he committed his first murder as part of the “Mason County War” in central Texas. After several small battles, a jailbreak, a re-incarceration, and an acquittal, Ringo left Texas for Tombstone, Arizona. It didn’t take long for trouble to arise there as well, and the belligerent gunslinger drunkenly shot and wounded an unarmed man in a saloon in 1879. He’s suspected of joining the Cochise County Cowboys, a local outlaw gang, in a series of robberies and killings that took place over the next several years. His history with the Earps in 1881-1882 is a famous Old West tale, and this chapter culminated with Ringo’s body being found slumped against a tree on July 14th, 1882, a single gunshot in his head, about thirty miles east of Tombstone. A local rancher reported hearing a single shot the day before, and this Colt SAA revolver was still in Ringo’s cold, lifeless hand. See the Bonhams Auction House website and their official description below for more details.

Although the coroner’s report officially stated that Ringo killed himself with this Colt SAA, rumors persist that he may have been gunned down by someone else – possibly known adversaries Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday.

Images courtesy of Bonhams.