On August 15, 1844, Texas president Sam Houston ordered Travis C. Brooks and Alexander Horton to take Texas militia east and establish peace. They arrested 10 leaders from each side, put them together, and forced them to draft an agreement disbanding both groups and agreeing to peace. Except for an occasional killing here and there, the Regulator-Moderator War was over.
REYNOLDS, Glenn (1853-1889)
Born on an East Texas cotton farm, Glenn Reynolds in 1859 moved to West Texas, near the present town of Albany. Raised in the heart of Comanche country, Reynolds developed his survival skills while engaging in skirmishes with raiding Indians when he was 12 years old. But he also received an education of a more formal nature while temporarily staying with relatives at Pueblo, Colorado, and still later at St. Louis. While at the latter, he attended Jones Commercial College.
After mining in Colorado, Reynolds returned to Texas and engaged in the sheep and cattle business on a rather large scale. Additionally, he served as sheriff of Throckmorton County for a year. At least one author asserts he was probably involved as a vigilante in the killing of ex-sheriff John Larn, who had turned outlaw and was gunned down in the Albany jail on the night of June 24, 1878.
In 1885, after more or less disastrous results in the sheep business, Glenn Reynolds moved his wife, Gussie, and their five children to the Pleasant Valley area of Arizona Territory, on rangeland lying at the edge of the Tonto Basin. By 1887, the surrounding mountain valleys were echoing with the sounds of gunfire as the feud known as the Pleasant Valley War swirled about the transplanted Texan. Reynolds's involvement in the fracas remains subject to debate, although one account does have Glenn blasting participant Al Rose with a load of buckshot.
On another occasion, Glenn's infant son became violently ill, and Glenn sent one of his cowboys on a night ride to Globe. Unfortunately, someone ambushed the cowboy, thus terminating the mission. The baby, George, died. Utterly disgusted with the
violent foolishness, Reynolds moved to town and campaigned for Gila County sheriff. Because he was generally well liked and considered by many to be the best shot in the Arizona Territory, he defeated the incumbent, B. F. Pascoe.
Sheriff Reynolds assisted Chief Deputy Jerry Ryan in arresting the infamous "Apache Kid" and incarcerating him at Globe. After the Kid's conviction, Reynolds hired William "Hunkydory" Holmes to guard a group of convicted prisoners (the Apache Kid included) during their journey from Globe to the Territorial Prison at Yuma. Glenn Reynolds, armed with a double-barreled shotgun and a .45 Colt sixshooter, and "Hunkydory," with a revolver and Winchester, loaded the prisoners on to a stagecoach driven by Eugene Middleton.
During the trip, on November 2, 1889, having unloaded the prisoners so that the team could pull the steep Kelvin Grade, the lawmen were overpowered and their weapons removed. The prisoners escaped after slaying both Reynolds and "Hunkydory" Holmes.
.366 APACHE KID; HOLMES, W. A.; LARN, JOHN; PLEASANT VALLEY WAR
RIGGS, Barney (?-1892)
Very little is known regarding the early days of Barney Riggs except that he worked as a cowboy in Arizona, and killed his employer during an argument over a young lady who apparently had been sharing her affections with both men. That shooting earned Riggs a life sentence in the Yuma Territorial Prison, although he was let out for doing practically the same thing that got him incarcerated. The story is that seven Mexican prisoners attempted to escape in October 1887, most of them being shot and killed by guards. One prisoner, however, stuck a knife against prison superintendent Thomas Gates and, using Gates as a shield, attempted to gain his freedom. Riggs, looking on, suddenly snatched a revolver off the floor and shot the convict twice, freeing Gates. That act of heroism earned Riggs a governor's pardon on Christmas Day, the only stipulation being that Riggs absent himself from Arizona and never return. As a result, Riggs went to Pecos, Texas, where he married the sister of Sheriff Bud Frazer. Frazer had been feuding with local gunman Jim Miller, and Riggs supported his brother-in-law, Frazer.
The word soon came down that John Denson and Bill Earhart, gunslinging associates of Miller, were in town to kill Riggs. The confrontation took place in R. S. Johnson's saloon. As the two gunmen stepped through the door, Earhart fired and missed. Riggs fired, and Earhart died on the spot. Denson then decided to run, and Riggs killed him from the doorway as the man reached the street.
In the meantime, Barney Riggs's marriage ended in a bitter divorce, the court naming Daniel Chadborn, a step-grandson, as the trustee for Annie Riggs. Chadborn and Barney subsequently met on a Fort Stockton, Texas, street on April 7, 1892, Chadborn in a buggy, Riggs standing on the sidewalk. Riggs made wild threats and also the mistake of reaching into his hip pocket. Chadborn interpreted reaching for a handkerchief to be the same as reaching for a gun, and he shot Riggs dead. Chadborn was acquitted.
.$66- ClkO CHADBORN, DANIEL JOSEPH; MILLER, JAMES
RILEY, James M. (a.k.a. Doc Middleton) (1851-1913)
Riley was born in Bastrop, Texas, but went to prison early for horse theft. He escaped a few months later, fled to Nebraska, and assumed the name of Doc Middleton. He made his living thereafter primarily by horse theft, and he wasn't particular about where the animals came from-Indians, the government, or ranchers. By 1879, he was back in prison. Later he was released and performed on an irregular basis in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
RINGO, John Peters (a.k.a. John Ringgold) (18 50-1882)
John Ringo was born on March 3, 1850, at Green Fork, Indiana, and some confusion exists as to whether the family name was Ringgold. Some people always called him that. In 1856, the family moved to Missouri, then headed for California in 1864, a hope being that the sunny climate would ease the suffering of John's tubercular father. The father accidentally or intentionally killed himself with a rifle during the trip, but the family continued on to San Jose, where they lived with Coleman Younger, whose wife Augusta was the sister of John's mother, Mary.
For reasons unknown, John Ringo left California in 1869 and moved to Texas, where a judge in Burnet fined him $75 for firing a revolver across the town
square on Christmas Day, 1874. Ringo subsequently became involved in the Mason County War, in which murder and cattle theft played important roles. As lynchings and gunfire led from one killing to another, former Texas Ranger Scott Cooley recruited a group of gunmen, one of them John Ringo. The Cooley faction killed perhaps a dozen people. Ringo and gunman Bill Williams killed Bill Cheney, allegedly for the murder of Mose Beard; they rode up to his home, accepted his invitation to eat, and while he was washing his face shot him to death.
Texas authorities arrested Cooley and Ringo in Burnet, and Ringo spent the next several years being transferred from one Texas jail after another until his release in 1879, when his case was dismissed. During this incarceration, gunfighter John Wesley Hardin and John Ringo became acquainted, Hardin taking an active interest in Ringo to the point of-years later-writing friends and inquiring about rumors of Ringo's death.
Ringo drifted to Arizona, where he wounded Louis Hancock at Safford on December 14, 1879. For the next year he continued to make a nuisance of himself, even returning to Austin, Texas, in May 1881. There, City Marshal Ben Thompson arrested and jailed him briefly on minor charges.
Back in Arizona, Ringo quarreled and drank, although he avoided charges of cattle rustling. He also avoided what has since become known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral on October 26, 1881, although he probably missed it only due to a serious lack of Cowboy communications, plus the fact that the gunfight was not a previously scheduled event.
On November 26, 1881, Ringo and a friend, Dave Estes, held up a saloon poker game at Galeyville, Arizona, and took $500, as well as a horse. Ringo was arrested shortly afterward, but after three successive trips before a trial judge, no witnesses showing up to testify, all charges were dropped in May 1882.
On January 17, 1882, John Ringo and Doc Holliday confronted each other on Tombstone's Allen Street, both men making references to ea
ch other's mother while keeping one hand on their gun. Wyatt Earp stood nearby poised to intervene, but Acting Police Chief James Flynn broke it up, arresting both Holliday and Ringo. A judge fined the two antagonists $30 each for carrying weapons.
On July 14, 1882, teamster John Yoast found the body of John Ringo sprawled under an oak tree in Morse's Canyon in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. A revolver clutched in his hand had fired one round. A bullet on the right side of his head had gone in between the eye and the ear and exited through the top of his skull.
Ringo had been acquainted with the country and was within 200 feet of water. A road passed within 40 feet, and a house stood less than a mile distant. His rifle leaned against the tree. Oddly, he wore an upside-down cartridge belt and had removed his shoes and wrapped his feet in an undershirt. The body was buried within a few yards of where it was found. The official verdict was suicide.
EARP, WYATT BERRY STAPP; GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL; HARDIN, JOHN WESLEY; HOLLIDAY, JOHN HENRY; MASON COUNTY WAR
ROAD Agent Spin (a.k.a. Border Roll)
When an outlaw surrendered, the lawman's task was to take him into custody, but this could be risky if the desperado was still armed. His weapons had to be removed, and this entailed a degree of peril. If a lawman stepped too close, he ran the risk of having his own weapons knocked aside. If a lawman ordered a desperado to drop his weapon, both lawman and outlaw ran the risk of it accidentally firing once it struck the floor or ground. To step up behind an individual to disarm him also had disadvantages, since a lawman had to holster his own guns in order to remove another man's from his holster.
A common method of disarmament was to ask for six shooters to be handed over, butts forward. However, the "road agent spin" could then occur-in which an outlaw removed his guns from his hips, extended them butts forward in surrender, then slipped his index finger inside the trigger guard, spun the weapon or weapons around in his hand, and either fired or covered the lawman.
When these things are enacted in western movies, they tend to be cute or clever. Outside of the movies, however, gunman John Wesley Hardin is the only individual recorded as being proficient at the road agent spin. According to Hardin's autobiography, he performed the stunt on Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene, Kansas, during the summer of 1871. He did not kill Hickok; he just wanted to impress him.
On October 6, 1871, John Wesley Hardin encountered Texas state policeman Green Paramore who, holding his gun on Hardin, growled, "Give me your
pistols." Hardin pulled both, offered them butts forward, then spun one around and shot Paramore dead. As Hardin wrote later, "One of the pistols turned a somersault in my hand and went off."
HARDIN, JOHN WESLEY; HICKOK, JAMES BUTLER
ROBBERS Roost
Robbers Roost was perhaps the third major Wild Bunch hideout, and its being only the third spoke of its ruggedness and remoteness. It lay in the thinly populated area of southeastern Utah, halfway between Moab and Hanksville. The Colorado, the Green, and the Dirty Devil Rivers formed rough boundaries. The twisting canyons were intimidating to anyone but outlaws running from the rope. The Sundance Kid once reportedly wintered at the Roost with Etta Place. Tales still revolve around hidden, buried, still-undiscovered outlaw loot.
BROWN'S PARK; CASSIDY, BUTCH; HOLEIN-THE-WALL; SUNDANCE KID; WILD BUNCH
ROBERTS, James Franklin (a.k.a. Jim) (1858-1934)
Macon County, Missouri, was the birthplace of James Franklin "Jim" Roberts, but while he was still a teenager the family moved to Tonto Creek, under the Mogollon Rim in Arizona Territory, more often described as Pleasant Valley. During the Pleasant Valley War of the late 1880s, Jim Roberts established his gunman reputation.
Originally, Roberts was content to breed horses near his isolated cabin, and indeed he was raising blue-ribbon-quality livestock, a fact noted by rustlers. After the loss of some prized steeds and the incineration of his home, Jim Roberts sided with the Tewksburys in their violent struggle with the Grahams.
It can be reasonably established that Roberts took an active part in gun battles resulting in the deaths of adversaries Mark Blevins, John Paine, and Harry Middleton and the serious wounding of Joseph Underwood. As many as 22 members of the Graham faction succumbed to partisan retribution. Just how much of the work was done by Roberts has to be regarded as suppositional at best, largely because he chose to remain closed-mouthed. All accounts, however, agree that his contemporaries believed him a poisonously dangerous adversary.
After an 1888 dismissal of a murder case against him, Roberts migrated to the gold camp of Congress, 19 miles north of Wickenburg, and from there sauntered over to Jerome, a copper-mining camp. There the Yavapai County sheriff "Bucket'" O'Neill gave Roberts a deputy's commission on December 18, 1889, a position he held under subsequent administrations. He later became a Jerome constable as well as town marshal.
At Jerome, Roberts capped off two more criminal careers. For instance, Dud Crocker, after being pistolwhipped by Deputy Sheriff Joe Hawkins, found himself handcuffed to a wagon wheel for the night. While Roberts patrolled the streets, Sid Chew liberated Crocker from custody with a crowbar. Arming themselves with two stolen six-shooters, the outlaws killed lawman Hawkins and escaped on stolen horses.
Roberts calmly saddled his favorite mule and the next day located the fugitives camped in a draw. With well-placed rifle shots, Roberts killed both and returned to Jerome with the outlaw bodies strapped to the horses they had stolen.
Roberts drifted south for a few years, finding time to pull a stint as a deputy sheriff in Cochise County in 1904. After that, acting under the authority of a deputy sheriff's commission, in 1927 Roberts became a special officer with the United Verde Copper Company at Clarksdale, Arizona.
On the morning of June 21, 1928, after returning from the post office, the 70-year-old Roberts noticed a robbery in progress at the local bank. After scooping up $40,000 in cash, and restraining terrified employees, desperadoes William Forrester and Earl Nelson left the bank on the run, jumping into a waiting automobile. At that point Roberts and another local citizen engaged the outlaws in an exchange of gunfire. As the auto raced past, Roberts fatally shot the driver (Forrester) in the head, causing the vehicle to careen out of control and crash into a utility pole. Nelson was captured.
On January 8, 1934, six years later, James Franklin Roberts, still actively on the job, died of natural causes and was buried in the Clarksdale Cemetery.
.36P aL90 PLEASANT VALLEY WAR
RUDABAUGH, David (1854?-1886)
Dave Rudabaugh is said to have been born in Fulton County, Illinois. The family later moved to Ohio. David's father died during the Civil War. In 1870, the mother later moved the family to Eureka, Kansas.
David supposedly went to Dodge City as a young man, and on January 27, 1878, was involved with an unsuccessful train robbery in Kansas. Bat Masterson and a posse captured him shortly afterward. Rudabaugh turned state's evidence, or as the i$r4vy GrVhii expressed it, "Rudabaugh was promised immunity if he would `squeal,' therefore he squole." His associates received five years in Leavenworth. Dave went free.
In 1879, Rudabaugh and another scoundrel named John Joshua Webb became policemen in Las Vegas, Nevada, but were arrested for stage robbery. Nothing came of the charges. However, on March 10, 1880, Webb killed a cattleman in a Las Vegas saloon. Webb was sentenced to be hanged. Rudabaugh tried to break him out of jail but succeeded only in killing the jailer. Webb later broke free of his own accord, killing three jailers in the process. As for Rudabaugh, he now teamed up with Billy the Kid and was allegedly one of the gunmen responsible for the death of James Carlyle at the Greathouse Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, on November 27, 1880. Sheriff Pat Garrett later tracked the gang to Fort Sumner, killing Tom O'Folliard on December 19, 1880, and Charlie Bowdre at Stinking Springs on December 25. During that latter day, Garrett also accepted the surrender of the Kid as well as those of Rudabaugh and Billie Wilson.
Garrett incarcerated the prisoners in Santa Fe, wh
ere Rudabaugh on December 28 pleaded guilty to robbing the U.S. mail. He received life imprisonment, although that was put on hold until his murder trial had been completed. On May 7, 1881, he was escorted to Las Vegas for trial, and on December 3 he escaped by tunneling out of jail.
Rudabaugh now dropped from sight, allegedly going to Mexico, where on February 18, 1886, he allegedly killed two men and wounded another during a cantina fight in Parral. An angry mob killed him, cut off his head, and paraded it around the plaza on a pole. The mob then left his head for the birds.
.366 4krj: BILLY THE KID; BOWDRE, CHARLES; GARRETT, PATRICK FLOYD JARVIS; GREATHOUSE, JAMES; WEBB, JOHN JOSHUA
RUNNING Iron
This was a short, straight iron, usually with a crook on one end, carried by cattle thieves. They used it to cross out or change brand markings on cattle or to create fictitious brands where none had existed.
RYNNING,Thomas H. (1866-1941)
This lawman earned most of his fame with the Arizona Rangers. Born in Christiana, Norway, he came to the United States when he was two. In 1885, he joined the U.S. cavalry, fought in numerous Indian engagements, and was with Gen. Leonard Wood at the surrender of the Apache leader Geronimo. Rynning later pursued Sitting Bull into British Columbia. He left the army in 1891, having notched 17 Indian battles. Following that, he could not resist joining the Rough Riders and participating in the charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba.
In 1902, Tom Rynning seemed a natural to succeed Burt Mossman as captain of the Arizona Rangers. Rynning's first concern was bringing order to such mining towns as Morenci, Globe, Bisbee, and Douglas, where racial tensions in the mines ran especially high. The Clifton strikes in particular seemed severe, yet Rynning brought the rioting there under control.
The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters Page 43