In July 1882 a man hauling wood in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona found a body seated on a flat rock among five oak trees growing from a single root. The corpse was blackened by the sun, a bullet had entered the right temple, a revolver was still in the right hand, and the feet were wrapped in strips torn from an undershirt. This was John Peters Ringo, the outlaw the movies present as a Latin-quoting rival of Doc Holliday. The record shows someone else: a boy who at 14 watched his father die in a shotgun accident on a Wyoming wagon trail, and who grew into a drifter and a violent drunk.

This episode works from coroner’s findings, newspaper clippings, and court records to separate the man from the legend. It covers his killings in the Texas feud known as the Hoodoo War, his loose ties to the Cochise County Cowboys, and a Tombstone more worried about mining investors than gunfights. Then it tests each theory of his death. Wyatt Earp’s claim does not fit the calendar, Doc Holliday was in a Colorado courtroom, and the coroner’s jury ruling of suicide is the one the evidence supports.

• In September 1875 Ringo and a partner shot an unarmed James Chaney on his own porch while he washed his face in a basin.
• In Safford, Arizona a drunk Ringo shot Lewis Hancock for declining a whiskey and saying he preferred beer. Hancock survived.
• His January 1882 street confrontation with Doc Holliday ended with both men arrested and fined for carrying weapons inside city limits.
• Ringo’s horse was found 11 days after the body, two miles away, with his boots still tied to the saddle.
• Court records put Doc Holliday in Pueblo County, Colorado on July 11th, 14th, and 18th, roughly 700 miles from the canyon.