David D. Johnson

David Johnson has obviously spent many, many hours in libraries, archives and newspaper morgues, working on this book; and he'll be gol-darned if one minute of that research doesn't make its way into the finished product. In consequence, Mr. Johnson is incapable of relating a plain, unvarnished tale without skittering off into whatever direction his index cards take him. No individual is mentioned without taking a moment (or three pages) to detail place of birth, parents, date of parents' marriage, names and birthdates of siblings, spouses of siblings, birthplaces and parentage of same ... you get the picture. When one of these digressions is finished, the likelihood is that both author and reader have forgotten the starting point, so there's a good chance we'll need to pick up the thread in the next chapter or two. There are dozens of chapters, each with at least 40 footnotes. Occasionally, we'll encounter a photograph of someone who either was mentioned 20 or 30 pages ago, or who won't come onto the scene for quite a while. New figures are often mentioned glancingly by their last name (John Clum, editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, for example), only to receive a formal introduction (with genealogy, of course) somewhere further down the trail. The result is a kaleidoscope of data from which I defy anyone to puzzle out a coherent narrative. The book is basically structured into two parts: (1) Ringo's early life through the events of the HooDoo war and his departure from Texas, (2) an account of doings in and around Tombstone culminating in Ringo's suicide at age 32. The almost comic shambles of Johnson's style is much worse in the first part of the book. The second part is more straightforward, primarily because the author becomes more and more preoccupied with disputing previous accounts of the legendary events of the "town too tough to die"; a strategy that, of necessity, requires him to focus a little bit harder. Johnson's thesis is actually pretty simple: Ringo was a decent man who lived a hard life and whose reputation has been sullied by partisans of Wyatt Earp and other Republicans.… (més)