Editing Johnny Ringo (section)

== Mason County War ==
{{main|Mason County War}}
Ringo left his mother, brother, and sisters in [[San Jose, California]], in 1869 and moved to [[Mason County, Texas]].<ref name=NRHP>{{cite web |last1=Johnson |first1=Dave |title=TSHA {{!}} Ringo, John Peters |url=https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ringo-john-peters |website=www.tshaonline.org}}</ref> He befriended an ex-[[Texas Ranger Division|Texas Ranger]] [[Scott Cooley]] who was the adopted son of rancher Tim Williamson.

Trouble started when two American [[Cattle raiding|rustler]]s, Elijah and Pete Backus, were dragged from the Mason jail and [[Lynching in the United States|lynched]] by a predominantly German mob. Full-blown war began on May 13, 1875, when Tim Williamson was arrested by a hostile posse and murdered by a German farmer named Peter "Bad Man" Bader. Cooley and his friends, including Johnny Ringo, conducted a terror campaign against their rivals. Officials called it the "[[Mason County War]]"; locally it was called the "Hoodoo War".<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.texfiles.com/texashistory/hoodoowar.htm |title=The Mason County Texas Hoo Doo Wars |work=Texas History |first=Glenn |last=Hadeler |access-date=2008-05-10 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100512150122/http://www.texfiles.com/texashistory/hoodoowar.htm |archive-date=2010-05-12 |url-status=dead}}</ref> Cooley retaliated by killing local German ex-deputy sheriff John Worley, then taking his [[scalping|scalp]] and tossing his body down a well on August 10, 1875.

Cooley already had a reputation as a dangerous man and was respected as a Texas Ranger. He killed several others during the "war". After Cooley supporter [[Moses Baird]] was killed, Ringo murdered James Cheyney on September 25, 1875, with a friend named Bill Williams. They rode up to Cheyney's house. Cheyney (who had led Baird into the ambush) greeted them unarmed, invited them in, and began washing his face on the porch. Both Ringo and Williams shot and killed him. The two then rode to the house of Dave Doole and called him outside, but he came out with a gun and they fled back into town.

Some time later, Scott Cooley and Johnny Ringo mistook Charley Bader for his brother Pete and killed him. Both men were jailed in [[Burnet, Texas]] by [[Sheriff]] A. J. Strickland, but Ringo and Cooley soon broke out of jail with help of their friends and they parted company to evade the law.

The Mason County War ended in about November 1876 after about a dozen individuals had been killed. Scott Cooley was thought to be dead and Johnny Ringo and his friend George Gladden were in jail. One of Ringo's alleged cellmates was the notorious killer [[John Wesley Hardin]].<ref name=NRHP/> While Gladden was sentenced to 99 years, Ringo appears to have been [[acquitted]]. Two years later, Ringo was a constable in [[Loyal Valley, Texas]]. Soon after this, he traveled to Arizona.