Where did clay allison die

Clay allison grave
John wesley hardin
Billy the kid

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Old West historian Paul Cool says that the phrase “good-natured holy terror” fits several Wild West characters. William “Curly Bill” Brocius and John Henry “Doc” Holliday come to mind. One character who definitely fills the bill is Robert Clay Allison, who reportedly considered himself a “shootist” rather than a gunman.

From 1956, when Franciscan friar Stanley Francis Louis Crocchiola wrote the first biography of Allison, until the early 2000s, when onsite and electronic research was easier, Clay Allison was portrayed as an unglued Southerner who poured his bitterness and vile onto former Union soldiers and anyone else who crossed him. Unfortunately this is how most people still view Allison. Early research on the man was iffy at best, and subsequent writers—and readers—have paid the price. In fact, disregarding the myths laid at his feet by modern writers, Clay in his early Texas years was a young man matured by four years of war and evidently trustworthy enough that two prominent Texas cattleman made him foreman of a

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Clay Allison | The “Shootist”

The American West was a complicated place. It is often depicted in simplistic terms, the white hat vs. black hat paradigm of law man vs. outlaw. However, it often wasn’t that cut and dried. Several notorious characters were considered law men and outlaws over the course of their careers. Others were somewhere in a ‘gray’ zone, good men capable of bad things or bad men who didn’t get caught. Clay Allison was somewhere in the latter group, a frequent participant in violent altercations throughout his life and a self-proclaimed “shootist.” It wasn’t that he was consistently a “bad” man, it just wasn’t a good idea to get on his “bad” side. Though the tall tales surrounding gunfighters are often exaggerated, he would have been a dangerous dude if he was guilty of 20% of the things that were attributed to him.

Early years

Like many young men who migrated west in the late 1860’s, Robert Andrew “Clay” Allison’s formative years were shaped by trauma, violence and loss. He was the fourth of nine children, born near Waynesboro, Tennessee on September 2, 1

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Gunfighter Clay Allison killed

Clay Allison, eccentric gunfighter and rancher, is believed to have died on July 3, 1887, in a freak wagon accident in Texas.

Born around 1840 in Waynesboro, Tennessee, Allison seemed to display odd tendencies from a young age. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Confederate Army but received a rare medical discharge for a condition that doctors called “partly epileptic and partly maniacal,” resulting perhaps from an early childhood head injury.

After spending some time as a cowhand for the famous Texas ranchers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, Allison started his own ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. For a time, he got along well with the local residents, but his tendencies toward violent rages soon became apparent. In October 1870, Allison led an angry mob that seized an accused murderer named Charles Kennedy from the local jail and hanged him. Such vigilante justice was not unusual, but many townspeople were shocked when a wild-eyed Allison decapitated Kennedy and displayed his head on a pole in a local saloon.

In 1874, Allison’s