Robert Clay Allison

1840 to 1887

Gunfighter

For his first twenty-one years, gunfighter Clay Allison lived on his family's farm in Tennessee. With the start of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate Army but was released after serving one year because of mental problems. Some months later, he reenlisted and fought until the end of the war as a scout under General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

After the war, Allison moved to Texas with some members of his family and worked as a cowboy for Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. Later, he was a trail boss and ran a ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico.

A quiet, friendly man when sober, Allison became deadly and probably psychotic when drunk. In 1870, for example, he participated in a lynching, after which he cut off the victim's head.

Four years later, in his first documented gunfight, Allison shot and killed Chunk Colbert. Asked why he had had a meal with Colbert before the shooting, Allison replied, "Because I didn't want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach."

After the murder of a Methodist minister who had criticized the Santa Fe Ring, Allison and some friends lynched a Mexican thought to be implicated in the murder. A short time later, two other Mexicans were also killed, probably by Allison. After a New Mexico newspaper attacked Allison's deeds, he had the press thrown in a river and published his own edition of the newspaper. He later apologized for these actions.

Allison was thought to be involved in the killing of three black soldiers, as well as in the murder of a deputy sheriff in Colorado, but he was never brought to trial for killings or others, perhaps because of his deadly reputation.

In the 1880s, Allison settled on the Washita River in Texas where became known as "the Wild Wolf of the Washita." He had married and had a daughter; a second girl was born after his death.

In July 1887, Allison died of a skull fracture after being thrown from his wagon--an unexciting death for one of the West's most well-known gunfighters.