Legends of the Old West - OUTLAWS Ep. 3 | “Clay Allison”

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Robert Clay Allison serves under Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil War and then drifts west to Texas. He works as a cowboy before starting his own ranch in Colfax County, New Mexico. There, he becomes a feared supporter of the settlers of Colfax County as they battle rich investors and the corrupt network known as the Santa Fe ring. After the so-called Colfax County War, Clay Allison ends up in a confrontation with Wyatt Earp in Dodge City. Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/lotow Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September of 1878, Clay Allison was in his final year as a feared gunman of the West when he reportedly stalked the streets of Dodge City looking for assistant marshal Wyatt Earp. Back in July, a group of drunken Texas Cowboys had galloped down Front Street, the main street of Dodge, and fired shots into the Comique Theater. Inside, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Batmasterson, and Bat's younger brother, Jim, were watching a vaudeville show. They and everyone else hit the floor when the bullets blasted through the building. The lawmen ran outside. Wyatt Earp and Jim Masterson fired up the street at the Cowboys.

One of the cowboys, George Hoy, fell from his horse with a bullet wound to his arm. No one could be sure which lawman fired the shot, but the legend quickly arose that it was fired by Wyatt Earp. When George Hoy died a few days later, the legend took its final form, that during the rowdiest years of Dodge City's existence, Wyatt Earp killed only one man, George Hoy. Clay Allison apparently knew George Hoy, and Allison showed up in Dodge two months later looking to settle the score.

Wyatt Earp provided the first known account of their meeting when he narrated his version of events to the San Francisco Examiner. And so Clay Allison came to town, Wyatt said, and for a whole day behaved like a veritable Chesterfield. But the next morning, One of my policemen woke me up to tell me that the bad man from Colorado was loaded up with a pair of six shooters and a mouthful of threats.

Straight away, I put my guns on and went down the street with Bat Masterson. Now, Bat had a shotgun in the district attorney's office. He thought the weapon might come in handy in case of trouble, so he skipped across the street to get it, while I went into Webster's saloon looking for Allison. I saw at a glance that my man wasn't there and had just reached the sidewalk to turn into the long branch next door when I met him face to face. We greeted each other with caution, and there we stood, measuring each other with sideways glances.

An onlooker across the street might have thought we were old friends. So, Allison said truculently, you're the man that killed my friend Hoyt. Yes, I guess I'm the man you're looking for, said I. His right hand was stealing round. onto his pistol pocket, but I made no move, only watched him narrowly. With my own right hand, I had a firm grip on my six-shooter, and with my left, I was ready to grab Allison's gun the moment he jerked it out. He studied the situation in all of its bearings for the space of a second or two. I saw the change in his face. I guess I'll go around the corner, he said

abruptly. I guess you'd better, I replied. And he went. But that was only the first half, half of the story. As Wyatt continued to explain, Clay Allison was leading a group of Texas cowboys who were primed for a fight. Would it be all-out war on the streets of Dodge? Or would it be all smoke and no fire? From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West.

I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the stories of six outlaws. They're horse thieves, bank robbers, train robbers, and gunfighters. This is episode three, Clay Allison, the shootest. Robert Clay Allison seemed to have a relatively normal upbringing in Wayne County, Tennessee, until he suffered an accident with a horse when he was a teenager. He grew up on a farm, like most people in Wayne County, down near the junction of Tennessee,

Alabama, and Mississippi. He was closer to Corinth, Mississippi, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama than he was to Nashville or Memphis. His father was a Presbyterian minister and a farmer who raised crops, sheep, and cattle. His mother raised eight of nine kids to adulthood. Clay Allison was near the middle of the pack of kids, and his fairly typical farm life changed when he either fell off a horse or was kicked by one. Externally, he suffered a fractured and dented skull. Internally, he suffered a severe brain injury which altered his personality.

He started having seizures, and he became withdrawn, introverted, and most concerningly, spontaneously violent. Frontier doctors had no treatment for such a calamity in the 1850s. And then came the Civil War. Tennessee joined the Confederacy, and Clay Allison joined the Confederate Army in October 1861, one month after his 20th birthday. He initially served in an artillery unit alongside a couple of his brothers and his neighbors, but his volatile personality and his violent tendencies did not mix well with army life.

Three months after he enlisted, he was declared unfit for service and medically discharged. That was in January 1862, but in September 1862, he re-enlisted, this time as a cavalry men in a Tennessee regiment which served under feared cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. With Forrest's ruthless, hard-riding, hard-fighting horsemen, Clay Allison found a home. Allison was six feet tall with a pointed beard and a readiness to fight. He fit right in. He served as a scout and a spy for Forrest's cavalry for three years. He fought in 13 battles before May 4, 1865, when he surrendered with Forrest's cavalry

at Gainesville, Alabama. According to later accounts, he was held as a prisoner of war, convicted as a spy, and sentenced to death. The night before his execution, he squeezed his hands out of his shackles, killed the guard, and slipped away into the night. Whatever the truth was, by May 10, 1865, he was free. Clay Allison and a few of his siblings lit out for Texas shortly thereafter. The group settled along the Mighty Brazos River, probably in Palo Pinto County, west of Fort Worth.

Clay found work on cattle ranches, and he earned a reputation as a skilled rider, and cowhand when he was sober. It can't be confirmed with certainty, but there has always been a belief that Clay Allison was one of the original 18 cowboys who signed on with Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight in the spring of 1866 for one of the first major Texas cattle drives in the West. In the spring and early summer of 1866, the two soon-to-be-famous cattlemen and their 18 cowboys drove a herd of cattle from Fort Belknap in Young County, Texas, to Fort Sumner in New Mexico Territory. The Goodnight Loving Cattle operation was straight north of the area where the Allison clan had settled, and the trail that Goodnight and Loving blazed went straight down through Palo Pinto County

before it eventually turned west at Fort Concho. So it's entirely possible that Clay Allison was one of the cowboys on the drive. If he didn't participate in the Good Night Loving Cattle drives, probably used their trail sometime in the next few years when he moved from Texas to northern New Mexico. Two drovers, Erwin Lacey and Lewis Coleman, hired Clay Allison to be the foreman of a drive to move 3,000 cattle to the area which would become Colfax County, New Mexico. They paid Allison with 300 head, which he used to set up his own ranch in Colfax County outside the town of Cimarron. Without knowing it, they had all built their ranches at Ground Zero of the first big range war in New Mexico. The best that can be said is that Clay

Allison moved to Colfax County, New Mexico sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s. The year of the cattle drive, which led him to the county, is sometimes recorded as 1868 and sometimes as 1872. It's not overly important, but one of the stories about Clay Allison that seems to have Samarit happened in 1871, which means he was probably established in the county before that time. In April of 1871, Clay Allison and a couple buddies stampeded a bunch of Army mules at Fort Union south of Colfax County. Allison and his buddies had probably been drinking heavily, and they intended the escapade as a prank. Apparently it worked so well and they enjoyed it so much that they did it again a few months later.

But that time, Clay Allison ended up shooting himself in the foot. The wound was bad, but a doctor managed to save the foot. One of the surviving photos of Clay Allison shows him sitting in a chair with two crutches and a heavily bandaged left foot. After the accident, he walked with a limp for the rest of his life and was forced to use the crutches when needed. And it was within the next year or so that things started to heat up around him in cold County. The heart of the problem was the massive tract of land known as the Maxwell Land Grant.

By 1875, when Clay Allison became involved in the troubles, the land grant already had 30 years of complicated history behind it, and it was leading to two range wars which would dominate the next 30 years of New Mexico's history. In the early 1840s, right before the outbreak of the Mexican-American war, the Mexican provincial governor who controlled the land that would become New Mexico territory issued the largest land grant of his time in office. He gave nearly two million acres to Carlos Bobien and Guadalupe Miranda. Then the claim was mired in the war from 1846 to 1848. Over the next 16 years, a man named Lucian Maxwell used a series of complicated and controversial maneuvers to acquire or buy all of the land in the original land grant. By 1864, Maxwell owned

most of the territory of New Mexico and a good portion of Southern Colorado. The area was so enormous that few people who hurried west after the Civil War had any idea that he owned the land on which they built farms and ranches and towns and started mining for silver, gold, and copper. In 1870, Maxwell sold all of his land to a group of investors. That group sold the land to a second group. When the second group of investors started kicking people off the land, there was instant trouble. Miners and ranchers who thought they owned their land

and had been working it for years were told to leave. Suddenly, the land belonged to someone else, and not just anyone but rich investors. Naturally, settlers were irate. And right in the heart of the Maxwell land-grant, Grant was Colfax County, where Clay Allison was ranching. On May 30th, 1873, settlers in Colfax County held a meeting and decided to arm themselves and defend their properties.

Spiratic violence dotted the landscape for the next 18 months, but the first real turning point happened in September 1875. On September 14th, a Methodist preacher, Reverend Franklin Tolby, was found shot in the back in Simmeran Canyon. Reverend Tolby had been a vocal supporter of the settlers and a critic of the land company interests and their powerful allies. Those allies were the loose network of judges, lawyers, politicians, and merchants who would be known as the Santa Fe Ring. One way or another, they controlled just about everything in New Mexico territory, and various members had no problem using violence to gain or maintain control. The murder of Reverend Tolby,

triggered, pun intended, the series of events which drew Clay Allison into what would later be called the Colfax County War. Reverend Oscar McMaines, a friend of the murdered Reverend Tolby, was convinced that a man named Cruz Vega was involved in Tolby's murder. On the night of October 30, 1875, McMaines and a masked mob, which reportedly included Clay Allison, captured Cruz Vega. The mob hauled Vega to a telegraph pole and began a brutal interrogation. They wrapped a noose around his neck and hoisted him up and lowered him down so that he repeatedly, but briefly, strangled. Vega eventually accused Manuel Cardenas of killing Reverend Tolby, and Vega named others, including men tied to the Santa Fe Ring who were involved in the murder.

When the mob was satisfied with the information, they finished hanging Cruz Vega. until he was dead. Two days later, on November 1st, Francisco Griego, Cruz Vega's uncle and a known gunman, walked into Henry Lambert's saloon at the Hotel St. James in the town of Cimarron, looking for the man he blamed for his nephew's death. Francisco Griego blamed Clay Allison for the death of Cruz Vega. Clay was in the saloon that night, and according to the Daily New Mexican newspaper, the two men ordered a drink, walked to a corner of the saloon, and talked for a bit. At some point during the conversation, Griego fanned his sombrero with one hand as a distraction

while he reached for his revolver with the other. Clay Allison didn't fall for the distraction. He drew first, fired three shots, and killed Francisco Griego in Henry Lambert's saloon. Allison was formerly charged with murder, but after an inquiry, the shooting was ruled self-defense, and the charges were dropped. On November 10, 1875, 10 days after Clay Allison killed Francisco Griego, lawmen arrested Manuel Cardenas for the murder of Reverend Tolby. Reverend Oscar McMaines and his mob of masked men broke into the jail, pulled Cardenas out, and beat him until he confessed to the murder of the Reverend.

Like Cruz Vega, Manuel Cardinas named members of the Santa Fe Ring as the men who paid him to do the killing. The mob allowed lawmen to take Cardenas back to jail, but later that night, some men returned to the jail, hauled Cardenas out a second time, and shot him. That made two vigilante killings and a self-defense killing in less than two weeks, and Clay Allison's name was associated with all of them. He increasingly became the most prominent man of action among the Colfax County settlers, which made him a top enemy of the Santa Fe Ring.

some portion of December 1875 and January 1876, it seems as though members of the ring, led by New Mexico Governor Samuel Axtel, plotted to kill Clay Allison and others in Colfax County. The plot was revealed two years later when a private letter from Axtel to a district attorney named Ben Stevens found its way into the hands of a lawyer who supported the Colfax County settlers. Stevens told people in Colfax County that the governor would come to town to meet with the settlers. Privately, the governor was never going to show up. The goal was to herd all of the leaders of the Colfax Rebellion

into one place and arrest them. But that wasn't really the goal either. The real goal was to get them into one place and kill them. Two different parts of the conspiracy letter from Governor Axtel to Ben Stevens said, Kill all the men who resist you. Do not hesitate at extreme measures. Everyone knew Clay Allison

would resist arrest, and Ben Stevens testified later that Clay Allison was one of the specific people whom the governor wanted killed. But the conspiracy didn't work. The Colfax County men sniffed out the trap and didn't show up for the governor's meeting. When the conspiracy failed, a posse, including a sheriff and 47 cavalry men, rode out to Clay's ranch and arrested him without incident. He was released from jail a few hours later, and the governor's plot to eliminate his enemies fizzled out. The rest of 1876 passed with little fanfare as the tension between the Santa Fe Ring and small ranchers and merchants started to shift south to Lincoln County, where it would explode into a much hotter and more famous war in 1878. By that time, Clay Allison

was long gone from New Mexico territory. By December 1876, Clay Allison's part in the Colfax County War was pretty much done. That month, Clay and his brother John traveled north to Los Anamis, Colorado to sell cattle. After 150 miles on the trail, the brothers were thirsty, and they didn't much care about the law in town that said they had to check their guns with the marshal's office. On December 21st, fully armed, the brothers took themselves on a saloon crawl in Los Anamis. They were loud, and their reputations for violence, preceded them. John's reputation was nothing like Clay's, but it was still unwise to test him.

At the Olympic dance hall, Marshal Charles Faber demanded their guns. The Allison brothers refused, on account of the other men in the hall having guns. They poked fun at the marshal and turned the incident into a spectacle. Marshall Faber left the saloon humiliated and angry. He quickly deputized two men, grabbed a double-barrel shotgun, and marched back to the saloon. When the lawmen stepped through the door, they opened fire. John took bullets to the side and the arm and fell to the floor. Clay standing at the bar, spun around and fired four quick shots. Two bullets hit Faber in the chest and killed him. The two hastily sworn in deputies fled the saloon. Clay chased him for a moment, then returned to his brother who lay bleeding on the floor.

According to later accounts, Clay was hysterical, and he dragged Faber's bow. body over to John and told his brother, this is the son of a bitch that shot you. Everything's going to be all right. John survived the ambush, and both Allison brothers were arrested and charged with manslaughter in Faber's death. John's charges were dropped. Clay's case moved forward, then crumbled when witness testimony made it clear that Faber fired the first reckless shot into the crowded hall. The grand jury declined to indict, and Clay Allison walked free. Three months later, in March 1877, Clay sold his Colfax County ranch to his brother John and moved out in New Mexico. He drifted east to Missouri and then Kansas, where he heard that a cowboy named

George Hoy, whom he seemed to have known during his time in Texas, had been killed in Dodge City by an assistant marshal named Wyatt Earp. Hoy had been one of a couple cowboys who had been hurrahing at 3 o'clock in the morning on July 26, 1878. They galloped their horses up front street and shouted and fired their pistols for the fun of it. That night, the Cowboys fired a few shots into the Comique Theater, while Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Batmasterson, and Jim Masterson were watching a vaudeville performance. When the shooting stopped, the lawmen ran outside, and Wyatt and Jim fired up the street at the Cowboys who were riding away from the scene.

One of their bullets hit George Hoy in the arm, and George died a few days later. Two months after the shooting, Clay Allison showed up in Dodge, apparently looking for revenge. By that time, he was famous. There was credible evidence to say that he participated in the killing of four men, and the real total was likely much higher. Newspapers all over the West printed and reprinted stories, which were almost entirely hearsay, but the stories were entertaining, and they sold copies, which was why the newspapers kept printing them.

of those stories, which were exaggerated at best and wholesale fiction at worst, made Clay Allison famous. In September, Dodge City and Ford County newspapers reported that Clay Allison was in Dodge, and he was gunning for the man who killed his friend George Hoy. Allison was also mad, in general, about the heavy-handed tactics of local lawmen. Allison was backed by a group of cowboys, sometimes noted as high as 25 in number. He went looking for Wyatt Ear, and in Wyatt's version of events, Wyatt went looking for Allison. Twenty years later, Wyatt told his story to the San Francisco Examiner newspaper. He said he had been awakened by one of his policemen who said, quote,

The Bad Man from Colorado was loaded up with a pair of six shooters and a mouth full of threats. The bad man from Colorado was Clay Allison, and the description was a reference to the killing of Marshall Charles Faber two years earlier. In Wyatt's telling, he and Clay found each other on the boardwalk in front of the Long Branch Saloon. They talked for a few tense moments, and then Clay stepped away from the confrontation. At the same time, Bat Masterson had retrieved a shotgun from the district attorney's office, and he was moving into position to support Wyatt. That was how things stood when Wyatt continued his story.

In the meantime, Wyatt said, 10 or a dozen of the worst Texans in town were laying low in Bob Wright's store with their Winchesters, ready to cover Allison's retreat out of town or help him in the killing if necessary. From where he had stationed himself, Batmasterson could see them, but I did not know they were there. After the encounter with Allison, I moved up the street and would have passed Bob Wright's door, had not Bat from across the street, signaled me to keep out of range. A moment later, Allison, who had mounted his horse, rode out in front of Webster's saloon, and called to me. Come over here, Wyatt, he said. I want to talk to you.

I can hear you all right here, I replied. I think you came here to fight with me, and if you did, you can have it right now. Several friends of mine wanted me to take a shotgun, but I thought I could kill him all right with a six-shooter. At that moment, Bob Wright came running down the street to urge Allison to go. out of town. He had experienced a sudden change of heart because Bat had crossed over to him with these portentous words. If this fight comes up right, you're the first man I'm going to kill. Allison listened to the legislators in treaties with a scowl. Well, I don't like you any too well, he said. Erp, he continued, turning to me and raising his voice, I believe you're a pretty good man from what I've seen of you. Do you know that these coyotes sent for me to make a fight with you

and kill you. Well, I'm going to ride out of town, and I wish you good luck. Unfortunately, for future generations of writers and movie producers, legendary lawman Wyatt Earps showdown with legendary outlaw Clay Allison on the streets of Dodge City in 1878 did not result in a gun battle that would have made the shootout in Tombstone look like a mild skirmish. Clay Allison left town and finally settled down. He went back to Texas, reunited with his brothers, and returned. turn to ranching. By 1880, Clay and his brothers were ranching in the panhandle along Gagebee

Creek in Hemphill County. The closest settlement was Mobidi, south of them in Wheeler County. Four years earlier, Mobeidi had been called Sweetwater, and that was where Bat Masterson had been badly wounded in an event which became known as the Sweetwater Shootout. While Bat had recovered at his family's home in Kansas, he received an offer from his old friend Wyatt Earp to join the new collection of lawmen that Wyatt was assembling to tame the rowdy town of Dodge City. And thus, the wheels within wheels of the Old West rolled on again. In Mobiti in 1880, Clay Allison registered the Ace Cattle brand and began building a serious ranch. The following year, on February 15, 1881, to be exact, Robert Clay Allison married America

Medora McCullough, a young woman from Mobiti who saw something worth loving beneath the skull the limp and the notorious reputation. Clay Allison was 40 years old, and his reckless, hard-drinking ways slowly softened with age and marriage. Allison devoted himself to ranching. He served on juries, handled business, and carried himself like an established cattleman rather than a gunfighter. In 1883, he sold the Gageby Creek Ranch and moved with Dora to a rock house in southwest Texas near the Texas-New Mexico border. Their daughter, Patty Dora, was born in 1885, and sadly she didn't have much time to spend with her father. In July of 1887, Clay's wife Dora was two months pregnant with their second child.

On July 3rd, Clay Allison was in the town of Pacas to buy supplies. He loaded his wagon with goods and set off on the 40-mile journey home. When he reached the Pacas River, a freak accident happened. There were no witnesses, so the exact circumstances will forever remain a mystery. But later in the afternoon, a cowboy was riding the same trail when he discovered a wagon and a mule team standing idle nearby. He searched the area, and he found Clay Allison dead on the ground with a broken neck. The most plausible conclusion that anyone could reach was that a wagon wheel must have struck a rock or a big clump of grass at the exact moment that Clay was reaching,

into the wagon bed to do something with the supplies. The wagon jumped and tossed Clay off of the driver's bench. The mules panicked and lurched forward as Clay fell to the ground, and one of the wagon wheels rolled over his neck. The heavily loaded wagon broke his neck instantly. Clay Allison had survived 46 years of dangerous adventures, including the Civil War and the Colfax County War, but it was a freak accident that took his life. He was buried in the Pacas Cemetery the following day. Seven months later, on February 10, 1888, Dora gave birth to her second child with Clay Allison. She named her second daughter Pearl Clay in honor of the famous father whom the girl never knew.

Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's the story of the Reno gang, the outlaws who were credited with the first classic train robbery of the Old West era. trains had been burglarized before as they sat in depots, but the Reno gang is believed to be the first outlaw group who stopped a moving train in the countryside to rob it. That story is next week on Legends of the Old West. To binge all the episodes of a new season, and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts,

or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched by Mandy Wimmer and written by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Villeer. Thanks for listening.