Drive south from Red River on the Enchanted Circle, through the Moreno Valley toward Cimarron, and you are crossing Clay Allison country. In the 1870s, Colfax County was Red River's rough backyard, a land of gold camps, big ranches and land-grant feuds, and no name from those years has gathered more stories, true and tall, than Robert Clay Allison.
Allison was born on September 2, 1841, on a farm in Wayne County, Tennessee, the fourth of nine children. When the Civil War came, he joined a Confederate artillery company, received a medical discharge in January 1862, then reenlisted that September as a cavalryman. He rode with General Nathan Bedford Forrest's command in 1864 and 1865 and surrendered with it at the war's end.
After the war, Allison drifted to the Brazos River country of Texas and hired on as a cowhand with Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. He may have ridden on the famous 1866 drive that blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail. By the spring of 1871 he was in Colfax County, New Mexico, and a year later he drove a herd north for ranching partners and took 300 cattle as his payment. With that herd he started his own ranch near Cimarron and built it into a lucrative operation.
His gunfighter fame was made on January 7, 1874, at the Clifton House, an inn in Colfax County. Allison and a gunman named Chunk Colbert, said to have already killed seven men, raced their horses, then sat down together to dinner. During the meal Colbert suddenly drew, but his pistol barrel struck the table. Allison drew faster and killed him with one shot. Asked why he had accepted a dinner invitation from a man likely to try to kill him, Allison answered, "Because I didn't want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach."
During the Colfax County War, Allison sided with settlers against the Maxwell Land Grant Company. On October 30, 1875, he may have been in the mob that lynched Cruz Vega, who was suspected of murdering the Reverend F.J. Tolby, a Methodist circuit rider. Two days later, Allison killed Vega's friend Francisco Griego in a confrontation at the St. James Hotel in Cimarron. In January 1876, a drunken Allison wrecked the office of the Cimarron News and Press over an editorial, then allegedly returned and paid 200 dollars for the damage.
Later storytellers gave Allison a starring role in an even darker Elizabethtown tale, the lynching of accused murderer Charles Kennedy in October 1870. In the legend, Allison dragged Kennedy to his death and displayed his head as a warning. A careful look at the surviving records tells a plainer story: a masked mob of about 25 men took Kennedy from his guards and hanged him, and no serious biographer of Allison believes he was involved. In Colfax County, the legend simply attached itself to the most famous name around.
Allison sold his New Mexico ranch in 1878 and settled in Texas. He married Dora McCullough in Mobeetie on February 15, 1881, and the couple had two daughters. On July 3, 1887, while hauling supplies from Pecos to his ranch, he was thrown from his heavily loaded wagon and fatally injured when a rear wheel ran over him. He was buried in Pecos the next day, and in 1975 his remains were reinterred in Pecos Park. The gunfighter who survived dinner-table duels died, in the end, in a wagon accident, but along the Enchanted Circle his name still rides on.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
