Why Wild West Lawmen Feared The Tennessee Rancher Who Killed 15 Men Before His Wagon Crushed Him

[00:00:00]The road is empty. The road has been empty for hours. It is the afternoon of July 3rd, 1887 in Picos County, Texas.

[00:00:07]The sky is white at the edges from the heat. A man in a wide hat sits on the seat of a heavy wagon, holding the rains loose in his right hand, letting the mules walk themselves. He has done this trip more times than he can count. 40 mi between the freight yard at POS and his ranch. A man can sleep on this trip if he wanted to. He does not sleep. He looks at the road and lets his thoughts drift the way a man does when he is 45 years old and tired and finally after a long life of trouble comfortable. His name is Robert Clay Allison. The men who knew him do not call him Robert. They call him Clay and they call him by that name carefully. The wagon is loaded heavy. Sacks of grain, dry goods, lumber, a small barrel of nails, a coil of rope. The rear wheels are taller than a grown man's waist. The wood is reinforced with iron bands. The wagon groans under its load with every turn of the wheel. A deep slow sound under the rattle of the harness. The dust comes up off the road in soft yellow clouds and settles on his pants and his sleeves and the dark hair on the back of his hands.

[00:01:04]He is thinking maybe about his wife. Her name is Dora. She's at the ranch with their daughter Patty, who is not yet 2 years old. Dora is pregnant again. The baby is due in February. He does not know yet that he will not be there for it. He is thinking maybe about the auction next week. He is a cattleman now. He has been a cattleman for years, but lately he has been thinking of himself that way again in the quiet first person way a man does when he has finally stopped running from himself. He bought this ranch four years ago in 1883 after he sold the place in New Mexico.

[00:01:35]He sold New Mexico because of what happened there. He sold Colorado in his head a long time before that. He has been a quieter man for some years now.

[00:01:42]The drinking is less, the fights are less, the dreams maybe are less. At 45, he has the long hard face of a man who has lived two or three lives already and is trying finally to live a simple one.

[00:01:54]Somewhere behind him, on the bed of the wagon, a sack of grain shifts. He hears it. He does not turn. There's a small jolt as a wheel finds a rut in the dry road, and the sack tilts and slides and then begins to fall over the side of the wagon toward the dust. He sees it out of the corner of his eye. It is the kind of small thing a rancher does not think about. He has lost grain before. He has spilled flour. He has watched a barrel roll off a wagon in a storm and not gone after it. But this is a full sack and the wagon is moving slow and his right hand is already on the seat rail. He leans, he reaches. He miscalculates. The wagon hits something. The seat shifts under him. His weight comes too far forward. He falls. He falls between the wagon and the ground. He falls in front of the rear wheel. The wagon does not stop. The mules do not know. They keep walking because they have been walking all day. And the man on the seat is not pulling the res. And the load is steady and the road is empty. The wheel comes over him. The wheel of a loaded freight wagon on a hot road in West Texas in 1887 with iron bands and 400 lb of grain riding on it comes down across the back of a man's neck. There's a single short sound, abrupt and final, the kind of sound a man who has spent his life around horses and gunfire will recognize. Then there's nothing. The mules go on. The dust falls. The wagon in time drifts to a stop down the road because no hand is on the res. And in the road behind it lies Robert Clay Allison, face down in the dust, dead before the wheel had finished passing over him. There is no gunfire. There is no smoke. There's no man standing over him with a pistol. There is no last word. There's no witness even for the first long minute. The body of the most feared shooist in the American West is alone in the dust. The newspapers will get the story three weeks later. The Globe Livestock Journal of Dodge City, Kansas on the 26th of July, 1887 will print the words that say it best and say its strangest. Clay Allison, the paper will write, "A brave, true-hearted, and oft dangerously reckless man, when in his cups, as at last, died with his boots on, but not by the pistol route.

[00:03:54]He fell from his wagon in Texas some days ago. The wheels of the same running over his neck and breaking it. Died with his boots on, but not by the pistol route. It is the most honest thing anyone wrote about Klay Allison in his life or after it. And it is the question that has haunted his name for 140 years.

[00:04:12]Before we go any further, do me a favor.

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[00:04:50]There is no nonsense. There is no shouting. We are doing something quiet on this channel. One story at a time. We tell the stories the textbooks skip. We tell the ones history got wrong or got too clean or got too short. The men who live these stories did not get a fair telling. We are trying to give them one.

[00:05:06]So if that sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe and stay with me because what we are about to talk about, you may have heard the name before, but you have not heard it like this. So let me set it down for you the way it sat for the lawmen of the American West. By the year 1878, in the cattle towns from Simmeron, New Mexico, up through Los Animus, Colorado, and across the long roads east into Dodge City, Kansas, there was a name a man could say in a saloon that would make the room go quiet. The name was Klay Allison. The newspapers had begun to credit him with 15 men killed. Modern historians, looking at the documents now, count fewer. Six, maybe eight. A few more if you include the lynchings, he led. The number was almost certainly inflated because that is what frontier newspapers did. But the number is not the question.

[00:05:52]The question is why the lawmen feared him because they did. They feared him in a way that they did not fear Wyatt Herp or Wild Bill Hickok or John Wesley Harden. They feared him not because he was the fastest or the deadliest or the most prolific. They feared him because he was something they could not name.

[00:06:09]Marshalss in Dodge City crossed the street when his shadow came through the door. The constable in Los Animus, Colorado, deputized two men before he would walk back into a dance hall where Allison was standing. The sheriffs in Kfax County, New Mexico, jailed him only when he allowed himself to be jailed and turned him loose almost as fast. He was a Tennessee man. He was a Confederate veteran. He was by most accounts a polite and quiet talker when sober, a gentleman to women, a steady hand with horses and cattle. He could ride into a Kansas newspaper office one afternoon and have a calm conversation about a livestock advertisement. The Kinsley graphic of Kansas described him in the winter of 1878 after he had stopped in town for a few days with these words.

[00:06:48]Tall, straight as an arrow, dark complexioned, carries himself with ease and grace, gentlemanly, and courteous in manner, never betraying by word or action the history of his eventful life.

[00:06:58]Never betraying by word or action the history of his eventful life. That was Klay Allison sober. But that history was always there. It walked behind him in every saloon he entered, in every road he traveled, in every dustcovered town from Samaran to Picos. And the men who knew it knew that the line between Klay Allison, the rancher, and Klay Allison, the killer, was sometimes only a single drink wide. So, here's the question. How does a man like that die under his own wagon? How does a man who killed his way through a decade of frontier violence, who survived gunfights at dinner tables and dance halls and saloon doorways, who walked into Dodge City in the fall of 1878 and walk back out with no man having the courage to test him? How does a man like that die by reaching for a sack of grain? How does the most feared shootist in the American West get killed by his own freight? To understand it, you have to go back. You have to start in Tennessee in a house full of children and a father who was a preacher and a horse that may or may not have kicked a small boy in the head and changed him forever. He was born on the 2nd of September 1841 near Wayneesboro in Wayne County, Tennessee. His father was Jeremiah Scotland Allison, a Presbyterian minister who raised cattle and sheep on the side. His mother was Mariah Brown Allison. Clay was the fourth of nine children. The household ran on hard work, on scripture, on the long Sunday quiet of a southern country church. His father died when Clay was 5 years old, and the children grew up under the discipline of their mother and the long shadow of a missing father. The boy was strange. The family knew it early. He had a temper that came up out of nothing fast and then was gone again.

[00:08:27]And afterward, he would not remember why he had been angry. The records do not agree on what caused it. Some sources say a horse kicked him in the forehead when he was a child. Some sources say he fell. Some sources say he was born with a club foot and a head that worked sideways. Whatever it was, it left a mark. The Allison family seems to have believed all his life that there was something inside their brother that was not quite right. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Clay was 20 years old. He enlisted in the Confederate Army that fall. He served for a few months and then in January of 1862, the army doctors discharged him. The discharge papers, which survive, give the reason in plain frontier medicine language.

[00:09:06]They wrote that he was, in their words, partly epileptic and partly maniacal.

[00:09:10]They listed an old head injury as the likely cause. They sent him home. Think about that for a second. The Confederate army, in the middle of the war, when it needed every able body it could find, looked at a 20-year-old volunteer and decided he was too dangerous to keep.

[00:09:24]That is not a small thing. Confederate doctors were not picky. They took men with bad lungs and bad eyes and bad backs and bad bones. They did not take Clay Allison. They sent him back to Tennessee with a paper that said, in the language of the time, that his mind was not safe. He went home. He came back a few months later in September of 1862 and reinlisted in the 9inth Tennessee Cavalry. He served the rest of the war as a scout and a spy under General Nathan Bedford Forest, the wizard of the saddle, one of the hardest cavalry commanders the war produced. Forest used him. Forest did not seem to mind whatever was wrong with the boy from Wsboro. The work of a forest scout in 1863 and 1864 was the work of a man who travels alone. You crossed Union lines at night. You wore plain clothes. You watched columns from the brush and counted wagons and rifles and horses.

[00:10:11]You came back two or three days later with a number in your head and dust in your beard. If you were caught, you were hanged as a spy because that was the way that war worked. Klay Allison did that work for two years. By the end of the war, he had been captured and held briefly as a prisoner of war in Alabama.

[00:10:26]He was released in May of 1865, and he went home to a Tennessee that had lost everything. That is the first thing the lawman would later understand about Klay Allison, though most of them never knew the details. He was a man who had been judged unfit even by the Confederacy. He had spent the back half of the war scouting for Bedford Forest, riding alone at night, killing in silence, learning the work of a man who travels with a knife and a pistol and trusts no one. He came out of the war with what we would now call something different and what they then called madness and what he himself called, in a quieter moment to a reporter years later, two sides of one man. That is one factor, the head injury, the diagnosis, the war, the killing taught early. The second factor is geography. In 1865, after the war, Clay and his brothers and a few in-laws left Tennessee for Texas. They worked cattle on the Brazos River. He rode for Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, the men who would later open the Goodn Night Loving Trail. He learned the country. He learned the Indian country and the dry country and the high meas.

[00:11:24]Then in 1870, he and his brothers drove a herd up to Kfax County, New Mexico, and they took their wages in cattle, and Clay homesteaded a ranch at the junction of the Vermejo and Canadian rivers, 9 milesi north of what is now the town of Springer. It was a beautiful country, hard, but beautiful. The Sreto mountains rose to the west. The grass was good, the water was steady, and the towns nearby, Samaran and Elizabeth Town, were boom towns full of miners, dvers, gamblers, soldiers, and the kind of men who came west because nowhere else would have them. Simmeron, in particular, was a hub. It sat on the Santa Fe Trail. It had the Lambert Inn, which later became the St. James Hotel, and the bullet holes are still in the tin ceiling of that hotel today. 26 of them, by one count. Men died in the dining room of that hotel. They died at the bar. They died on the stairs. This was the country Klay Allison built his ranch in. This was the country he became Klay Allison, the gunfighter in. Because here is the thing the lawmen understood about him that they did not fully understand about other shootists. Klay Allison was not a drifter. He was not a marginal man. He was a land owner. He had a ranch. He had cattle. He had property. He had standing. He paid taxes. He served on juries. He had political connections. He was respectable in the eyes of the law in a way that Billy the Kid and Jesse James never were. and that made him almost impossible to prosecute. If you wanted to arrest Klay Allison for murder, you had to come out to his ranch. And his neighbors knew him, and the local sheriff often owed him money or favor, and the witnesses were drunk.

[00:12:52]And the courts in Kfax County were, in the polite phrase, unreliable. A constable in Los could be killed in a dance hall in front of 50 witnesses, and the killer could walk free on a self-defense ruling 6 weeks later because the constable, after all, had fired first. That is exactly what happened in December of 1876. That brings us to the third factor, the acts themselves. In October of 1870 in Elizabeth Town, New Mexico, a small mining boom town in the Marino Valley, there was a man named Charles Kennedy.

[00:13:20]Kennedy ran a wayfairing station on the road from Taos to Elizabeth Town at the base of Palo Facado Pass. Travelers stopped there for a meal in a bed. Some of them never left. Kennedy's wife, Gregoria, a young woman not yet 20, finally broke. She ran more than 10 miles in the snow to Elizabeth Town and walked into a saloon half frozen and told the men inside that her husband had killed many travelers and that he had finally killed their own small son in a fit of drunken rage because the boy had said something the wrong way at supper.

[00:13:47]Clay Allison was in that saloon. He listened. He led a posi out to the Kennedy place that same night. They found human bones in the fireplace. They found skeletons under the floor. They found two bodies in the cellar, one of them the dead child. They arrested Charles Kennedy and brought him into Elizabeth Town to await trial. The trial dragged. A witness came forward. The evidence was overwhelming. And then on a fall night, a masked mob broke into the jail, took Kennedy out by force, and lynched him. The legend is what came next. The legend says that Klay Allison led the mob and that after Kennedy was dead, Klay took a knife and cut off Kennedy's head and put the head in a sack and rode 29 miles down the trail to Samaran where he staked the head on a fence outside the Lambor as a warning.

[00:14:30]The legend says he drank a beer underneath it. The legend says the head was there for days before someone took it down. Now, some modern historians, including the writer Loretta Miles Toliffson, who has done careful work on this case, suggest that the cinematic flourishes of the head and the pike and the ride to Tamarin are later editions.

[00:14:48]The lynching itself is documented. The beheading is contested. We will say what the record allows us to say. We will say that Klay Allison led the lynching. We will say that newspapers and frontier accounts widely credited him with the head on the pike. And we will say that whether or not he carried the head, the men of Kfax County believed he did. And the belief was the thing that mattered.

[00:15:09]The belief sat in the mind of every law man in northern New Mexico for the rest of Klay Allison's life. This is what they understood about him. This is the third factor. Klay Allison was theatrical. He was the kind of violent man who wanted you to see what he had done. He left signs. He left marks. He left the impression. He did not kill quietly. He killed in such a way that you would talk about it for the next 20 years. And in the frontier, where reputation was a kind of currency, that was the most dangerous kind of killer to be. The fourth factor was the calm.

[00:15:39]Because here is the strange thing about Klay Allison. When the violence came, he was not always wild. Sometimes he was very, very still. In January of 1874 at the Clifton House, an inn in Kfax County, New Mexico, Klay Allison sat down at a dinner table with a man named Chunk Colbert. Colbert had come up from Texas. He was a gunman with a grudge.

[00:15:59]Years earlier, in a dispute on the Brazos River, Allison had beaten up Colbert's uncle, Zachary Colbert, a fairyman who had tried to overcharge him for a river crossing. Chunk Colbert had decided to settle the family account. He had told friends before he came north, that Allison was going to be his seventh kill. They spent the afternoon together.

[00:16:16]They raced their horses, they drank, they laughed, and then Colbert suggested dinner at the Clifton House, and Allison accepted. The two men sat down across from each other at a small table.

[00:16:26]Colbert laid his pistol in his lap under the table where Allison could not see it. Allison laid his pistol on the table next to his coffee cup in plain view where every man in the room could see it. They ate. They talked. Whatever was said between them is not recorded, and you can imagine it however you like. Two killers at a wooden table with their hands close to their guns, eating a roast beef supper in a stage stop in northern New Mexico in the dead cold of January. When the meal was finished, Cober moved. He brought his pistol up from his lap. The barrel caught the underside of the table. The shot, if it had ever fired, would have gone into the wood and the floor and not into Clay Allison. Allison saw the move. Allison picked up his own pistol from the table where it had been sitting the whole time. He aimed. He fired one shot. The bullet went into Chunk Colbert's forehead. Colbert was dead before he hit the floor. After it was over, when the men in the room had stopped staring, someone asked Klay Allison why he had agreed to sit down to dinner with a man he knew was going to try to kill him.

[00:17:24]Klay Allison's answer is one of the most famous lines in the history of the American West. Because he said, "I didn't want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach." That was the fourth factor. The law men of the frontier had seen drunk shooters and angry shooters and panicking shooters and back shooters. They had not often seen a man who would sit through a roast beef dinner across from a man who was planning to kill him and shoot him cleanly in the head over the dishes and then make a joke about it. That kind of calm is something you cannot teach. That kind of calm scares other men in a way that hot violence does not. He did it again almost the same way a year and a half later. In the first week of November 1875, in the bar of the Lambert Inn in Simmeron, a man named Francisco Grigo came in looking for him. Grigo was the uncle of a man named Cruz Vega, who had been lynched a few days before by a mob that some witnesses said Allison had led. Grigo was armed. Grigo was angry.

[00:18:15]Grigo had come to settle the family's score, the same way Chunk Colber had come north to settle his. The two men spoke briefly at the bar. Grigo put a hand on his pistol. Allison was faster.

[00:18:25]He shot Grigo twice. Grigo was dead before the smoke cleared. The charges again were dropped. Self-defense, witnesses, a justified shooting. Klay Allison walked out of the Lambert Inn that afternoon and rode home. The fifth factor was the alcohol. Klay Allison drank. He drank hard. And when he drank, he did not become the calm killer at the dinner table. He became something else.

[00:18:46]A neighbor said of him after he died that when sober he was a quiet, pleasant, affable man, but under the influence of liquor, he was a very dangerous man. That was the truth of him, said simply, by a man who lived near him. Once drunk, he rode his horse stark naked down the main street of Mobiti, Texas, with nothing on him but his gun belt and his boots. The story got into the papers. He laughed about it later. Once drunk, he went to a dentist in Cheyana, Wyoming in the summer of 1886. The dentist drilled into the wrong tooth. Allison left the dentist chair, walked into the street, came back an hour later with a pair of pliers, threw the dentist into his own chair, and pulled one of the dentist's teeth out as payment. Once drunk, he and his brother, John Allison, crashed a dance in Los Anas, Colorado on the 21st of December, 1876.

[00:19:34]They stomped on the feet of dancing women and refused to give up their guns when the constable asked them to. The constable, a man named Charles Faber, walked out of the dance hall, deputized two men, and came back with a shotgun.

[00:19:46]As Faber stepped through the door, someone in the room shouted, "Look out!"

[00:19:50]Faber fired his shotgun at John Allison and hit him three times. Klay Allison, standing at the bar, turned and drew his pistol and fired four shots. One of them killed Faber. The deputies fled. John Allison survived. The charges were dismissed on grounds of self-defense because Faber had fired first. These are not the actions of a calm man. These are the actions of a man whose brain is somewhere else. And here is what the historians now think. They think Klay Allison had something we would today call bipolar disorder. They think he had a traumatic brain injury from his childhood that affected impulse control.

[00:20:24]They think the alcohol was the trigger that flipped him from one state into the other. And they think he himself half understood it. He once told a reporter that there were two men inside him. One was a quiet Tennessee farmer who wanted to raise cattle and read scripture. The other was someone he did not have a name for, who came when he drank and did things he could not later explain. The sixth factor was simply that no one wanted to test him. By the year 1878, the legend was bigger than the man. The number of 15 men killed, which was almost certainly inflated, had begun to circulate in the eastern press.

[00:20:55]Batmasterson would later write about him. The Dodge City papers tracked his visits. When Klay Allison rode into Dodge City in September of 1878, the whole town was watching. The story that has come down to us in the version Wyatt Herp told for the rest of his life says that Allison had been hired by Texas cattleman to kill Herp and that Herp faced him down in the street and that Herp by the steel of his eye alone drove the killer out of town. The story is a great story. The story is almost certainly not what happened. The most careful historians who have looked at the contemporary newspapers, the Ford County Globe and the Dodge City Times of that fall find no evidence of any showdown. Batmasterson was out of town at the time. The other lawmen kept their distance. The most likely truth is that Allison came into dodge looking for trouble. Drank his way from saloon to saloon for a day and was eventually talked into leaving by a saloon keeper and another cattleman. There was no high noon street duel. There was no herurp staring him down. But here's the thing the story tells us. Even if the events are wrong, Wyatt Herp for the rest of his life told the story as if facing down Klay Allison was the proudest day of his career. He did not say that about facing down Doc Holliday. He did not say that about the Okay Corral. He said it about Klay Allison. That is the reputation the man carried. That is what the lawmen of the west saw when they saw him. And that is the paradox. A man like that, a man like Klay Allison who walked through the cattle towns of the frontier with a name that emptied saloons should not have died the way he died. He should have died in Dodge City in a street fight with Wyatt Herp. He should have died in a saloon in Moi at the hands of a drunk Texas cowboy who finally had enough. He should have died at the end of a rope in Santa Fe. He should have died in a gunfight on a back road in Colorado, his pistol still in his hand, his eyes still open, his boots in the dust. He should not have died reaching for a sack of grain. But the truth, when you sit with it, is gentler than the legend. The truth is that by the summer of 1887, Klay Allison was 45 years old and he was tired and he was trying. He had married a woman named Madora McCullik called Dora in 1881. She was a strong woman. She loved him. She knew the way wives in those years knew what kind of man she had married and she stayed. She bore him a daughter, Patty Dora, in August of 1885. She was pregnant again with the child who would be born in February of 1888 and named Clay Pearl and who would never see her father's face. Dora was the steady hand on Clay Allison that no constable, no sheriff, no doctor in Tennessee or Confederate uniform, no friend, no foreman had ever been. She was the one who got him to sell the ranch in New Mexico. She was the one who got him to slow the drinking down. She was the one who got him to buy quiet pasture land near Picos, Texas, and to start over.

[00:23:36]The ranch in Texas was nothing fancy. 40 mi out from the town of Picos on the river. Good water, mid-grade grass, a small house, a few outbuildings, cattle that he ran himself with a couple of hired men. He was finally the rancher his father had wanted him to be. The Presbyterian preacher, who had died when Clay was five, had once told the boy's mother, in the way preachers do, that the child would either grow up to lead men to God or to lead them in some other direction. The preacher did not live long enough to see which way it went.

[00:24:03]But by 1887, you could maybe argue, looking at the small wooden house and the cattle and the quiet little daughter and the steady wife, that the preacher's wish had finally come true. Slowly, late, imperfectly, but come true. He was at the end trying to be an ordinary man, a husband, a father, a rancher, a man who drove his own wagon to town for supplies and drove it back and did not look for a fight and did not stomp on the feet of strangers and did not drink himself into a place where the other man came out. That is the reveal underneath the story. The man who killed for 15 years did not die because he was a killer. He died because he was in the end just a man on a wagon doing a small chore on a hot day, reaching for a sack he had reached for a hundred times before. The wagon did not know who he was. The wheel did not care. When they found him in the road, his face was in the dust. The mules had stopped a/4 mile down. There was no blood on his shirt.

[00:24:56]There was only the angle of his neck, broken cleanly in a way no one mistook for anything else. They buried him in the POS cemetery the next day. Years later, in 1975, his remains were moved into a small park near the Pos Museum, and a granite headstone was set over the new grave. The inscription on that headstone makes a claim that men still argue about. It reads, "Robert Clay Allison, 1840 to 1887, gentleman and gunfighter. He never killed a man that did not need killing." It is the kind of inscription the West likes to put on a man like that. It makes him sound clean.

[00:25:29]It makes him sound finished. It makes him sound like the lawmen who feared him were just slow or wrong or weak. The truth was uglier and quieter than the inscription. The truth was that Klay Allison was a sick man in a sick country, in a sick time. He carried a wound in his head from boyhood. He carried a war in his bones. He carried a thirst he could not put down. He killed men because something in him would not stop. And then he tried in his last years finally to stop. And the moment he stopped, the world reached out from the side of a wagon road in West Texas and took him without ceremony, without warning, without a single shot fired.

[00:26:02]The Globe Livestock Journal got the obituary closer to the truth than the headstone did. He died with his boots on, but not by the pistol route. That is the whole story in 14 words. A violent man, finally tired, finally home, finally trying, killed by something so ordinary that the legend has never known what to do with it. That is why the law men of the American West feared Klay Allison. And that is why his story is not the story you have heard before. The men who feared him were not afraid of his gun. They were afraid of his calm.

[00:26:29]They were afraid of his diagnosis. They were afraid of the man inside the man.

[00:26:32]The one who came out when he drank. The one who beheaded Charles Kennedy. The one who shot Chunk Colbert across a roast beef dinner. the one who would not be afraid of a constable's shotgun in a dance hall in Los Animus. But that man is not the one who died on the 3rd of July 1887 in Picas County, Texas. The man who died that afternoon was the other one, the Tennessee farmer, the husband, the new father, the man with a daughter at home and another on the way.

[00:26:56]The man who had been trying finally to live the smaller life, the man who reached without thinking for a sack of grain that was falling off the back of his own wagon because the grain was paid for and the family was waiting. And a 45-year-old man does not waste good feed in the dust of a Texas road. He reached.

[00:27:13]He fell. And the wagon, with all its weight, with all its iron and wood and labor, did what no other man in the American West had ever managed to do. It killed him. And somewhere in the long quiet of West Texas, in the white sky and the yellow dust, the legend of Clay Allison ended, not with the smoke of a pistol, but with the slow sound of mules walking away from a body in the road.

[00:27:33]That is the story. And that is why almost 140 years later, we are still telling