Unlike most gunfighters of the time, the 47 year-old Allison didn't die in a blaze of gunfire or at  the end of a hangman's noose, but rather stuck under his own wagon forty miles from town. Clay Allison was buried in the Pecos Cemetery the day after his death, where hundreds of people were said to have attended his funeral. 

His second daughter, Pearl Clay, was born seven months after his death. Later, Dora married for a second time and moved to Forth Worth, Texas.

Just one month after Clay Allison's death, his brother Monroe Allison died of a heart attack at his Gageby Creek ranch on August 5, 1887. The 43-year-old bachelor was found next to his horse. John Allison, after a brief and painful illness, died in Clifton, Tennessee, on January 7, 1898, leaving a wife and four daughters. He was not quite 44.

Clay Allison's life was certainly an adventure, from cattle rustling, to lynching, to coining the term "shootist."  But his life was also marked by much success as a rancher.  Whether Clay Allison was a gentleman or a villain is a question that many have never settled in their own minds. 

On August 28, 1975, in a special ceremony, his remains were re-interred in Pecos Park, just west of the Pecos Museum.

Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, © Updated July, 2007

Certain it is that many of his stern deeds were for the right as he understood that right to be."    

-  A Kansas newspaper editor wrote after Allison had been killed in a bizarre buckboard accident.