In the summer of 1886, Clay had just finished a long, hard trail drive that took him to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Having a terrible toothache, he visited a local dentist, who, having already heard of Allison's reputation, trembled with the thought of who was in his chair. The dentist started working on his tooth, but Clay soon realized that it was the wrong tooth, pushed his way out of the dentist chair and went to find another dentist. After the new dentist pulled the correct tooth, an angry Clay returned to the first dentist, held him down in the dental chair and pulled one of his molars with a pair of forceps. Attempting to extract a second, the dentist's screams were heard and men came and pulled Allison away from the petrified dentist.

Shortly thereafter, the couple moved again, this time to Pecos, Texas, 50 miles south of the New Mexico line. On July 1, 1887, Allison was hauling a load of supplies to his ranch from Pecos when a sack of grain fell from the wagon. Trying to halt it's fall, Clay fell from the heavily loaded wagon and in the next instant the wagon wheels rolled across him, breaking his neck. As the horses reared and lurched forward, his neck was further crushed by the heavy buckboard, almost decapitating him.

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 August, 2011.

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.