Shot All to Hell: Bad Ass Outlaws, Gunfighters, and Law Men of the Old West by Nick Vulich

Author:Nick Vulich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

Robert A. “Clay” Allison

Clay Allison’s “trigger finger was the busiest in the early 80s,” according to the Albuquerque Morning Journal. “His record was twenty-one dead men, whose graves were scattered from Dodge City to Santa Fe.”

The article went on to say, “Clay spent his time amusing himself shooting up small towns and dance halls, and making gentlemen dance barefoot to the accompaniment of his bullets.”

One of Allison’s first kills was a desperado named Chunk. They met up at Red River Station in New Mexico on January 7th, 1874. The word was Chunk was out to get Allison because Clay had killed his uncle.

The two men sat on opposite sides of the dinner table, each man itching for an opportunity to draw. Chunk made the first move. He dropped his knife on the floor, and reached below the table to grab it. Allison didn’t miss a beat—he pulled his pistol and let Chunk have it—right between the eyes. The Evening Star wrote, “a little red spot between Chunk’s eye showed where the bullet had entered, and the man, swaying from side to side, bent gradually over and soon was perfectly still, with his face buried in the dish.”

Witnesses observed, Allison went on with his dinner as if nothing had happened. When he finished eating, he walked out, mounted his horse and rode away.

Marshal Sam Durnin, of Pecos County, Texas, learned a lesson he’d never forget. Clay Allison was loyal to his friends—dead or alive.

What happened was Durnin killed one of Allison’s friends in a “honakatonk” melee. When Clay learned about it, he vowed to show the marshal a thing or two. Two months later, things came to a head in Curt Munson’s saloon. Durnin wasn’t taking any chances. He hid in a back room of the saloon for a full half hour, keeping Allison covered with his Winchester. When he couldn’t take the suspense any longer, Durnin walked up to Allison and pointed a .45 at his heart.

“Like the dab of a cat’s paw, Allison reached out and caught the wrist of Durnin’s hand that held the gun. A man of bull’s strength, he leaped over the table and twisted that wrist of Durnin’s until the marshal had to drop the gun to the floor and gasp with pain.”

Allison kicked the gun out of the marshal’s reach as he snatched his other gun out of its holster. “Then Allison put his knee in the small of the helpless marshal’s back, grabbed him from behind by both ears, kneed him forward and out of the saloon, and in that way he prodded Marshal Sam Durnin, a bad man himself, all over the streets of Durango.”

According to the Washington Evening Star, Durnin survived the night, but the humiliation he suffered that day dogged him for the rest of his life.

Another time in Las Animas, Allison was at a dancehall, drunk, and whirling his revolver around his finger. For one reason or another, he got a bug up his butt, and screamed for everyone to take their hats off.

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