In the fall of 1870, Elizabethtown — then the rowdiest gold camp on Baldy Mountain's western flank and the county seat of Colfax County — had no real law to speak of. Cowboys rode up and down the street shooting out saloon lamps and mirrors, and legend says they made newcomers "dance" with bullets fired at their feet. Into that lawless Saturday-night world came Clay Allison, a broad-shouldered Civil War veteran with a hair-trigger temper and a reputation that was already spreading from Cimarron to Elizabethtown.
A few miles away, on the lonely trail toward Taos, a hunter and trapper named Charles Kennedy ran a wayside cabin where travelers could rest the night. Men who stopped there began to vanish. When Kennedy was locked in the Elizabethtown jail on suspicion of robbing and murdering his overnight guests — and, it was whispered, his own son — the camp's anger boiled over. A search of his cabin turned up burned bones and human skulls, and the bodies of the missing, including Kennedy's boy, were found. The courts moved too slowly for a town that trusted its own ropes more than any judge.
Allison led the answer. A mob broke into the jail, dragged Kennedy into the street, and hanged him. That was the justice the camp understood — but legend adds a macabre coda. It is said that Allison cut off the dead man's head, rode twenty-nine miles to Cimarron with it in a sack, and had it staked on a pole in front of Lambert's Inn, the grand frontier hotel later famous as the St. James. Accounts differ — some versions have the head mounted outside an Elizabethtown saloon instead — but every telling agrees on the point: Charles Kennedy's terror ended in E-Town.
Allison's connection to Red River country did not end there. In the spring of 1871 he stole twelve government mules belonging to the commander of Fort Union, General Gordon Granger. When he tried the trick again that fall, military men surprised the would-be rustlers; Allison accidentally shot himself in the foot and fled to a hideout along the Red River, where he sent Davy Crockett's nephew for Dr. Longwell of Cimarron to patch him up. The wound left him with a permanent limp — a souvenir of the months he spent as a fugitive in the high country above the town that is Red River today.
Elizabethtown is now a quiet ghost town off State Road 38, its old stone walls and the Mutz Hotel ruins standing where the lynch mob once gathered. Whether you take the whole grim tale at face value or not, it is the kind of story this country seems to keep — big, bold, and impossible to forget. The gold is gone and the gunfire is gone, but the legends of the men who walked these streets still ride these mountains.