Guest Post: HISTORY'S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: BELLE STARR – Her Fabled Life, Her Unsolved Murder

It has been about two months since the last time our man in Fort Worth with hos post on Dorothy Kilgallen. Nice to have Earl back on the blog with another informative post.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

  

BELLE STARR – Her Fabled Life, Her Unsolved Murder

by Earl Staggs

Belle Starr, according to legend, was a lovely lady who ruled outlaw gangs with her guns, her will and her personal favors. She has come down through history as an adventuress who rode with Jesse and Frank James, the Younger Brothers, and other famous outlaws of the day. According to the stories, she robbed from the rich and gave to the poor and cleaned out saloons and crooked poker games with six guns blazing.

 

Belle on Horseback

On February 3, 1889, two days before her forty-first birthday, she was gunned down on a dark country road near King Creek, Oklahoma. No one was ever convicted of her murder.

“Dime Novels” were popular at the time to appease the public’s appetite for exciting, hell-raising stories about hard-riding, fast-shooting outlaws and heroes of the old west. Writers and publishers were happy to supply them, even if they were imaginative exaggerations of the truth. In this manner, history gave legendary status to the likes of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, and others, including Belle Starr. Like the others, Belle’s exploits and adventures were more fiction than fact. The manufactured but fascinating and often fantastic stories became the myth and the legend. Hollywood bolstered her status as a genuine larger-than-life figure with movies starring beauties such as Gene Tierney and Elizabeth Montgomery as Belle.

Her legend began taking shape soon after her death. Most responsible was Richard Fox, publisher of National Police Gazette and a number of dime novels. His book, Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James: A Full and Authentic History of the Dashing Female Highwayman, published the year she was killed, was supposedly an official biography of her life. Another book called her the “Petticoat Terror of the Plains.”

In actual fact, there is no evidence that Belle was ever the leader of an outlaw band or robbed banks, trains, or stagecoaches. Even though she was fond of carrying a six-shooter (sometimes two), she was not known to have ever participated in any gunfights. She knew and spent time with the James boys and the Youngers, but her experiences outside the law were limited to a little rustling here and there, and providing a place for her outlaw friends to hole up from time to time.

Not that her life was dull and uneventful. Far from it. A year before her death, she told a reporter for the Fort Smith Elevator, “I regard myself as a woman who has seen much of life.”

She was born Myra Maybelle Shirley on her father's farm near Carthage, Missouri, on February 5, 1848. Her father did well as a farmer and in 1856, sold his farm and bought a livery stable. A blacksmith shop and an inn in the town square of Carthage. Belle graduated from Missouri's Carthage Female Academy, a private institution her father helped establish. 

Belle as a Young Girl

She was a bright student, with polite manners and enjoyed the life of a spoiled rich girl. She had a talent for playing piano and liked having an audience. She also loved the outdoors and spent a lot of time roaming the countryside with her older brother Bud, who taught her to ride a horse and handle guns.

Belle’s family and their lives changed drastically, however, when the Kansas-Missouri Border War, a bloody precursor to the Civil War, broke out in the late 1850’s. Belle’s brother Bud joined Quantrill’s Raiders and rose to the rank of captain, but was killed in 1864. The constant fighting and killing took its toll on local businesses and after Bud’s death, Belle’s father sold his interests in Carthage and the family moved to Scyene, Texas, a small settlement southeast of Dallas.

The James-Younger Gang robbed their first bank in Liberty, Missouri, in 1866 and fled to Texas where they stayed with Belle and her family. Belle had grown up with the James brothers and the Youngers back in Missouri. She also became reacquainted with Jim Reed, another family friend from Missouri. A romance blossomed, and they were married on November 1, 1866. Belle was then eighteen years old. They lived with Belle’s family in Scyene and Jim worked as a salesman in Dallas. In 1867, Belle and Jim moved to the Reed’s family farm in Missouri. The following year, Belle gave birth to her first child. They named her Rosie Lee but always called her “Pearl.”

There were rumors that Belle was seduced by Cole Younger during their time in Scyene and bore him an illegitimate child, but both Belle and Cole as well as historians denied it.

Jim Reed was not good at farming and eventually became a full-fledged outlaw with his own gang. He was wanted for allegedly killing a man in Arkansas, and he and Belle fled to California with their daughter Pearl. There, in 1871, Belle gave birth to a son she named Edward.

Jim fell in with the Starr gang, a Cherokee Indian family well-known for rustling and bootlegging. He was killed in August 1874 by a member of his own gang in Paris, Texas, where he and Belle had settled with their family. Belle left her children with her mother and traveled to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and became involved with an Indian outlaw known as Blue Duck. 

Belle and Blue Duck

Belle married Sam Starr in 1880, and they settled in Indian Territory. She learned the ins and outs of fencing stolen goods for rustlers and bootleggers as well as the art of harboring her outlaw friends from the law. Her illegal activities proved to be quite lucrative for her. Belle always harbored a strong sense of style, which would become a part of her later legend. She was also a crack shot and enjoyed riding sidesaddle dressed in a black velvet riding habit and a plumed hat, and carrying two pistols with cartridge belts across her hips.

In 1883, Belle and Sam were arrested for horse theft and served nine months in the House of Corrections in Detroit, Michigan.

On December 17, 1886, Sam Starr was involved in a gunfight with a police officer and both men were killed. The happiest period of Belle’s life, as she called it, abruptly ended. To maintain her residence on Indian land, Belle married Jim July Starr, a relative of Sam’s, who was fifteen years younger.

Dime novels, scandal magazines, and gossip kept her name alive over the next couple years.

On February 3, 1889, two days shy of turning forty-one, she was ambushed and killed while riding home late at night.

Statue of Belle

In one version of the story, she had been attending a dance where a man asked her to dance. When Belle refused, he became enraged and followed her. When she stopped to give her horse a drink, he shot her.

There were other suspects, including both her children. One source suggested her son, Edward, may have been her killer because she beat him for mistreating her horse. Her daughter Pearl was considered a suspect because she never forgave her mother for refusing to let her marry the man she loved.

Edgar J. Watson, one of her sharecroppers, was another suspect. He was a wanted man in Florida with a price on his head, and he was afraid she was going to turn him in. Watson was tried for her murder but was acquitted.

Officially, there were no witnesses to how it actually happened, and no one was ever convicted of the crime. The murder of Belle Starr, the “Bandit Queen,” remains an unsolved mystery in the pages of history.

 Her grave site is near Eufair Lake, southeast of Porum, Oklahoma. A horse was engraved on her tombstone, along with these words:

Belle's Tombstone

Shed not for her the bitter tear,
Nor give the heart to vain regret
Tis but the casket that lies here,
The gem that filled it sparkles yet.

Earl Staggs ©2018

Earl Staggs is a three-time winner of the Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year and earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.