Belle Starr and her Times: The Literature, the Facts, and the Legends

by Glenn Shirley

Overview

Who was Belle Starr? What was she that so many myths surround her? Born in Carthage, Missouri, in 1848, the daughter of a well-to-do hotel owner, she died forty-one years later, gunned down near her cabin in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. After her death she was called “a bandit queen,” “a female Jesse James,” “the Petticoat Terror of the Plains.” Fantastic legends proliferated about her. In this book Glenn Shirley sifts through those myths and unearths the facts.

In a highly readable and informative style Shirley presents a complex and intriguing portrait. Belle Starr loved horses, music, the outdoors-and outlaws. Familiar with some of the worst bad men of her day, she was, however, convicted of no crime worse than horse thievery. Shirley also describes the historical context in which Belles Starr lived. After knowing the violence of the Civil War as a child in the Ozarks, She moves to Dallas in the 1860s and married a former Confederate guerilla who specialized in armed robbery. After he was killed, she found a home among renegade Cherokees in the Indian Territory, on her second husband’s allotment. She traveled as far west as Los Angeles to escape the law and as far north as Detroit to go to jail. She married three times and had two children, whom she idolized and tormented. Ironically she was shot when she had decided to go straight, probably murdered by a neighbor who feared that she would turn him in to the police.

This book will find a wide readership among western-history and outlaw buffs, folklorists, sociologists, and regional historians. Shirley’s summary of the literature about Belle Starr is as interesting as the true story of Belle herself, who has become the West’s best-known woman outlaw.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806122762
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	09/15/1990
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	324
Sales rank:	865,076
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Glenn Shirley (1916-2002) an authority on the Old West, has written many books and hundreds of articles for anthologies, journals, and magazines. He is the author of Temple Houston: Lawyer with a Gun; West of Hell?s Fringe: Crime, Criminals, and the Federal Peace Officer in Oklahoma Territory, 1889-1907; and Shotgun for Hire: The Story of ?Deacon? Jim Miller, Killer of Pat Garrett, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Read an Excerpt

Belle Starr and Her Times

The Literature, The Facts, and The Legends

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By Glenn Shirley

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 1990 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-2276-2

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CHAPTER 1

From Richard K. Fox to 20th Century-Fox

On Wednesday, February 6, 1889, the following item appeared on the front page of the New York Times, bearing a Fort Smith, Arkansas, February 5 dateline under the heading "A Desperate Woman Killed":

Word has been received from Eufala [sic], Indian Territory, that Belle Starr was killed there Sunday night. Belle was the wife of Cole Younger.... Jim Starr, her second husband, was shot down by the side of Belle less than two years ago.

Belle Starr was the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders. She married Cole Younger directly after the war, but left him and joined a band of outlaws that operated in the Indian Territory. She had been arrested for murder and robbery a score of times, but always managed to escape.

There was no truth in this dispatch except that the woman had been slain. The editor of the Fort Smith Elevator sent it to several metropolitan newspapers. Few besides the Times picked up the story. In Texas the Dallas Morning News used it; here Belle had spent a dozen years of her life. To others the woman's name meant nothing. The Vinita Chieftain, in Indian Territory, gave her ambush murder only a paragraph.

Yet, almost overnight, the name of Belle Starr became a household word throughout the nation. She had been elevated to a seat of immortal glory as a sex-crazed hellion with the morals of an alley cat, a harborer and consort of horse and cattle thieves, a petty blackmailer who dabbled in every crime from murder to the dark sin of incest, a female Robin Hood who robbed the rich to feed the poor, an exhibitionistic and clever she-devil on horseback and leader of the most bloodthirsty band of cutthroats in the American West. All this despite the lack of a contemporary account or court record to show that she ever held up a train, bank, or stagecoach or killed anybody; the renegades she supposedly led and kept out of the tangles of the law were only figments of a vivid imagination.

The Times item caught the eye of Richard K. Fox, editor-owner of New York's National Police Gazette and publisher of dime novels. Fox's empire had grown fat on his sprightly and romantically imaginative presentations of crime and retribution involving the vices of the rich, big-city suicides, counterfeiters, swindlers, baby garroters, opium dens, obscene orgies, labial amusements, and hosannas raised in honor of western sheriffs, cow-town marshals, and assorted desperadoes like Jesse James, Sam Bass, and Billy the Kid. Commanding a circulation that reached mostly into barrooms, gambling houses, billiard halls, tonsorial parlors, livery stables, and brothels, his pen-and-ink illustrated weekly was read by a majority of the male population of the United States—and the female contingent also; it provided a national code of honor and morals, affected our politics, and had a more profound influence on our culture than the works of all other romantic writers of the period. As it pinkly flapped across America, much that was invented for its columns was embellished by word-of-mouth accounts of oldsters from the mountain fastnesses of the Alleghenies, remote bayous, and swamps of the South to the scattered prairie hamlets, lumber and mining camps, jerkwater railroad stops, and desert way stations of the West, and later all this became absorbed into legend.

Many of the western characters were yesterday's news or dead now, and this empty manger spelled trouble for a tabloid that thrived on turning phantom creatures into flesh and blood. Fox was bemoaning the fact that he had been unable to prod his army of writers into coming up with fresh heroes and heroines from the West who could inflame the imagination of his readers. He perceived Belle Starr as a circulation builder and dispatched Alton B. Meyers, bright young freelancer and the Gazettes Southwest representative, to Fort Smith.

Another version is that Meyers already was in the notorious border city, nursing a painful hunger with exactly seven cents in his pockets and searching desperately for a story that might bring him a wired advance. He lounged on the wooden sidewalk on Garrison Avenue, wondering how much food seven cents would buy and where he might find lodging for the night. A garrulous old-timer sat nearby, complacently chewing tobacco and perusing the latest issue of the Fort Smith Elevator.

"I'll be damned," the old-timer suddenly exclaimed, "they've gone an' kilt Belle Starr!"

Belle Starr! Meyers rolled the name over his tongue. It had a more romantic sound than even Sam Bass, Jesse James, or Billy the Kid.

"Who was Belle Starr?" he asked.

"Oh, hell," the old man spat and snorted, "just a nutty old whore who imagined she was a bandit queen."

Belle Starr! A bandit queen! Meyers practically ran to the telegraph office. Within hours he had a cash advance, a hotel room, a full stomach, and a ream of writing paper. Apparently, Belle's son and daughter and her mother, who had arrived from Texas, refused to divulge any family history likely to bring discredit upon themselves, so Meyers had to resort to less-reliable information among her acquaintances. Court records, easily available, were consulted carelessly. Few of the names, dates, or essential facts were correct. Alleged excerpts from Belle's letters and diary—a gag used by most writers of the yellow-journalism school to make their work appear authentic—were pure fabrication.

Meyers' lurid manuscript reached the Gazette desk in mid-March, and Fox plunged into the vivid, catchy offering:

Of all the women of the Cleopatra type, since the days of the Egyptian queen herself, the universe has produced none more remarkable than Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen. Her character was a combination of the very worst as well as some of the very best traits of her sex. She was more amorous than Anthony's mistress; more relentless than Pharoah's daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc. Of her it may well be said that Mother Nature was indulging in one of her rarest freaks, when she produced such a novel specimen of womankind. Bella was not only well educated, but gifted with uncommon musical and literary talents, which were almost thrown away through the bias of her nomadic and lawless disposition, which early isolated her from civilized life, except at intervals, when in a strange country, and under an assumed name, she brightened the social circle for a week or a month, and then was, perhaps, lost forever.

Fox did not serialize the biography in the Gazette, his usual procedure, but published it that summer as a twenty-five-cent, wire-stitched paperback: Bella Starr, The Bandit Queen, or The Female Jesse James. A Full and Authentic History of the Dashing Female Highwayman, with Copious Extracts from Her Journal Handsomely and Profusely Illustrated.

Thousands of copies were sold, yet today this quaint little volume is practically nonexistent. An original would be difficult to find at any price. An incomplete copy rests in the archives of the Texas State Library; a near-perfect copy in private hands is in the library of Texas' former United States senator, William A. Blakley, who years ago acquired the collection of Ramon F. Adams of Dallas, the well-known bibliophile of western and outlaw books. In 1960 a facsimile edition was printed by the Steck Company of Austin.

Fox's circulation problem was solved, and across the horizon galloped the most beautiful, the most daring, the most exciting female outlaw ever to ride into American folklore. The legend was born, and for almost a century writers for the printed page, radio, stage, and screen have found the Fox opus a virtual treasure chest, using its inventions, scrambling for facts, adding inventions of their own.

The year after Bella Starr appeared, Street & Smith of New York published as No. 35 in the Secret Service Series a sensational paperback, Adventures and Exploits of the Younger Brothers, Missouri's Most Daring Outlaws, and Companions of the James Boys, in which author Henry Dale alleges that Belle married Cole Younger, that her maiden name was Starr; he makes other a la Fox claims about her that are just as unreliable.

Cesar Lombroso, the Italian physician-criminologist, professor of psychiatry at Pavia in 1862, and later professor of criminal anthropology at Turin, held that a criminal represents a distinct anthropological type with definite physical and mental stigmata and is the product of heredity, atavism, and degeneracy. In 1895 he published, with the noted Italian writer-historian Guglielmo Ferrero as co-author, The Female Offender, which was translated into English and reprinted in the Criminology Series of D. Appleton and Company, New York, in 1903. It is not known whether Lombroso relied on the Fox opus for his Belle Starr material. Since he fell for the bogus diary and other Gazette fiction, one must assume that he did, or was so careless as to accept it second-hand from Charles Victor Crosnier de Varigny, whom he mentions.

Varigny was the Italian correspondent in New York during the 1890s who furnished the Rome and Milan papers little more than sensational rewrites of American crime news, which he lifted from the National Police Gazette, the Police News, the New York Herald, and Joseph Pulitzer's World. In 1893 he published his 322-page La Femme aux Etats-Unis, reprinted as The Women of the United States by Dodd, Mead of New York in 1895. Here, translated from the Italian (pages 201–203), is his initial estimate of our heroine:

Who will believe the improbable adventures of a Belle Star, the idol of the Western bandits, a living defiance hurled at the law, embodying in herself the audacity, the vices and daring composure of those outlaws who from father to son boasted of dying with their boots on, with their knife or revolver ... drawn, as she herself did 3 Feb., 1889 at 35 years of age, after the most singular existence imagineable, leaving a daughter and son who follow in her footsteps....

She was born in Carthage, Mo. Her father, the leader of a gang in the South, took an active part in the War of Secession, and from her youth Belle Star had a great liking for fisticuffs, acts of violence, plunder and murder in that bloody period. After the war was over, her father moved to Kansas with the remains of his gang and she accompanied him. A daring Amazon from the age of ten she handled revolvers and lassoes, carbine and Bowie knives....

They hated everything connected with the North. She fell in love with Bob Younger at age 14. She had herself kidnapped by him. Her father refused to consent to her marriage, but she paid no attention to him and got married on horseback surrounded by 20 members of the gang.

In The Female Offender (page 174) Lombroso states:

The born criminal is rarely inclined to write much. We know but of three instances among them of memoirs: those of Madame Lafarge, of X., and of Bell-Star, while male criminals are greatly addicted to these egotistic outpourings. Madame Lafarge, the woman X., and Bell-Star, particularly the last, were certainly endowed with superior intelligence.

Under Synthesis (pages 187–89), Lombroso observes:

In general the moral physiognomy of the born female criminal approximates strongly to that of the male. The atavistic diminution of secondary sexual characters which is to be observed in the anthropology of the subject, shows itself once again in the psychology of the female criminal, who is excessively erotic, weak in maternal feeling, inclined to dissipation, astute and audacious, and dominates weaker beings sometimes by suggestion, at others by muscular force; while her love of violent exercise, her vices, and even her dress, increase her resemblance to the sterner sex. Added to these virile characteristics are often the worst qualities of woman: namely, an excessive desire for revenge, cunning, cruelty, love of dress, and untruthfulness, forming a combination of evil tendencies which often results in a type of extraordinary wickedness.... A typical example of these extraordinary women is presented by Bell-Star, the female brigand, who a few years ago terrorised all Texas.

Lombroso then outfoxes Fox with this absurd summation:

Her education had been of the sort to develop her natural qualities; for, being the daughter of a guerrilla chief who had fought on the side of the South in the war of 1861–65, she had grown up in the midst of fighting, and when only ten years old, already used the lasso, the revolver, the carbine, and the bowie-knife.... She was as strong and bold as a man, and loved to ride untamed horses which the boldest of the brigands dared not mount.... She was extremely dissolute, and had more than one lover at a time, her admirer en titre being always the most intrepid and daring of the band. At the first sign of cowardice he was degraded from his rank. But, however bold he might be, Bell-Star dominated him entirely, while all the time having—as Varigny writes—as many lovers as there were desperadoes in four States. At the age of eighteen she became head of the band, and ruled her associates partly through her superior intelligence, partly through her courage, and to a certain degree through her personal charm as a woman. She organised attacks of the most daring description on populous cities, and fought against government troops, not hesitating the very day after one of these raids to enter some neighbouring town unaccompanied, and dressed—as almost always—in male attire.... She wrote her memoirs, recording in them her desire to die in her boots. This wish was granted, for she fell in a battle against the government troops, directing the fire to her latest breath.

Meanwhile, Samuel W. Harman, a Bentonville, Arkansas, hotelman with a bit of newspaper and legal experience, who became acquainted with crime, criminals, and marshals in the Indian Territory as a professional juryman in Judge Isaac C. Parker's federal court, was collecting material to chronicle the epoch. In 1898 the Phoenix Publishing Company (job shop of the Fort Smith Elevator) published his 720-page volume Hell on the Border; He Hanged Eighty-Eight Men, which sold for two dollars a copy. The title page lists Harman as author and C. P. Sterns, who assembled most of the transcripts from court records and biographical sketches of major court personalities, as compiler. But it was J. Warren Reed, a well-known Fort Smith attorney who argued so many cases before Judge Parker, who commissioned the work, tabulated the court actions, wrote the land grants and statutory information on the court's beginnings and jurisdiction, and paid the printing bill. Reed's florid style and unabashed praise of his courtroom performances are apparent, yet his name does not appear as co-author. The episodes on deputy marshals, the Indian Territory outlaws tried and condemned in the court, and the classic moralizing and teaching by example which dominates the work are Harman's; reliability is questionable, especially his 62-page chapter "Belle Starr, the Female Desperado."

Because of the reputation of Judge Parker's court, the first printing of Hell on the Border was exhausted quickly. Only a few copies reached libraries. It is one of the most sought-after books and the chief source of practically every book and feature story on the subject. In 1930, eight years after lawyer Reed's death, J. W. Rice, an early Indian Territory printer, published an abridged edition of one thousand copies set on a Linotype in the printing department at Kendall College, Tulsa, Oklahoma. This edition, reduced to 320 pages by eliminating most of Reed's land grants and statutory material and cutting what Rice deemed "overlong accounts of cases" and "useless description," sold for $2.50. Either edition, the first in stiff green wrappers and the second in stiff yellow wrappers, now commands a fancy price. A third printing (a reprint of Rice's abridged edition), consisting of 303 pages in stiff brown wrappers, was issued in 1953 by Frank L. Van Eaton, World War II veteran and self-styled "dyed-in-the-wool promoter," who "developed the idea" while confined to a bed in the Veterans Tuberculosis Hospital at Livermore, California. Finally, a fourth "Indian Heritage Edition" of one thousand hardbound copies autographed by its editors, Jack Gregory and Rennard Strickland, was issued by the Hoffman Printing Company of Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1971 to "make this frontier classic available to a wider reading audience." This 214-page version "concentrates" on twenty-four "major figures and incidents" from the rare first edition, "edited and regrouped in an effort to supply continuity and eliminate repetition." In 1954 the Frontier Press of Texas at Houston issued a separate printing, in stiff blue wrappers, of the Belle Starr chapter from the original Hell on the Border, with photographs from the Rose Collection of Old Time Photos, then owned by Ed Bartholomew.

Much of Harman's Belle Starr, the Female Desperado is founded upon the wildly fictitious Fox tale and is full of the same errors. Here, in part, is his introduction of our heroine:

Of all the noted women ever mentioned by word or pen, none in history have been more brilliantlly [sic] daring nor more effective in their chosen roles than the dashing Belle Starr, champion and leader of robbers; herself a sure shot and a murderess, who never forgot an injury nor forgave a foe; who was a terror alike to those she hated and to false friends....

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Belle Starr and Her Times by Glenn Shirley. Copyright © 1990 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
The Literature,
1. From Richard K. Fox to 20th Century-Fox,
The Facts and the Legends,
2. The Shirleys of Missouri,
3. Myra's "Daring Ride" and the Death of Bud Shirley,
4. Texas,
5. Tom Starr and Youngers' Bend,
6. Flight to California,
7. The Grayson Gold Robbery,
8. The Austin-San Antonio Stage Robbery,
9. Reed "Hands in His Checks",
10. The Mystery Years,
11. Belle Among the Starrs,
12. A Trip to Detroit,
13. Belle's Piano,
14. Outlaw Middleton and a One-eyed Mare,
15. Sam Starr, Fugitive,
16. Belle Widowed Again,
17. Belle's Triple Trouble,
18. Canadian River Ambush,
19. The Gem That Sparkles Yet,
Notes, Comments, and Variants,
Bibliography,
Index,