Belle Starr

One hundred and sixty-four years ago, a baby girl was born in Carthage, Missouri.  Her father ran several businesses, including the livery stable.  The girl, Myra Maybelle Shirley, was sent to a private finishing school and learned to play the piano with the best teachers.  She was known as May to her family.  The family moved to Texas, and in 1866, May married her childhood sweetheart, Jim Reed.  They had a son and a daughter.  Belle always harbored a strong sense of style, which would feed into her later legend. A crack shot, she used to ride sidesaddle while dressed in a black velvet riding habit and a plumed hat, carrying two pistols, with cartridge belts across her hips.  In August of 1874, Jim Reed was killed.  In 1880, May married a Cherokee Indian named Sam Starr.  Belle, as she was now called, and Sam moved to the Indian Territory.  There, she learned ways for organizing, planning and fencing for the rustlers, horse thieves and bootleggers, as well as harboring them from the law. Belle's illegal enterprises proved lucrative enough for her to employ bribery to free her cohorts from the law whenever they were caught.  In 1883, she and Sam were caught and convicted for stealing horses; they served their time in prison in Detroit, Michigan.  On 17 December 1886, Sam was in a shootout with Officer Frank West.  Both men were killed, while Belle's life as an outlaw queen (and what had been the happiest relationship of her life) abruptly ended with her husband's death. 

   Belle's own death was mysterious. For the last two-plus years of her life, gossips and scandal sheets linked her to a series of men with colorful names, including Jack Spaniard, Jim French and Blue Duck, after which, in order to keep her residence on Indian land, she married a relative of Sam Starr, named Jim July Starr, who was 15 years younger than her.  On February 3, 1889, two days before her 41st birthday, she was killed. She was riding home from a neighbor's house in Eufaula, Oklahoma, when she was ambushed. After she fell off her horse, she was shot again to make sure she was dead. Her death resulted from shotgun wounds to the back and neck and in the shoulder and face.  There were no witnesses and no one was ever convicted of the murder. Suspects with apparent motive included her new husband and both of her children, as well as Edgar J. Watson, one of her sharecroppers, because he was afraid she was going to turn him in to the authorities as an escaped murderer from Florida with a price on his head. Watson, who was killed in 1910, was tried for her murder but was acquitted, and the ambush has entered Western lore as "Unsolved."  One source suggests her son, whom she had allegedly beaten for mistreating her horse, may have been her killer.