Belle Starr is one of those names like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane that reminds you that there were cowgirls, women, in the Old West who did in fact ride horses, carry guns and live hard, dangerous lives. They were not all like Dale Evans, companion to Roy Rogers, sagebrush saints.
Belle Starr, however, was singular. Although I knew little about her, she has been famous for decades. There are dozens of books and films about her life, including “The Belle Starr Story,” an Italian “spaghetti western” in 1968 in which our Eugene Walter, then living in Rome, played a part. That movie and previous storytellers cared little about the factual details.
But this book by Huckelbridge is deeply researched and detailed and although he has to speculate from time to time, it looks to me as if the job is done. It contains, to use a well-known phrase, all you could want to know about this singular, violent woman.
Starr began life as Myra Maybelle Shirley, a thoroughly respectable young woman raised in southwest Missouri in a family with roots in Appalachia and the Ozarks and strong Confederate sympathies. Young Myra Shirley was a fine judge of horses, an excellent rider and also properly educated, a cultured young woman who delighted in playing the piano. Her father owned a respectable hotel in Carthage, Missouri but early in the Civil War, Carthage became lawless and the town was burned down.
A good chunk of this book, and just as interesting as Belle’s story, is the chaos and violence of those states that had not seceded. Once the Civil War had broken out, southwest Missouri and Kansas were territories with bands of irregulars, Confederate sympathizers like Quantrill’s Raiders, but also Union, who harassed and killed their old friends and neighbors, now on opposing sides.
Starr’s life was changed forever, and Huckelbridge then follows her from phase to phase, first as a mounted spy for the Confederacy, then increasingly as an outlaw. She married and lost a brother and husbands to gun violence. She perhaps began as a lookout for gangsters but soon became a full-fledged outlaw herself, in Western regalia, sporting two 45’s with derringers in her bodice.
She ran with notorious criminals, most notably Cole Younger and Jesse James—stealing horses, holding up stagecoaches and robbing banks and rich ranchers. Belle was arrested and served time, but always returned to the outlaw life. Later, as mistress of Younger’s Bend, she ran a “protection” racket—not in the urban sense of extortion of shopkeepers, but as rent for outlaws hiding out, resting, safe from justice.
Belle married into the Cherokee Nation, a matriarchal society, and Huckelbridge has several illuminating chapters on the relations among the different tribes and the sordid history of federal treaties and white settlers steadily encroaching on Indian lands.
No surprise, Belle Starr was shot to death in the saddle with her boots on.
