Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend by Michael Wallis

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Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend by Michael Wallis

'Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend' by Michael Wallis

Jesse James, Cole Younger, Wyatt Erp, Belle Starr … the cavalcade of real-life figures from America’s Wild West days were fictionalized over and over again. Starr stood out as the woman in the gang.

For his new biography of Belle Starr, Michael Wallis went in search of the truth and found that much of what was written during and after her life was wrong or exaggerated. Sensation-seeking journalists, dime novelists and Hollywood screenwriters invented tales of Starr as the bandit queen of the Old West. Shifting through a heap of memories and archival records, Wallis finds that she never led a gang of outlaws but was married to four men who lived on the wrong side of the law. Three of them died from gunshots. Two were Native American. And that last point was what made her story so salacious to audiences in her time.

Born Myra Maibelle Shirley in 1848, she was raised by a family of middle-class Missouri slaveholders and given the good education expected of a Southern belle. Later commentators marveled that she read books and could play piano. She also learned to ride and shoot, skills that came in handy when the Civil War broke out. By age 14 she was scouting for her older brother’s band of Confederate insurrectionists. Missouri was a bloody battleground, a scorched earth, and after her brother was killed, the family and their enslaved household headed for Texas, the Confederacy’s final redoubt.

Like other recent authors of post-Civil War history, Wallis points out that the U.S. was overrun by psychologically damaged, heavily armed veterans, some addicted to morphine from battlefield surgery. Belle’s first husband, Jim Reed, was a Confederate guerilla who never settled back to farming. He took to crime, running a horse-theft ring. Sidebar: two of Belle’s brothers were shot in years to come for stealing horses.

By today’s legal markers, Belle was an accessory to crime through her intimate association with criminals. According to Wallis, she rued Reed’s lawless ways and hoped he’d reform, even as he continued to backslide. But a woman who rode at the side of outlaws was irresistible to the press, and Wallis speculates, with reason, that she decided to embrace her public image. Perhaps it was ironic that she wanted her son to be law-abiding and her daughter to marry up into a higher class.

Belle married Cherokee gunfighter Tom Starr, and when he died, she married his cousin, July Starr, 15 years her junior. In 1889 she was bushwacked on Cherokee lands, probably by a sociopathic farmer. He was acquitted for lack of evidence and moved to Florida, where he became a successful entrepreneur and serial killer until he was cornered and slain by an angry mob.

OK, Belle never held up a stage coach or a train, but who can say it wasn’t a remarkable life on the frontier?

Buy Belle Star on Amazon here.

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