Basically everyone has heard of Jesse James. Slightly more obscure is Belle Starr, an outlaw from the same Wild West era, albeit one without the name recognition of James and his gang, with whom she had some ties. In her time she was known as the Bandit Queen and the Petticoat Terror of the Plains. Perhaps most interestingly of all, she was murdered and her murder remains officially unsolved to this day.
Her birth name was Myra Maybelle Shirley (her family mostly knew her as “May”) and she hailed from Carthage, Missouri. Although a prosperous farmer in the region, her father was considered the black sheep of his prominent, old-stock Virginia family. In fact, her father had been divorced twice when she came along, scandalous at the time. Starr was the daughter of his third wife, who had family ties to the Hatfields of the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud.
Belle Starr's Early Life and First Marriage
The family moved to Texas in 1864, after the town of Carthage was attacked by a Union offensive during the War Between the States. Her brother, a Confederate sympathizer, was killed in a raid on a house and is rumored to be one of the famed Quantrill’s Raiders, whose former members eventually became the James-Younger Gang. Her father’s handsome trade as an innkeeper (his personal wealth was estimated to be about $10,000, which was quite a lot of money in those days) was likewise destroyed in this “sack of Carthage.” It was in Scyene, Texas – or at least this is what the legends say – that she first threw in her lot with criminal gangs, including the James-Younger Gang. She knew both Jesse James and the Younger brothers from back in Missouri, having reconnected with them during their criminal career in Texas.
It wasn’t just that the inn was burned down that caused them to flee. The armies of both sides of the Civil War marauded through the area around this time and everyone was forced to pick a side. Thus, personal reprisals from one side against the other were very common, and even if her father had been able to rebuild the inn, the family wouldn’t have been safe (as they were prominent Confederate sympathizers in the town at the time). Indeed, Belle’s father enthusiastically supported his son’s decision to ride with Quantrill’s men.
Starr married Jim Reed, a former member of Quantrill’s Raiders who later was a party of the James Gang. Legend has it that they were married by another member of their gang while they were both on horseback – she had had a crush on Reed since she was a teenager. In keeping with the rest of her life story, she first met Reed during a bank robbery in 1866. The pair had a daughter together named Rosie Lee (who they called “Pearl”). It is sometimes rumored that Pearl’s father was not Reed, but instead Cole Younger. They had a second child, named Eddie, in California in 1871, after they fled there because Starr was wanted for murder. The pair split up when Reed met another woman.
Continue reading Belle Starr: The Untold Story of the American Outlaw Known as the Bandit Queen at Ammo.com.