A Starr Rises & Falls

Outlawry wasn’t completely a man’s world, thanks to horse thief and prostitute Belle Starr (1848-1889). One of the great stories of the Bandit Queen holds that she galloped into a livery stable one afternoon and ordered her horse’s shoes to be nailed on backwards. That way, she could really confuse the posse that was hot on her trail. Belle Starr was born Myra Maybelle Shirley to a farming inn keeping family in Medoc, Missouri. The family moved to Carthage, Missouri, when Myra was a little girl. She attended private school there. Excelling in music and Hebrew. The stories about her start right around the time of the Civil War, when some folks swear she was teen spy for Quantrill. Her brother did ride with the raiders, but it doubtful Myra ever say the border butcher. Her father moved the family to Scyene, 10 miles east of Dallas, after the war. It was the summer of 1866 that young Cole Younger came riding by for a brief fling. When he left to rejoin the James boys, Myra Maybelle went to work as a soiled dove and a dealer in a Dallas gaming house. During this time, she met and married James Reed. The true paternity of Belle’s first child, a daughter christened Rosie Lee but always called Pearl, is still a mystery. In 1871, the Reeds moved to California, where Belle had another baby. The family relocated to Texas, where the new parents a earned a living stealing horses. One biographer states that Belle accompanied her husband during the robbery of Watt Grayson in Indian Territory. In that incident, a woman dressed as a man slipped a noose around old man Grayson’s neck and hoisted him “six or seven times” up a tree until he told where he had buried $30,000 in gold. Belle was widowed in 1874 when Reed was slain by a bounty hunter. Belle refused to identify the body, which meant the bounty could not be paid. Belle Starr was shot in the back with a shotgun by an unknown assailant in February 1889.