BELLE STARR: A NOTORIOUS FEMALE OUTLAW
“THE BANDIT QUEEN AND THE PETTICOAT TERROR OF THE PLAINS”
Belle Star was born Myra Belle (popularly known as May or Maybelle) Reed (05/02/1848–03/02/1889). She was married to a Cherokee Indian named Sam Starr, and they lived together on their ranch in the Oklahoma Indian territory. They were known for housing outlaws and targeting travelers and cowboys passing through. She lived a bandit’s life, associating with infamous criminals like Jesse James and the Younger Gang.
In 1883, she and her husband were convicted of horse theft and served time in a federal penitentiary. She was charged with a handful of other crimes before being shot and killed on her ranch in 1889. The killer was never identified.
Belle’s father John Shirley, was considered the “black sheep” of a well-to-do Virginia family which had moved west to Indiana, where he married and divorced twice. His third wife was a distant relative to the Hatfield’s, Elizabeth “Eliza” Hatfield Shirley. He moved the family to Carthage, where he bought a livery stable and a blacksmith shop on the town square. Belle was born on her father’s farm near Carthage, Missouri, on February 5, 1848. Most of her family members called her May. Her father prospered raising wheat, corn, hogs, and horses. In the 1860s, Maybelle received a classical education and learned the piano, while graduating from Missouri’s Carthage Female Academy, a private institution that her father had helped establish. The Shirleys were regarded as “commoners” because they owned no slaves. While in school, she was “irregular in attendance” and was regarded as “wild” by her teachers.
Maybelle’s brother, John A. M. “Bud” Shirley, six years older than her, was active in Jasper County among the bushwhackers who were guerilla bands, organized to resist the federal troops who had been sent to compel Missouri to join the war against the Confederacy. Maybelle was reputed to have allegedly supported her brother in these efforts as a spy. Bud Shirley was killed by federal troops in late June 1864. Soon after the war, anguished over Bud’s death and his business ruined by theft and destruction, John Shirley disposed of his property and took his family to Scyene, a small settlement ten miles southeast of Dallas, Texas.
James C. Reed and Myra Maybelle Shirley married there on November 1, 1866. Two years later, she gave birth to her first child, Rosie Lee nicknamed Pearl. Part of her legend was that Belle had a strong sense of style, and she was a crack shot. She used to ride sidesaddle dressed in a black velvet riding habit and a plumed hat carrying two pistols, with cartridge belts across her hips. Reed turned to crime and was wanted for murder in Arkansas, which caused the family to move to California, where their second child, James Edwin nicknamed Eddie, was born in 1871.
Later returning to Texas, Reed was involved with several criminal gangs. While Reed initially tried his hand at farming, he would grow restless and associated with the Starr clan, a Cherokee Indian family notorious for whiskey, cattle, and horse thievery in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, as well as the Jesse James and Cole Younger gangs.
In April 1874, despite a lack of any evidence, a warrant was issued for her arrest for a stagecoach robbery by her husband and others. Reed was killed in August of that year in Paris, Texas, where he had settled down with his family.
In 1880, she married a Cherokee man named Sam Starr and settled with the Starr family in the Indian Territory. There, she learned ways of organizing, planning, and fencing from 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 colleagues from the law whenever they were caught.
In 1883, Belle and Sam were arrested and charged with horse theft and tried. She was found guilty and served nine months at the Detroit House of Corrections in Detroit, Michigan. Belle proved to be a model prisoner, and during her time in jail, she won the respect of the prison matron. In contrast, Sam was incorrigible and assigned to hard labor.
In 1886, she eluded conviction on another theft charge, but on December 17 of the same year, Sam Starr was involved in a gunfight with his cousin, a Law Officer. Both men were killed, and Belle’s life as an outlaw queen was abruptly ended with her husband’s death, in what had been the happiest relationship of her life.
For the last 2+ years of her life, gossip and scandal sheets linked her to a series of men with colorful names: Jack Spaniard, Jim French, and Blue Duck Dutch, after which, she married a relative of Sam Starr, Jim July, who later became Jim July Starr and who was some 15 years younger than her.
On February 3, 1889, two days before her 41st birthday, Belle was killed. She was riding home from a neighbor’s house 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. Legend says she was shot with her double-barrel shotgun, but no one ever was convicted of the murder because there were no witnesses. Suspects with apparent motive included her new husband and both of her children as well as Edgar Watson. The latter was afraid she would turn him into the authorities since there was a price on his head as an escaped murderer from Florida. Watson was eventually killed in 1910. Another source suggests her son, whom she had allegedly beaten for mistreating her beloved horse, may have been her killer.
Rare were female outlaws in the Wild West in those days. Belle must have been very brave to marry an Indian outlaw and to maintain the same lifestyle until her tragic end.
Sammy RNAJ
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