Belle Starr
The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
In this definitive biography of the most infamous female outlaw of the nineteenth century, best-selling historian Michael Wallis challenges a notorious legacy.
In the annals of legendary Wild West desperadoes, Belle Starr is remembered to this day as the Bandit Queen. Shortly after her murder in 1889, a highly romanticized, sensational book titled Bella Starr ... The Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James was published—the first in a series of high-profile portraits to brand Starr as a villain. Now, celebrated author Michael Wallis parses over a century of mythmaking to reveal the woman behind the renegade legend.
Wielding compelling research, including correspondence, official records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Wallis traces Starr’s beginnings to Carthage, Missouri, where she was born Myra Maibelle Shirley in 1848 and was classically educated to be a Southern belle. Myra’s early years were characterized by the chaotic violence of the Civil War—she was traumatized by the death of her brother, who was killed riding with “bushwhackers,” one of the many insurgent guerilla groups supporting the Confederate Army. From then on, she swore revenge against all Yankees and became a willing “friend to any brave and gallant outlaw.”
The crimes committed by Starr’s innermost circle—stagecoach stickups, bank robbery, horse theft—would take her from war-torn Carthage to rollicking Scyene, Texas, until she finally settled in Indian Territory (present Oklahoma). And although Starr indeed ran in the same circles as notorious outlaws Jesse James and the Younger brothers, the crimes ascribed to her were greatly embellished—including the fact that the allegedly bloodthirsty Starr more than likely never killed a single person.
Turning a redemptive eye to Belle Starr’s tarnished legacy, Wallis crafts an illuminating portrait of a woman demonized for refusing to accept the genteel Victorian ideals expected of her, a woman who chose instead to live her life outside the law, riding sidesaddle with a pearl-handled Colt .45 strapped to her hip.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lurid reputation of a famed outlaw is energetically fact-checked by historian Wallis (The Best Land Under Heaven) in this diligent account. In his attempt "to unravel the... legend" of Belle Starr (the so-called "female Jesse James"), Wallis retires many baseless falsehoods while rendering a sympathetic portrait of a woman hardened by conflict and loss. Missouri-born Myra Shirley took her first step into outlawhood in 1863, when at 15 years old she swore to avenge the death of her Confederate soldier brother at the hands of Union troops. For a time she couriered intelligence for local Confederate guerillas, but her family eventually fled to Scyene, Tex., "a refuge for hell-bent ruffians" and anti-Union rebels. After the war, a brief stint at farming with husband James Reed was upended when he turned to bootlegging, a path which set Shirley on an escalating progression of brushes with the law, almost all of which, Wallis reports, had to do with her series of outlaw husbands' activities (which were quite spectacular and did involve the likes of Jesse James). It was a falsified 1889 New York Times obituary that basically invented the "Bandit Queen" mythos from whole cloth, Wallis asserts. But even stripped of exaggeration, this tale of a proper Southern lady who adopted an unconventional lifestyle and a taste for anarchic, violent men rivets.
