Belle Starr Was Outlaw Queen on a Side Saddle

Belle Starr was locally notorious in Texas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas but captured public imagination with lurid tales in the Police Gazette which were gathered and expanded into this Dime Novel that carried a heafty 25 cent cover price due to the many illustrations. Ever after the supposed Outlaw Queen became fodder for novels, plays, songs, and movies.

You have to admit Belle Starr was the perfect name for an outlaw queen.  It emblazoned perfectly the covers of dime novels, titillated the readers of the original scandal sheet The Police Gazette, and set off fantasies of a bewitching bandit beauty celebrated in generations of movies, TV shows, and songs.  The allure was so strong that in the back yard westerns we enacted every Summer day in Cheyenne my cousin Linda was always Belle to my brother’s Roy Rogers and my Hopalong Cassidy.   The stories we played out were just about as real as any associated with Starr.

Myra Maybelle Shirley doesn’t quite cut the same ice.  But that was her name at birth on a farm near Carthage, Missouri on February 5, 1848.  Her father John Shirley was a prosperous farmer.  Her mother was a member of the Virginia (later West Virginia) Hatfield clan. But it would be a mistake to read too much into that—Hatfield-McCoy feud did not break out until after the Civil War and the family was not particularly then identified with violence.

Myra got a quite proper upbringing for a young lady of her class.  She was a graduate of the Carthage Female Academy, a finishing school where she learned a little Latin, how to play the piano, and all of the social graces.

About the time Myra graduated, all hell was breaking loose along the Kansas-Missouri Border.  The well-to-do Shirleys were slave owners.  Her father and uncles may have ridden with the Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers who attacked Free Soil settlers in Bloody Kansas.  The family was close to other pro-slavery clans in the area of south eastern Missouri including the James and Younger families.  Myra was said to be particularly close to the Younger boys.

After the war broke out Confederate Missouri Guard forces under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and General Sterling Price whipped a Union force under the command of Colonel Franz Sigel, in the First Battle of Carthage, the first important engagement in the West which gave control of most of the state south and west of St. Louis to the Rebels.  The Shirley family decided to sell the farm and move to Carthage which was becoming a major regional hub for the Confederacy.  John Shirley opened an inn and livery stable on the town square.

It was probably during this period when young Myra mastered the difficult use of the side saddle which was becoming the “proper” way for a young gentlewoman to ride.  The saddle accommodated the voluminous skirts and petticoats of the day by allowing a lady to wrap one leg around a pommel draping both to the same side of the horse.  The seat was not as secure as a conventional saddle ridden with legs astride the horse.  It took a skilled horsewoman to do much more than amble along at a walk in such a contraption.  Myra could reportedly keep in the saddle at a full gallop.  She continued to use the side saddle almost exclusively the rest of her life.

In 1863 the tide of war turned in the region at the Second Battle of Carthage, a smaller but significant skirmish in which Union forces repulsed an advancing force sending them scurrying back to Arkansas.  Yankee troops occupied the town.  Myra’s brother John A. M. “Bud” Shirley joined the partisan irregulars harassing Union troops.  He became a Captain of his own band of Bushwhackers.  He may have ridden when partisans attacked the occupied town in September 1864 and burned the Courthouse and much of the Square.  With a Yankee price on his head, Captain Shirley was ambushed and killed as he ate at a sympathizer’s house in near-by Sarcoxie soon after. 

The Shirley family became refugees.  They fled the area and made their way to Scyene, Texas near Dallas where other Missouri guerillas, including the Younger Brothers and Frank and Jesse James also settled.

As May Reed the future Belle Starr took to wearing broad hats and carrying pistols like the outlaws she associated herself with in Texas.  This photo shows that as a young woman she was much more attractive than the gaunt, haggard woman of better known later pictures.

In 1866 Myra, now generally called May, married James Reed, a young man from back home in Carthage on whom she once had a teen age crush.    No contemporary accounts remark on her beauty, although once or twice she was called handsome.  What May might have lacked in conventional attractiveness, she made up with a sense of style, even when they young family struggled on a farm near town.  She cut a swath in riding habits and plumed hats when she rode into town.

James did not take much to sod busting and his wife’s taste in finery compelled him to find extra income.  He fell in with her old chums the Younger Brothers and began to ride with their gang.  He may also occasionally have ridden with the James Gang—the two groups were friendly and often shared personnel.  All were former Confederate guerillas and at least at first considered their robberies as an extension of the war.

May took to the life style.  She soon added a pair of Colt revolvers to here riding gear and was known to display her marksmanship to admiring locals.

Scyene served as a safe haven and base for the outlaw gangs’ far flung raids, bank, and train robberies.  Reed would be gone for weeks at a time, return, and resume what looked like an ordinary life on the farm.  May gave birth to the couple’s first child, Rosie Lee, who they called Pearl in 1868.

Outlawry was dangerous work and was apt to disrupt family life sooner or later.  In 1871 Reed was charged with robbery and murder in Arkansas and wanted posters with a price on his head began to circulate in Texas—a sure invitation to some greedy or ambitious neighbor to turn him in.  The couple fled to California where a son, James Edwin—Eddie—was born.

When things cooled off, they returned to Texas.  Reed soon fell in with a new gang, the Starrs, a Cherokee clan based in Indian Territory who specialized in running whiskey to the tribes, cattle rustling, and horse thievery.  Strong arm robbery, Reed’s specialty was a side line.  

It is unclear if Mrs. Reed actively took part in the commission of her husband’s crimes during these years or was merely an accomplice.  But her continued show of being an armed and her swagger did nothing to discourage a notion that she was an active participant.  In April 1874 that supposition was enough despite a lack of any evidence placing her on the scene, to get a warrant issued along with her husband and members of the Starr gang for a Stagecoach robbery. 

The Reeds shifted their base of operations to Paris, Texas where James was shot and killed that August.
A widow with two children and no means of support, May continued her association with her old outlaw pals, many of whom evidently helped support the family.  She may have become more directly involved in some of their operations, particularly the sale of rustled cattle and horses.  She was evidently spared the fallback occupation of many a widow in her position—prostitution.

In the late 1870’s she may have entered a brief relationship—some say a marriage—with Charles Younger, uncle of Cole.  But this is unsubstantiated by any known records and may simply be rooted in gossip which took root in lore.

In 1880 31 year old May married Sam Starr and settled with him on a ranch, renamed Younger’s Bend, on the Canadian River near present-day Eufaula.  It was there that she finally became something like the bandit queen of legend.  She adopted the name of Belle, probably to obscure her identity, but perhaps as a pet name given to her by her new husband.  In Texas she was still known as Mrs. Reed or May.

Belle turned out to be a woman of great organizational skill and was soon assuming a leadership position among the Starrs.  She organized and directed cattle raids and planned robberies.  She regularized the clan’s business dealings, cultivating markets and keeping lawmen on the payroll for protection.  She was seen in her full regalia in company of the boys, her brace of pistols now upgraded to a nickel-plated pearl handle horse pistol and a lighter .38.  She kept a shotgun in a saddle boot. But whether she actually led any of the gang’s crimes is doubtful.  No reliable witness ever put her on the scene.

But in 1883 Belle and Sam were found in possession of stolen horses by a Federal Marshall operating in Indian Territory.  The pair was dragged before the notorious Hanging Judge Isaac Parker’s Federal Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Both were convicted.  Belle was sent to the Detroit House of Corrections in Michigan because the Feds had no facilities for women.  There she was regarded as a model prisoner, was made a trustee, and won the admiration and affection of the supervising Matron.  The rebellious Sam served time at hard labor, much of it on a chain gang and in the hole for various infractions.

Belle was released after nine months.  Sam rejoined her in Indian Territory when his sentence was up.  Then they were back in business.

Belle and her husband Sam Starr in Fort Smith,Arkansas in 1886 months before Sam was killed in a shoot out with an Indian Police Officer.  She is shown riding side saddle and heavily armed. 

In 1886 Belle was again hauled before Judge Parker on a theft charge but escaped conviction.  While in Ft. Smith she posed on horseback fully armed for her most famous photograph.  It was a triumphant moment, but Belle’s happiness was cut short when Sam and Indian Police Officer Frank West shot each other to death in a gunfight on December 17 of that year.

Widowed once again, Belle was rumored to have had several short relationships with members of her outlaw circle—Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, and Jim French.  In order to be able to remain on her land in the Indian Nation, Belle married the much younger Jim Starr a/k/a Jim July.

Belle with Blue Duck, a Cherokee outlaw who rode in the Starr gang.  After Sam's death he was one of a series of lovers she took and was rumored by some to have briefly been her husband.  Blue Duck is most famous as the relentless and remorseless killer in Larry McMurtry's  novels Commanche Moon and Lonesome Dove, both of which were made into successful TV mini series.

Despite these relationships, her active leadership in the Starr gang had ended with Sam Starr’s death.

On February 3, 1889 just two days before her 41 birthday Belle was riding home from a visit to neighbors in Eufaula when she was ambushed.  She was hit in the back and neck with a blast of buckshot from a shotgun.  She was knocked off of her horse.  He assailant turned her over on her back and finished her off with a second blast directly in the face, and act of such rage and savagery that suspicion was immediately drawn on those closest to her. 

Those suspects included her husband, and her son.  A tenant sharecropper named Edgar J. Watson, a Creek, was charged with her murder supposedly because Belle had threatened to turn him into the law on an outstanding murder charge in Florida.  But Belle, who had harbored many outlaws at her ranch including Jesse James himself once for several months, would be unlikely to betray anyone.  Evidence was slim to non-existence and the jury did not believe the prosecutor’s case.  Watson lived until 1910 when he was shot and killed.

Jim Starr may not have been entirely happy in his marriage to a dominating older woman, but he had little motive to murder her since he had no claim on the land on which he was living comfortably.  Most historians discount him as a suspect.

Belle with her children.  James "Eddy" Starr, upper right, was her eldest and has been suspected of her murder.  Pearl, standing in back of her seated mother became a prostitute and successful madame after her mothers death. 

Eddy, however, had recently been beaten by his mother for abusing a horse and was known to be furious with her.  The fact that the shotgun used in the murder probably belonged to Belle also linked him to the crime.  But there was never enough evidence to charge him.  Belle’s murder remains officially unsolved.  

Eddie Reed was convicted of horse theft and receiving stolen property in July 1889 and the family nemesis Judge Parker sentenced him to prison in Columbus, Ohio.  Like many former outlaws Eddie switched sides, becoming a lawman in Fort Smith.  He was involved in a famous gun battle with two outlaw brothers named Crittenden in 1895 who he killed.  He died in another shoot out in a Claremont, Oklahoma saloon on December 14, 1898.

Belle's daughter Pearl turned to prostitution after her mother's murder and went on to be a successful madame. 

Pearl Starr turned to prostitution to raise money to try and secure her brother’s release from the 1889 prison sentence.  Her efforts did earn him a pardon which opened the door to his law enforcement career.  Pearl continued to ply her trade and operated brothels in Van Buren and Fort Smith, Arkansas, up to and through World War I.  

At the time of her death Belle was locally notorious in Indian Territory, Texas, and Arkansas, but unknown in the rest of the country.  Richard K. Fox, editor and publisher of the Police Gazette, always on the look-out for exciting yarns, picked up the story of Belle’s murder from the Western press. Intrigued he did a modicum of investigation into her life and launched a series of lurid articles in his magazine.  These were consolidated and expanded into a dime novel, Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James published late in the year of her death.  Some Western historians continue to cite the book as a source on her life although it is riddled with errors and exaggerations.

But it did prove popular.  More dime novels followed along with the inevitable stage melodrama.  Woody Guthrie was just one of those who immortalized her in song. 

The luminous Gene Tierney actually got second billing to Randolph Scott in the highly fictionalized 1941 20th Century Fox bio-pick Belle Starr the Bandit Queen. 

Belle has been portrayed, rarely very realistically, in dozens of films.  Actresses portraying her included Betty Compton in 1928, Gene Tierney opposite Randolph Scott in 1941, Jane Russell in 1953, Elsa Martinelli in a spaghetti western with a feminist touch directed by Lina Wertmüller in 1968,  Elizabeth Montgomery in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, and Pamela Reed in the same year’s The Long Riders.

In her statue at the Woolaroc Museum in in the Osage Hills of Northeastern Oklahoma Belle is toting a rifle, not the usual shotgun she had in the boot of her side saddle. 

Belle is commemorated in the former Indian Territory where she spent much of her life with a gun-toting life size statue at Woolaroc, Oklahoma.

 

The Man Who Invented the Wild West—Buffalo Bill Cody

 

                                       Buffalo Bill Cody--still a handsome man in 1916.

On January 10, 1917 a family gathered around the bed of a dying man in Denver, Colorado.  His health had been failing for some time and he was in great pain from renal failure.  His great mane of white hair was soaked with sweat.  The day before a Catholic priest with whom he had become friendly was called to the bedside and the 70 year old allowed himself to be baptized into the church and receive the Last Rites.  When the old plainsman, soldier, hunter, scout, and showman drew his last breath it was international news.  Buffalo Bill was dead.  Coincidently so was the man named William Fredrick Cody.

The funeral arrangements for such an illustrious figure—at the turn of the 20th Century he had been said to be, “the most recognizable human being on Earth”—could hardly be simple.  Telegrams of condolences poured into the home of his sister, Mary Decker where his wife Louisa, daughter Irma, and other sisters had gathered from the likes of President Woodrow Wilson, German Kaiser Wilhelm II, members of the British Royal family, and children who had to scrape together carefully count pennies to pay for each word.

One of the largest assembly spaces in Denver, the Elks Lodge Hall had to be secured for the funeral which was attended by thousands far overflowing the building’s capacity and into the street.  Despite the death bed conversion, the service was not a funeral mass, but a Masonic ritual.  The deceased had been an active Mason since 1870 and achieved his 32nd Degree in the Scottish Rite in 1895.  Wyoming Governor John B. Kendrick led the funeral procession which included military honor guards, veteran performers from his famous Wild West shows, and contingents of   Native Americans.  The procession ended at a cemetery where the body was temporarily interred.

More permanent arrangements were somewhat controversial.  Bill had designated Cody, Wyoming, the town he founded on the Shoshone River as the western gateway to Yellowstone Park, as his final resting place in a 1909 will.  Development of the town and his near-by TE Ranch was a project that consumed much of his time—and a good deal of his fortune—over the last 20 years of his life. 

But a superseding 1913 will left the decision on a final resting place to his wife Louisa.  She, other members of the family, and the attending Priest all attested that in his final hours Cody had picked the peak of Lookout Mountain west of Denver in Golden, Colorado as his final resting place.  It was selected, it was said because to the west was the panorama of the Rocky Mountains and to the east the vista of the Great Plains spread out.  Some members of the family living in Cody objected but Louisa prevailed.  He choice may have been influenced by an offer of $10,000 from Colorado to locate the grave there and support for the construction of the grave site and museum.  Cody had lost most of his fortune by the time of his death, so this is not entirely implausible. 

Cody’s body was relocated near the summit on June 3, 1917.  In the mid-‘20’s Cody, Wyoming civic leaders began a long campaign to have the body moved to their town.  By this time the grave was a pilgrimage site for tourists and Cody wanted that trade.   A niece became a spokesperson for the cause.  But it was frustrated at every turn.  In 1948—an economic down-turn year when tourism was dramatically off—Cody residents reportedly raised $10,000 dollars as a reward for anyone who would obtain the body and bring it north.  The Denver American Legion post responded by posting an armed guard at the grave while a new, deeper shaft was blasted into the solid rock and Cody and his wife, who died in 1923, were place at the bottom under tons of freshly poured cement.

Today more than 100,000 people annually still visit the grave site and 65,000 pay the modest fee for admission to the near-by museum

Not that the town of Cody suffers much.  It’s dramatically beautiful setting alone attracts visitors, as does the rich hunting and fishing in the surrounding mountains.  The Buffalo Bill Dam above the city is the reservoir for an irrigation project conceived and started by Cody himself became the Federal Government’s first big water reclamation public works project in the 1920’s.

The Scout, an equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill is a tourist attraction in Cody, Wyoming pictured on this vintage tinted linen post card.

The small city of Cody with less than 10,000 year-round residents may not have a grave site but it does have the magnificent equestrian monument to Buffalo Bill, The Scout executed by famed sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and dedicated in 1924.  Nearby is the Buffalo Bill Center of the West incorporating 5 museums—the Draper Natural History Museum, the Plains Indian Museum, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Whitney Western Art Museum (home to many works by artists like Fredrick Remington and Charles Russell), and, of course, the Buffalo Bill Museum.

The town maintains a connection to the Wild West show tradition by hosting nightly amateur rodeo completions all summer and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) sanctioned Cody Stampede is held annually over the July 4th holiday and is one of the premier events on the circuit.

Cody himself still holds a unique place in the American national psyche.  He was both an authentic frontiersman and a bombastic caricature of one.

Cody was born on a farm near Le Claire, Iowa Territory on February 26, 1846.  His father, Isaac, was originally from Toronto Township, Upper Canada and his mother was a Quaker and former schoolteacher.  Not long after his birth his father rented his Iowa land and the family returned to Toronto Township where the child was educated by his mother and in good local schools.  Unlike the depiction of him in some places, he was not at all illiterate, but quite well educated for a farm boy, and well spoken, almost courtly in his speech and manners.

In 1853 Isaac, an ardent abolitionist sold his Iowa land to finance relocation to Bleeding Kansas hoping to reinforce the anti-slavery population hoping to form a government under the popular sovereignty provisions of the 1850 Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Whether by accident or design the family moved to the pro-slavery stronghold of Fort Leavenworth.  Isaac was assaulted with a bowie knife and nearly killed trying to give a speech in the town.  He frequently had to hide for his life and his family was in constant danger. 

When he recovered from his wounds he went east to recruit new settlers.  In his weakened condition he died on the return trip leaving young Bill an orphan.

                    Cody in his Army uniform at age 19.

Bill joined Jayhawker band in the virtual civil war battling pro-slavery Bushwhackers.  Then he worked as a teamster, joined an expedition against the Mormons during the short lived and nearly bloodless Mormon Wars in Utah in 1857, tried his hand prospecting in an 1859 Colorado gold rush, and answered the call for “skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily” to ride for the Pony Express during its legendary brief months of operation when he was 14.  Too young to join the Army, he became a scout for the Kansas Militia in campaigns against the Comanche and Kiowa until he could finally enlist in the Union Army when he turned 17 in 1863.  He served as a teamster and sometimes scouted with the 7th Kansas Cavalry and saw action in Missouri and Tennessee.  After the war he served as a civilian scout and dispatch rider for the Army out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas.

That led, in 1867, to a job as a hunter for the construction crews on the Kansas Pacific Railway.  He provided buffalo meat for the table and helped keep the enormous herds clear of the tracks.  His skill became legendary and in a year and a half of service may have killed over 4,000 bison.  Cody won the exclusive right to the nick-name Buffalo Bill in a one day competition with another hunter, William Comstock.  Cody won the completion with 61 kills to Comstock’s 48.

The hunting job for the first time brought Cody into contact with important men who were not Army officers.  His skill as a marksman and rider and his dashing appearance—he had taken to wearing the fringed-buckskins of Indian hunters, long hair, and a low crowned, wide brimmed sombrero—attracted their attention.

Accounts of his exploits began to show up in newspaper articles.  Then he met writer Edward Zane Carroll Judson better known as Ned Buntline, who was inspired to create a fictional Buffalo Bill based very loosely on the real hunter.  In 1869 Buntline published Buffalo Bill, The King of Border Men, which began running as a serial in the New York Weekly.  That was so successful that Buntline was soon churning out lurid Buffalo Bill tales in monthly dime novels.

In December 1872, Cody traveled to Chicago to make his stage debut with his friend Texas Jack Omohundro in The Scouts of the Prairie, one of the original Wild West shows produced by Buntline. The effort was panned by critics one of whom compared Cody’s acting to a “diffident schoolboy.”  But the handsome performer was a hit with the sold-out crowds.

                                    Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohunro, and Cody during their one season all together on tour.

Cody returned annually for the next 11 years in a new production each time. For the 1873-74 season he invited an old friend—Union vet, hide hunter, gambler, and lawman William Butler Hickok better known as Wild Bill.  If Cody and Texas Jack were unpolished as actors, Hickok, who was drunk almost all of the time, could not remember his lines and staggered around the stage.  He was not invited back.

During the run of these shows, Cody broke with Buntline over the use of his name and image.  He continued under his own management, hiring playwrights to craft new shows.  He also took control of the Dime novels and hired Prentiss Ingraham to write most of them.

Cody’s family lived in Rochester, New York while he toured with these shows.  He had married Louisa Frederici shortly after the Civil War and together they had four children, two of whom died and were buried in Rochester.

In the off season, Cody returned to the West every year where he continued to act as a guide for wealthy tourists and dabbled in various business schemes, most of which failed.  After the 1876 massacre of George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry, Cody was once more called into service as a scout. 

During a skirmish at Warbonnet Creek in Nebraska on July 17, 1876 Cody had an alleged duel with a Cheyenne warrior named Heova’ehe or Yellow Hair.   Cody was reported to have shot him and then in hand-to-hand combat stabbed and killed the Indian and taken his scalp.  Some witness accounts differed, and the press misreported the name of the warrior as Yellow Hand, but the incident became famous as “The first scalp for Custer.”  Cody had the incident written into the script of his next show.

In 1879 Cody attempted to separate himself from the Dime novel character by publishing an autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill, Col. William Fredrick Cody.  While the book has known errors and not a few exaggerations it is thought to be on the whole a fairly accurate account of his life to that point.  A second autobiography was undertaken years later with a ghost writer and is riddled with errors because Cody died before he could read the proofs.

Before the 1883 season, Cody scrapped plans for another theater tour.  He had bigger ideas.  That summer working from land he recently purchased on the banks of the North Platte River in Nebraska, he put out a call for experienced riders, cowboys, scouts, as well as Indians promising good wages and a new kind of adventure.  He was assembling a spectacle, a pageant of the West to tour the nation in a circus-like troupe. 

The show would begin with the grand entry of all of the performers to stirring music by a large brass band and then feature exhibitions of horsemanship, sharpshooting, cowboy completions—rodeo type events—and was sprinkled with vignettes of pioneer life.  Highlights included a robbery of the Deadwood stage, a reenactment of the Duel with Yellow Hair, and a finale of an Indian raid on a cabin with Bill and the Cavalry riding to the rescue.  It was all thrilling and Cody was sure audiences had never seen anything like it.

                                Cody with Sitting Bull on tour.

In 1885 Cody’s troop included Sitting Bull and a number of Lakota warriors and their families.  Although the show featured the scenes of Indian warfare, Cody hoped that the teepee village erected on the show grounds and open to public visits, would showcase native family life and soften prejudices against them.  He paid his native performers very well and often spent time with them.  His relationship with Sitting Bull would have later repercussions.  Many Sioux, especially members of the Oglala band remained with the show season after season and their descendants still perform around the country doing traditional dances at Pow Wows and rodeos like Cheyenne Frontier Days.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was an immediate hit in its initial tours and was expanded and improved every season with new attractions.  By 1886 the show was making Cody rich.  He bought more land near the town of North Platte which he dubbed Scout’s Rest Ranch and built an eighteen-room mansion and a large barn for winter storage of the show’s livestock.

Rather than take the show on the road for the 1886 season he built exhibition grounds on Staten Island, New York where it played from June to October.  That winter he moved indoors with a slightly downsized program to Madison Square Garden then returned to the Island for the next summer.  During this New York stay more than a million people bought tickets to the show including the editors and publishers of all of the major newspapers and magazines who covered the extravaganza lavishly. 

It attracted the attention of the wealthy elite and of a parade of literary celebrities.  Thomas Edison took time to see the show and when it came time for him to make the first American motion picture with a plot, The Great Train Robbery, he was inspired by the Wild West show. But it also played to children from the slums, including young Jewish immigrants who would go on to largely create an infant movie industry for which westerns would become a staple.  Buffalo Bill and the Wild West were firmly setting an image of the West in the American mind.

Buffalo Bill in London where he was a big hit with the ladies.

When the show closed its final Staten Island season, Cody packed it up and loaded it on a ship to England where he engaged to play as part of the American Exhibition which coincided with the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria.  He entertained members of the Royal family who were so impressed that Prince Edward arranged a second grand Command Performance for the Queen and her Jubilee guests including young Kaiser Wilhelm and most of the crowned heads of Europe.  Young Annie Oakley, Cody’s star attraction, especially dazzled the crowd and later shot a cigarette out of the Kaiser’s lips.  The show played more than 300 performances in London and then visited Manchester and Birmingham before returning to the States in October of 1887.  An estimated 2.5 million people saw these performances. 

It was the first of four European tours before 1892.  He visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 followed by appearances in the south of France, Spain, and Italy where he and members of the troupe were received by Pope Leo XIII at the Vatican.  The 1891 tour began in Germany followed by appearances in the Netherlands, Belgium, and a return to Britain.  In 1892 there was another trip to England and another Command Performance.

A poster for Cody's expanded show--Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.

Back home Cody greatly expanded his show and renamed it Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.  The new show added representative riding groups from horse cultures around the world—Turks, Argentine Gauchos, Arabs, Mongols and Cossacks.  It also included a U.S. Cavalry unit, Northwest Mounted Police, Indian Lancers, and other mounted military and an expanded group of Natives representing several tribes.  The Grand Entry ride of these hundreds of performers was both colorful and impressive.

Buffalo Bill and members of his troupe at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

The new show was designed with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 in mind.  But Exposition authorities refused Cody’s request for space to perform on the grounds.  He definitely bought land nearby and opened up anyway.  Despite the annoyance of fair officials who viewed it as competition, the millions of visitors that flooded the city for the Exposition provided more than enough audience for both.  After the fair concluded, Cody packed the show up for more tours of American cities.

In 1890 Cody responded to a request by General Nelson A. Miles to come to South Dakota where the Lakota reservations were tense with the spread of the Ghost Dance which was thought to be encouraged by Sitting Bull.  Miles hoped that he could intercede with the old man.  He found Sitting Bull personally friendly but embittered by White men and hardships on the reservations.  There was nothing Cody could do to stop the Ghost Dancing.  He could not prevent the Wounded Knee Massacre, arriving on the scene with Miles two days after the rampage by the 7th Cavalry as the frozen bodies of the dead were gathered and dumped in slit trenches for burial. 

This episode inspired the play Indians by Arthur Kopit and Robert Altman’s film version Buffalo Bill and the Indians staring Paul Newman as Cody who was portrayed as a bombastic phony.  In real life Cody was deeply shaken by the incident.

During the off season of 1895 Cody founded the Wyoming town that he modestly named for himself and its development as a tourist destination, hunting haven, and his TE Ranch occupied much of his time and money over the next several years.

On the cusp of a new century Cody was at the peak of his fame. Then outside Lexington, North Carolina on October 29, 1901, a freight train crashed into one unit of the train carrying Buffalo Bill's show from Charlotte, North Carolina to Danville, Virginia. Annie Oakley was so severely injured that it was thought for a time that she would never walk again, although she did eventually recover and return to the show.  110 horses were killed, including Cody’s two favorite personal mounts.  Also destroyed were a lot of equipment, props and scenery for the show.  It was a financial setback that shook the foundation of Cody’s enterprise.

To recover, Cody took the show to Europe for four more tours from, 1902 to 1906.  In addition to stays in major cities, the show played one night stands in nearly every town in Europe big enough to accommodate them.  By the time the final tour was completed he had penetrated deep into Eastern Europe—Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine, Poland, and Bohemia.

Despite the success of the European tours, the costs of mounting the traveling extravaganza in the states, a series of bad investments, and money tied up in his Cody, Wyoming developments put a strain on the show.  He had to fold it after the 1907 season.

The next year he teamed up with his chief rival as Wild West show operator, Pawnee Bill to form the joint Two Bills Show.  But the joint endeavor also struggled and during an appearance in Denver in 1910 the Sheriff foreclosed on the show and sold its assets piecemeal.  An era had ended. 

The poster for Cody's Essanay Studio film released after his death.  The full print has been lost and only brief clips survive.

Cody himself was not yet ready to totally abandon show business.  In 1916 he made The Adventures of Buffalo Bill for Chicago’s Essanay Studios featuring members of his old shows and a large cast of Indians and soldiers, including General Nelson Miles himself largely focused on the 1890 trip to South Dakota.  The film was released on January 29, 1917 shortly after Cody’s death.  Prints of the film have been lost and only a couple of short clips survived.

Cody repeatedly showed up in films, stage shows, and television in the years since his death notably in Annie Oakley starring Barbara Stanwick in 1935, Cecil B DeMille’s 1936 The Plainsman, the 1944 highly fictionalized bio pic Buffalo Bill starring Joel McCrea opposite Maureen O’Hara, Young Buffalo Bill staring Roy Rogers at Republic Pictures, the Broadway and film versions of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, and the Paul Newman vehicle.  He was either a recurring regular character or was portrayed in individual episodes of too many televisions show to recount.

The bio-pic with Joel McCrea and Maureen O'Hara was wildly fictionalized.

Buffalo Bill also makes numerous appearances in literature including work by highly respected authors Larry McMurtry and Jerome Charyn. 

Perhaps the best elegy to the old man was written by poet e. e. cummings in 1920 and expressed the ambiguity of his life.

“Buffalo Bill’s”
defunct
        who used to
        ride a watersmooth-silver
                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                  Jesus

he was a handsome man
                      and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Belle Starr—Outlaw Queen on a Side Saddle

Belle Starr was locally notorious in Texas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas but captured public immagination with lurid tales in the Police Gazette which were gathered and expanded into this Dime Novel that carried a heaft 25 cent cover price due to the many illustrations. Ever after the supposed Outlaw Queen became fodder for novels, plays, songs, and movies.

You have to admit Belle Starr was the perfect name for an outlaw queen.  It emblazoned perfectly the covers of dime novels, titillated the readers of the original scandal sheet The Police Gazette, and set off fantasies of a bewitching bandit beauty celebrated in generations of movies, TV shows, and songs.  The allure was so strong that in the back yard westerns we enacted every summer day in Cheyenne my cousin Linda was always Belle to my brother’s Roy Rogers and my Hopalong Cassidy.   The stories we played out were just about as real as any associated with Starr.

Myra Maybelle Shirley doesn’t quite cut the same ice.  But that was her name at birth on a farm near Carthage, Missouri on February 5, 1848.  Her father John Shirley was a prosperous farmer.  Her mother was a member of the Virginia (later West Virginia) Hatfield clan. But it would be a mistake to read too much into that—Hatfield-McCoy feud did not break out until after the Civil War and the family was not particularly then identified with violence.

Myra got a quite proper upbringing for a young lady of her class.  She was a graduate of the Carthage Female Academy, a finishing school where she learned a little Latin, how to play the piano, and all of the social graces.

About the time Myra graduated, all hell was breaking loose along the Kansas-Missouri Border.  The well-to-do Shirleys were slave owners.  Her father and uncles may have ridden with the Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers who attacked Free Soil settlers in Bloody Kansas.  The family was close to other pro-slavery clans in the area of south eastern Missouri including the James and Younger families.  Myra was said to be particularly close to the Younger boys.

After the war broke out Confederate Missouri Guard forces under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and General Sterling Price whipped a Union force under the command of Colonel Franz Sigel, in the First Battle of Carthage, the first important engagement in the West which gave control of most of the state south and west of St. Louis to the Rebels.  The Shirley family decided to sell the farm and move to Carthage which was becoming a major regional hub for the Confederacy.  John Shirley opened an inn and livery stable on the town square.

Teen age Myra Shirley in a Civil War era tintype.

It was probably during this period when young Myra mastered the difficult use of the side saddle which was becoming the “proper” way for a young gentlewoman to ride.  The saddle accommodated the voluminous skirts and petticoats of the day by allowing a lady wrap one leg around a pommel draping both to the same side of the horse.  The seat was not as secure as a conventional saddle ridden with legs astride the horse.  It took a skilled horsewoman to do much more than amble along at a walk in such a contraption.  Myra could reportedly keep in the saddle at a full gallop.  She continued to use the side saddle almost exclusively the rest of her life.

In 1863 the tide of war turned in the region at the Second Battle of Carthage, a smaller but significant skirmish in which Union forces repulsed an advancing force sending them scurrying back to Arkansas.  Yankee troops occupied the town.  Myra’s brother John A. M. “Bud” Shirley joined the partisan irregulars harassing Union troops.  He became a Captain of his own band of Bushwhackers.  He may have ridden when partisans attacked the occupied town in September 1864 and burned the Courthouse and much of the Square.  With a Yankee price on his head, Captain Shirley was ambushed and killed as he ate at a sympathizer’s house in near-by Sarcoxie soon after.

The Shirley family became refugees.  They fled the area and made their way to Scyene, Texas near Dallas where other Missouri guerillas, including the Younger Brothers and Frank and Jesse James also settled.

As May Reed the future Belle Starr took to wearing broad hats and carrying pistols like the outlaws she associated herself with in Texas.  This photo shows that as a young woman she was much more attractive than the gaunt, haggard woman of better known later pictures.

In 1866 Myra, now generally called May, married James Reed, a young man from back home in Carthage on whom she once had a teen age crush.    No contemporary accounts remark on her beauty, although once or twice she was called handsome.  What May might have lacked in conventional attractiveness, she made up with a sense of style, even when they young family struggled on a farm near town.  She cut a swath in riding habits and plumed hats when she rode into town.

James did not take much to sod busting and his wife’s taste in finery compelled him to find extra income.  He fell in with her old chums the Younger Brothers and began to ride with their gang.  He may also occasionally have ridden with the James Gang—the two groups were friendly and often shared personnel.  All were former Confederate guerillas and at least at first considered their robberies as an extension of the war.

May took to the life style.  She soon added a pair of Colt revolvers to here riding gear and was known to display her marksmanship to admiring locals.

Scyene served as a safe haven and base for the outlaw gangs’ far flung raids, bank, and train robberies.  Reed would be gone for weeks at a time, return, and resume what looked like an ordinary life on the farm.  May gave birth to the couple’s first child, Rosie Lee who they called Pearl in 1868.

Outlawry was dangerous work and was apt to disrupt family life sooner or later.  In 1871 Reed was charged with robbery and murder in Arkansas and wanted posters with a price on his head began to circulate in Texas—a sure invitation to some greedy or ambitious neighbor to turn him in.  The couple fled to California where a son, James Edwin—Eddie—was born.

When things cooled off, they returned to Texas.  Reed soon fell in with a new gang, the Starrs, a Cherokee clan based in Indian Territory who specialized in running whiskey to the tribes, cattle rustling, and horse thievery.  Strong arm robbery, Reed’s specialty was a side line. 

It is unclear if Mrs. Reed actively took part in the commission of her husband’s crimes during these years, or was merely an accomplice.  But her continued show of being an armed and her swagger did nothing to discourage a notion that she was an active participant.  In April 1874 that supposition was enough despite a lack of any evidence placing her on the scene, to get a warrant issued along with her husband and members of the Starr gang for a Stagecoach robbery.

The Reeds shifted their base of operations to Paris, Texas where James was shot and killed that August.

A widow with two children and no means of support, May continued her association with her old outlaw pals, many of whom evidently helped support the family.  She may have become more directly involved in some of their operations, particularly the sale of rustled cattle and horses.  She was evidently spared the fallback occupation of many a widow in her position—prostitution.

In the late 1870’s she may have entered a brief relationship—some say a marriage—with Charles Younger, uncle of Cole.  But this is unsubstantiated by any known records and may simply be rooted in gossip which took root in lore.

In 1880 31 year old May married Sam Starr and settled with him on a ranch, renamed Younger’s Bend, on the Canadian River near present-day Eufaula.  It was there that she finally became something like the bandit queen of legend.  She adopted the name of Belle, probably to obscure her identity, but perhaps as a pet name given to her by her new husband.  In Texas she was still known as Mrs. Reed or May.

Belle turned out to be a woman of great organizational skill and was soon assuming a leadership position among the Starrs.  She organized and directed cattle raids and planned robberies.  She regularized the clan’s business dealings, cultivating markets and keeping lawmen on the payroll for protection.  She was seen in her full regalia in company of the boys, her brace of pistols now upgraded to a nickel-plated, pearl handle horse pistol and a lighter .38.  She kept a shotgun in a saddle boot. But whether she actually led any of the gang’s crimes is doubtful.  No reliable witness ever put her on the scene.

But in 1883 Belle and Sam were found in possession of stolen horses by a Federal Marshall operating in Indian Territory.  The pair was dragged before the notorious Hanging Judge Isaac Parker’s Federal Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Both were convicted.  Belle was sent to the Detroit House of Corrections in Michigan because the Feds had no facilities for women.  There she was regarded as a model prisoner, was made a trustee, and won the admiration and affection of the supervising Matron.  The rebellious Sam served time at hard labor, much of it on a chain gang and in the hole for various infractions.

Belle was released after nine months.  Sam rejoined her in Indian Territory when his sentence was up.  Then they were back in business.

Belle and her husband Sam Starr in Fort Smith,Arkansas in 1886 months before Sam was killed in a shoot out with an Indan Police Officer.  She is shown riding side saddle and heavily armed.

In 1886 Belle was again hauled before Judge Parker on a theft charge but escaped conviction.  While in Ft. Smith she posed on horseback fully armed for her most famous photograph.  It was a triumphant moment, but Belle’s happiness was cut short when Sam and Indian Police Officer Frank West shot each other to death in a gunfight on December 17 of that year.

A widow with two children and no means of support, May continued her association with her old outlaw pals, many of whom evidently helped support the family.  She may have become more directly involved in some of their operations, particularly the sale of rustled cattle and horses.  She was evidently spared the fallback occupation of many a widow in her position—prostitution.

Belle with Blue Duck, a Cherokee outlaw who rode in the Starr gang.  After Sam's death he was one of a series of lovers she took and was rumored by some to have breifly been her husband.  Blue Duck is most famous as the relentless and remorseless killer in Larry McMurtry's  novels Commanche Moon and Lonesome Dove, both of which were made into succesful TV mini series.

 

In the late 1870’s she may have entered a brief relationship—some say a marriage—with Charles Younger, uncle of Cole.  But this is unsubstantiated by any known records and may simply be rooted in gossip which took root in lore.  Widowed once again, Belle was rumored to have had several short relationships with member of her outlaw circle—Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, and Jim French.  In order to be able to remain on her land in the Indian Nation, Belle married the much younger Jim Starr a/k/a Jim July.

Despite these relationships, her active leadership in the Starr gang had ended with Sam Starr’s death. 

On February 3, 1889 just two days before her 41 birthday Belle was riding home from a visit to neighbors in Eufaula when she was ambushed.  She was hit in the back and neck with a blast of buckshot from a shotgun.  She was knocked off of her horse.  He assailant turned her over on her back and finished her off with a second blast directly in the face, and act of such rage and savagery that suspicion was immediately drawn on those closest to her. 

Those suspects included her husband, and her son.  A tenant sharecropper named Edgar J. Watson, a Creek, was charged with her murder supposedly because Belle had threatened to turn him into the law on an outstanding murder charge in Florida.  But Belle, who had harbored many outlaws at her ranch including Jesse James himself once for several months, would be unlikely to betray anyone.  Evidence was slim to non-existence and the jury did not believe the prosecutor’s case.  Watson lived until 1910 when he was shot and killed.

Jim Starr may not have been entirely happy in his marriage to a dominating older woman, but he had little motive to murder her since he had no claim on the land on which he was living comfortably.  Most historians discount him as a suspect.

Belle with her children.  James "Eddy" Starr, upper right, was her eldest and has been suspected of her murder.  Pearl, standing in back of her seated mother became a prostitute and successful madame after her mothers death.

Eddy, however, had recently been beaten by his mother for abusing a horse and was known to be furious with her.  The fact that the shotgun used in the murder probably belonged to Belle also linked him to the crime.  But there was never enough evidence to charge him.  Belle’s murder remains officially unsolved. 

Eddie Reed was convicted of horse theft and receiving stolen property in July 1889 and the family nemesis Judge Parker sentenced him to prison in Columbus, Ohio.  Like many former outlaws Eddie switched sides, becoming a lawman in Fort Smith.  He was involved in a famous gun battle with two outlaw brothers named Crittenden in 1895 who he killed.  He died in another shoot out in a Claremont, Oklahoma saloon on December 14, 1898.

Pearl Starr turned to prostitution to raise money to try and secure her brother’s release from the 1889 prison sentence.  Her efforts did earn him a pardon which opened the door to his law enforcement career.  Pearl continued to ply her trade and operated brothels in Van Buren and Fort Smith, Arkansas, up to and through World War I. 

At the time of her death Belle was locally notorious in Indian Territory, Texas, and Arkansas, but unknown in the rest of the country.  Richard K. Fox, editor and publisher of the Police Gazette, always on the look-out for exciting yarns, picked up the story of Belle’s murder from the Western press. Intrigued he did a modicum of investigation into her life and launched a series of lurid articles in his magazine.  These were consolidated and expanded into a Dime Novel, Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James published late in the year of her death.  Some Western historians continue to cite the book as a source on her life although it is riddled with errors and exaggerations.

But it did prove popular.  More Dime Novels followed along with the inevitable stage melodrama.  Woody Guthrie was just one of those who immortalized her in song.  

Amoung the many movies and TV show based on Belle Starr with this 1968 spaghetti western with a feminist twist starring Elsa Martinelli.

Belle has been portrayed, rarely very realistically, in dozens of films.  Actresses portraying her included Betty Compton in 1928, Gene Tierney opposite Randolph Scott in 1941, Jane Russell in 1953, Elsa Martinelli in a spaghetti western with a feminist touch directed by Lina Wertmüller in 1968,  Elizabeth Montgomery in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, and Pamela Reed in the same year’s The Long Riders.

Belle is commemorated in the former Indian Territory where she spent much of her life with a gun-toting life size statue at Woolaroc, Oklahoma.