Queen Of All Mayhem: The Untold Story Of Belle Starr, Wild West’s Legendary Outlaw

A new book with the title Queen of all Mayhem: The Blood-soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr is just begging to be picked up. And what a fascinating chronicle Dane Huckelbridge has written about the legendary “gunslinging, horse-thieving, bandit-carousing outlaw” of the Wild West.

The period of the nineteenth century, when Myra Maybelle Shirley, aka Belle Starr, was raising hell wherever she went, was tumultuous in American history—the fierce battles with the native tribes whose lands the white immigrant settlers grabbed, the terrible toll the Civil War took on the people, and the madness of the Gold Rush. The times were marked with horrific violence, unimaginable cruelty and criminal activity so brazen that no law-keeping forces could control it.

It was also the time of the legendary outlaws Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, Jim Miller, and Holliday, now immortalised in books and movies. Among them is a single female name—Belle Starr.

When women tended to homes and children, Bella Starr flamboyantly rode side-saddle, dressed in black velvet, a plumed hat, and pistols at her waist. The weapons were not for show—she was an expert shooter (though murder is not listed as one of her crimes). The daughter of a prosperous father, she was also, unlike the women of her time, well educated, well read and had learnt to play the piano.

She was taught to ride and shoot by her older brother Bud and had an untamed sense of adventure even as a young girl, called “wild” by her school teachers. During the Civil War years, she was known to spy for the Confederate side that her family supported because nobody would suspect a pretty teenager. She would not obey the rules of feminine behaviour that had been laid down for women of that conservative era. Huckelbridge writes, “Belle simply had no use for sewing circles of calico dresses; she would not be cosseted inside any farmhouse kitchen or be seen as less than equal to any man.”

The end of the Civil War and the defeat of the pro-slavery Confederates left the region smouldering in ruins, teeming with aimless and angry young men with nothing to do and nowhere to go but capable of fighting and killing without compunction. Many of them took to crime, robbing banks, trains and rich homesteads.

There were a few female rebels like Calamity Jane, Big Nose Kate and Annie Oakley, but none had a life as colourful or courageous as Belle Starr. She was a true outlaw—she counted Jesse James and Cole Younger as friends; she married a criminal, Jim Reed, and participated in at least one of his big heists. But he was unfaithful and left her alone to raise their two children, and when he was killed, Belle not just refused to identify or claim his body but also gave up on white society altogether, and that’s when the legend started to build up.

She married, with some severe opposition from tribal elders, Sam Starr, son of Cherokee warlord Tom Starr, and soon took over his criminal empire, which, along with stealing horses, smuggling and banditry, also included a protection racket, and because the white cops had no jurisdiction over native territory, she sheltered outlaws on the run from the law—including the notorious Jesse James.

She named her compound Younger’s Bend, supposedly after her former lover Cole Younger. Old Tom, who had once killed 32 men who had been involved in the murder of his father, saw the value of having a smart and intelligent woman in his gang. She was a better leader than her husband and more enterprising too. Luckily for her, Cherokee tribes are matriarchal, known to have female warriors and leaders—and here she came into her own.

After Sam was killed, and as a white woman faced with having to vacate her property on native land, she pulled one over on the white cops waiting outside the boundary to arrest her by marrying a younger native man, Jim July, and making him take the Starr surname.

She did serve a short stint in prison for the relatively minor crime of horse theft but otherwise manoeuvred to keep herself out of the grasp of the police. There is no evidence of her ever doing any Robin Hood kind of deeds, but she still gathered admirers. The media, pandering to a sensation-hungry public, fed them stories of her exploits.

She was murdered at the age of 40, and the killer was never caught, but her death made national news and was followed by the publication of a salacious and mostly fictitious book, Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen or the Female Jesse James.

The lurid paperback described her as “more amorous than Antony’s mistress, more relentless than Pharaoh’s daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc,” and went on to comment, “Mother Nature was indulging in one of her rarest freaks when she produced such a novel specimen of womankind.”

Inevitably, she became a legend after her death, with novels, biographies, poems, and folk songs written about her, and after the first film in 1941, Belle Starr, with Gene Tierney playing her, several Hollywood movies and television serials too, none of which bothered much about facts.

Huckelbridge’s book is painstakingly researched and places her in the right social and historical context. It is about time Belle Starr was rediscovered and placed back on the pantheon of outlaws from which the passage of time has erased her.

Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author.

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