Volume 17 , Issue 10

How Belle Starr Died February 3, 1889

As we were browsing through the Library of Congress Newspaper Archives searching for any information concerning Belle Starr, we found the following article in The Daily Ardmoreite, dated 30 August 1910, page two: "How Belle Starr Died." The death of the "outlaw queen" was unromantic for she was a woman.

Muskogee, Okla., Aug. 30 (1910) -- Of all the outlaws in old Indian Territory that died with their boots on, none passed away in such a glamour of romance as did Belle Starr.

Time had not dimmed the luster of that certain reputation which she enjoyed. The years had given increase to the blood and thunder notoriety that caused her name to be spoken in whispers by timid persons in the days when she swaggered in Indian Territory towns with her sombrero atilt, and her pistols glistening in her belt, or when she rode into Fort Smith, despite Judge Parker and his hangman, Maledon, and browbeat policemen with oaths and display of firearms until they were at the point of jumping their jobs.

Belle Starr's name is still remembered. Perhaps it was because she was a woman and knew how to keep close to the footlights that she blazoned her name along every trail and at every cross-roads in the southwest. Though she had been dead more than twenty years, yet no name was spoken more frequently than hers in the tales of outlawry. Popular imagination continues picturing her as having killed countless men, as having robbed innumerable banks and trains, and as a demon with a bloody knife between her teeth and a pistol in each hand terrorizing whole communities and making deputy marshals hit the high places, getting out of the country.

Myra Bell Shirley, that was her maiden name, fell as far short of her general reputation as a coyote does of being a cougar. Her father, Judge John Shirley, kept a hotel at Carthage, Missouri, before the civil war, and there Belle was born, February 5, 1848. In 1869 she was married to James Reed, whose father owned a farm near Rich Hill, and the two moved to Texas, where Reed work a crooked trail and began scouting, one of the charges against him being murder. He was assassinated after which his widow went with her two children to theme of "Uncle Tom" Starr, on the South Canadian river, in what is now Haskell county, Oklahoma. This was about 1879. Reed had been frequently at the Starr home when a young man and it was there that he became acquainted with "Uncle Tom's" son, "Sam" Starr, who Belle married. With him she served a year in the federal house of correction at Detroit, Michigan, for horse stealing.

During their married life Sam and Belle lived at what is now known as Younger's Bend, a long turn of the South Canadian, about seven miles southwest of the present town of Porum. Hidden away in a wilderness of deep canyons, inaccessible hills and dark forests, they gave refuge to every bandit that ranged northward from the Rio Grande. settlements were far between and the rural inhabitants of that part of Indian Territory found it wise to relinquish the hunting of outlaws to United states marshals. Edward Reed, belle's son, was killed while trying to shoot up a saloon at Wagoner in 1896. Her daughter, Pearl Reed, was living at Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1910. It had been said that her father really was Cole Younger. Among men who knew Belle well, she was described as having been a woman of more than ordinary education and of great natural wit and shrewdness. Then they turned the other side of the picture and said that she relied upon her skirts to save her from harm when she talked back to officers of the law; that her blackest crimes were stealing horses and taking money and contraband goods from the outlaws she harbored and protected at her home on the South Canadian. An old deputy United States marshal who used to surround her place with his men and search it, said, "Belle and Sam lived just like full blood Indians, from hand to mouth, letting each day take care of itself. There were time when they had plenty to eat, and times when there was nothing in the house."

Sam Starr and Frank West, a deputy United States marshal, drew their guns in a feud fight one winter night at a dance at the home of Mrs. Lucy Surratt., near the present town of Whitefield. When the smoke cleared away both men were dead, and Belle, a widow for the second time. She replaced Sam with a flubbed Cherokee, "Bill" July, whose chief accomplishment was horse stealing. He was shot and killed by "bud" Trainer, a deputy United States marshal, while scouting in the choctaw country.

There are numerous stories of the manner in which Belle Starr met her death. A man that made close inquiry in 1910 in the neighborhood of her old home on the South Canadian accepted the statement of one of her old friends that she was killed by Edgar A. Watson, who came with his family from Florida in the late 1880's and rented land on the south side of the Canadian, about seven miles from Belle star's home. Watson appeared to be a law abiding man, and merchants with whom he traded had confidence in his integrity. But in time it was learned that he was a desperate character and a fugitive from Florida where he was suspected of murder.

Belle Starr kept close watch upon every upon every stranger who appeared within striking distance of her lair on the river. She worried herself into Watson's confidence and was supposed to have learned his secret. It was told that they became enemies over the renting of land, while another story was that Watson and July were stealing together, and when Watson refused to make a fair division of the spoils, Belle threatened to betray him.

In the forenoon of Sunday, February 3, 1889, Belle rode up to the King Creek store and gin and told the proprietor she had come to eat dinner with him. She was riding her favorite mare, a fast and spirited animal. Though she had become dissolute, she retained the old fashioned modesty of refusing to ride astride. Her sidesaddle was made by skilled workmen and was known throughout Indian Territory as "the Belle Starr saddle."

At the dinner table, Belle appeared worried, and said she had a premonition of approaching death at the hands of her enemies. She was laughed at and told that "thunder and lightening couldn't kill her." With a pair of scissors she cut a large silk handkerchief in two, and gave half of it to the farm tenant's wife for a keepsake, and asked that her cloak, for which she had paid $40, be kept until her return, if she ever came back.

Belle started for home about 1 o'clock in the afternoon and on her way, before reaching the river, stopped at the house of a man named Barnes, where she remained talking to the women until about 3 o'clock. A homely reason for her stopping was to get a pone of sour corn bread from Mrs. Barnes. When she reached the Barnes place, Watson was standing in the yard with a double-barrel shotgun. He left at once, working in the direction in which Belle was traveling.

Filo ("Frog") Hoyt, a farmer, had been on the north side of the river and was on his way home when he rode off the ferry boat about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Hearing the sound of a rapidly running horse, he loped up just in time to see Bell Starr's mare, riderless, leap from an embankment into the river and swim across. He galloped in the direction from which the mare had come. At a sudden turn his horse snorted and sprang aside at an object lying in the road, the body of Belle Starr. She had been shot from behind with two load of mixed shot. Her assassin had chosen this abrupt turn in the road as a point of vantage and had concealed himself behind a large tree about thirty steps distant. The tracks from the tree led close to theme of Watson.

The day of the funeral July caused Watson to be arrested for murder and taken to Fort Smith. Merchants who went from the neighborhood told Judge Parker of waste's good reputation and Watson was discharged. Later he was sent to the penitentiary in Arkansas for horse stealing and was killed by guards while trying to escape from he coal mines.

The body of Belle Starr into which more than sixty shot had been fired, was dressed for burial by women int he neighborhood, many of whom she had befriended. She had much sympathy for persons in want, and there was scarcely a home within miles of where she lived into which she had not gone and remained night and day doing all that was possible to alleviate sickness and suffering. She liked to tell stories to children and would sit hour after hour singing old-fashioned religious songs to the accompaniment of her guitar. Belle's grave was dug in the dooryard and the clods heaped over her without a prayer.

Not long ago before 1910 a man with an Indian driver that knew the country who as a boy had sat on Belle Starr's knee, drove to the old Belle Starr home. The country was still thinly settled. There were dim outlines of the almost forgotten Briartown-Eufaula trail to be seen at intervals in the timber. Belle Starr followed this trail in in going to and from her outlaw den. This traveler had long pictured to himself the appearance of this region, after listening to descriptions of it by deputy United States marshals. He found that his imagination had fallen short of the reality. The country was savage and forbidding; the silence, oppressive. At the stream crossings the Indian driver shifted his automatic further in front on his belt and looked inquisitively at places where men could have been in hiding.

"This is Belle Starr creek," he said at last, as the horses splashed through the water. "it comes from the belle Starr Canyon, which was about three miles in length, with walls so high and steep that a man may not ride up or down them. The entrance was up the creek a short distance. Once inside you would find meadow land where there was good grazing. In that canyon was once a grapevine corral, in which stolen horses were kept."

Up from Belle Starr Creek was a level bench of land on which stood a gaunt dead tree, beside what appeared to be a grave, inclosed with a picket fence.

"There was the old Belle Starr spring," said the driver. "It was only about two hundred yards from the house."

Close by were two swarthy full blood Indian women doing their family washing beside a big iron kettle on an open fire. They looked askance over their shoulders at the stranger and got closer together. The water of the spring had a strange brackish taste.

From the sombre forest the road wound suddenly up a rocky hillside and stopped at a gate over which two large maple trees threw their shade. These trees were planted by Belle Starr. Inside stood the old home of the woman who had stolen away with her Cherokee husband, "Sam" Starr, thirty years ago, to this solitude. The house was of cedar logs, built by an Indian named Dempsey Hannell shortly after the war. It faced south, with a porch its entire length. The log room was about fourteen feet square with a big stone fireplace on the west side. Two small windows, scarcely larger than a cowboy's hat, did not let in enough light to drive out the shadows. This room had witnessed many an outlaw revel. The grimy rafters were nearly within reach of a man's hand. At the rear was a "leanto," divided into two rooms, and beneath them was a cellar. In later years a box house had been built on the East side of the old cedar fortress.

The view from the doorway was forlorn. Thickets of wild plums and patches of briars and brambles had pushed out of the timer and crawled closer and closer to the cedar house, struggling to cover the few remaining feet of bare, hard earth that lay clinking in the hot sunshine. Down across a ragged field was the sluggish, yellow river, and still further was a "deadening," the branches of the tall, dead trees making a picture of desolation. Beyond the Canadian, rising sheer to the sky, were precipices with caverns, where in the old days lay securely hidden the men for whose necks the hangman's noose dangled at Fort Smith.

About twenty feet from the doorway was the grave of Belle Starr, with the edges of the marble headstone chipped and broken by relic hunters. At one corner grew a hollyhock, with crimson flowers. The stone had been cut and inscribed by Joseph Daily, a rural stone-cutter. First, was a picture of Belle Starr's horse. Above its head was a star; beneath, a bell, and on its flank, a BS brand. At the bottom of the stone was a clasped hand filled with flowers. On the stone was inscribed:

Belle Starr. Born in Carthage, Mo., Feb. 5, 1848 Died Feb. 3, 1889.

Shed not for her the bitter tear. Nor give the heart to vain regret; "Tis but the casket that lies here. The gem that filled it sparkles yet.

The farmer that lived in the cedar house said that a human skull had been plowed up in the garden.
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