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Belle Starr
Posted 04.21.06 at 10:00 AMDid you know that Belle Starr, one of the most famous female bandits, was once held in the jail in Paris? The story has always intrigued me. I once had a good Quarter Horse mare named Belle; she was gentle and sweet, unlike, I suspect, the real Belle Starr, but about as luckless. She was standing beside a light pole when a bolt of lightning hit the transformer on it, bounced off, and struck her dead. Maybe if I hadn’t named her “Belle” . . .
According to historian Spencer Jones, in a 1972 news clipping, a Paris paper reported that Sam J. Parker, a resident of Collin County before his death in 1940, had become a Texas Ranger after the Civil War. He arrested Belle (then Belle Reed) in present day Delta County in the late 1860s. He took her to Paris and turned her over to the sheriff, and she stayed a few days in the old jail on S. Main St. but was released for lack of evidence.
She started out in life as plain Myra Belle Shirley, and when she wed the outlaw, Sam Starr, in 1880, the famous Belle Starr was born. Her first husband had been none other than Cole Younger, who was shot in a Minnesota bank robbery while a member of the James Gang. However, she didn’t have long to live it up in the outlaw world because she was shot in the back by an unknown assassin in 1889. Sam had got it himself a few years earlier at a dance in 1886. Never one to lead the single life long, she married Jim July and made him change his name to “Starr.“
Although some would have described her as “hatchet faced,“ she was well educated for a woman of her time and place. She sometimes dressed in a black velvet dress and wore high button shoes. A black ostrich-feathered hat topped off her outfit when she rode to town on her favorite mare. However, she always wore a cartridge belt with two revolvers around her waist.
Mainly, Belle and Sam stuck to cattle and horse thieving, but once she loaned $2,000 to a friend named Blue Duck, who lost it all in a card game in Fort Dodge, Kansas. In one of her more famous exploits, Belle marched into the saloon, both guns drawn, and scooped up $7,000. As she was leaving, she invited anyone who wanted his money back to come to Indian Territory and “look her up.“ (I love it.) My own Belle’s predecessor was a grey Arabian who was faster on his feet than greased lightning. I should have named him Blue Duck. What a good name for a grey horse!
Belle and Sam hung out with such well known folks as the James brothers,, the Youngers, and the Quantrills, Daltons, and Doolins in a remote and rugged area of Oklahoma called Youngers Bend. Lawmen avoided it like the plague. It sounds romantic until you read about where most of them got their start. I’ve always imagined Quantrill’s Raiders topping the horizon and bearing down on a small community, the infamous black flag waving in the wind. It meant “No Quarter.“
There has always been a legend among horsemen in this area that the best horses filtered down to Texas from Missouri, descendants of the fine horses that the James Gang rode. Of course, a fast horse was a bandit’s means of survival.
Another “Texas connection” to Belle Starr involves her husband Jim Reed. They were said to have lived several months in a cabin near Ponder in Denton County some time in the 1870s. I remember Ponder quite well from my college days—we went there to eat steaks. However, Bell was upstaged by another female bandit many years later when the Ponder bank was robbed by Bonnie and Clyde!
Belle isn’t buried in Youngers Bend, though. She was buried in the back yard of her cabin, atop a bluff overlooking the South Canadian River. The cabin has long since rotted away, her stone also the victim of souvenir hunters. The original stone was carved with the design of a bell, a likeness of her favorite mare, and a star. It said, “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.“
Reader comments
If I recall correctly, A.W. Neville mentioned Belle Starr in Paris in either The History of Lamar County or The Red River Valley Then And Now, possibly both.
For those interested, both books contain some pretty good tales of the nefarious folks in Paris’ past.
I heard about Belle Starr when I was a small child; my grandmother and mother would giggle and say, “We’re sort of kin to Belle Starr”; I never knew how we were kin or why they laughed being so young. After my family research, I learned David Rothburn Rodgers mother was Sarah “Sally” Starr; he was born Missouri; after the 1850 census. The family was in Texas by 1870; Sarah died around 1861, as far as can be ascertained. I learned that Belle married one of the Starr brothers, and that’s why the “giggle” she was an outlaw!
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What a woman…what a notorious mean woman! It is amazing how we romanticize the lives of criminals in history. Somehow the tales always make us smile and shake our heads like grandparents chuckling over the antics of their naughty grandchildren. Will we someday do the same thing with some of our own present-day notorious criminals?