Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen

Myra Maybelle Shirley was born in Missouri in eighteen forty-eight and became the most famous outlaw celebrity of the Indian Territory era under a name she did not live long enough to fully inhabit. She was known by the time of her death as Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen, a title invented largely by a dime novel published in eighteen eighty-nine, the same year she was killed. The real Belle Starr was more complicated than the legend and considerably less glamorous.

She had connections throughout the outlaw networks that moved through Indian Territory in the eighteen seventies and eighties, including friendships or associations with men like Cole Younger and Jesse James, though the nature and depth of those connections has been disputed by historians ever since. She married or partnered with a series of men who operated on the wrong side of the law, and she ran a property in the Territory that served, among other things, as a place where wanted men could rest their horses. In eighteen eighty-three she was brought before Parker's court on charges of horse theft and convicted.

She served nine months in federal prison in Detroit. Parker sentenced her personally. Accounts of the trial suggest she was articulate, composed, and not remotely intimidated by the courtroom.

She was shot and killed on February third of eighteen eighty-nine, two days before her forty-first birthday, on a road near her home in the Choctaw Nation. She had just left a neighbor's house and was riding alone. The killer was never identified.

Suspects included a neighbor with a land dispute, her own son, and others with grievances. No arrest was ever made. She was buried at her farm, called Younger's Bend, in what is now eastern Oklahoma.