Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts, and the Legends

Who was Belle Starr? What was she that so many myths surround her? Born in Carthage, Missouri, in 1848, the daughter of a well-to-do hotel owner, she died forty-one years later, gunned down near her cabin in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. After her death she was called “a bandit queen,” “a female Jesse James,” “the Petticoat Terror of the Plains.” Fantastic legends proliferated about her. In this book Glenn Shirley sifts through those myths and unearths the facts.

In a highly readable and...