BELLE STARR

The trials of a frontier woman.

Teasing through the myths and gossip swirling around Belle Starr (1848-1889), reputedly the most famous female outlaw of the 19th century, Wallis, biographer of Billy the Kid, among others, finds a complicated, defiant woman. Myra Maibelle Shirley was born in the backwoods of Missouri to a family of proud slave owners. Her father, at 42, had been married several times by the time he met 21-year-old Eliza Pennington; some of his offspring by earlier marriages were older than his new bride. John and Eliza had six children of their own: Their second son, Bud, was Myra’s favorite. They galloped together on horseback through the countryside, he taught her how to handle a gun, and by the time she was a teenager, “she was a fearless rider and a crack shot.” His death during the Civil War upended her life: She vowed, somehow, to get revenge. Educated briefly at a female academy in Carthage, Missouri, where she was one of the first students, she learned by living. Wallis captures the rousing atmosphere of the lawless west—Belle’s family moved to Texas after Carthage was burned by guerrillas—with outlaws going “on the scout” to evade capture; horse thieves; bank, train, and stagecoach robbers; and murderous gangs terrorizing communities. Although Belle never killed anyone and was convicted only once, of horse theft, her life revolved around outlaws: family, lovers, husbands. Her first husband’s escapades led to his being murdered at age 29. Another husband, a mixed-race Cherokee, was killed in an exchange of “deadly gunplay,” as was Belle herself, ambushed in a murder still unsolved. Wallis’ Belle is a brazen woman, refusing to bow to the constrictions of her time: lawless, if not an outlaw herself.

A brisk, spirited biography.