TULSA, Okla. (KFOR) — First of all, argued author Michael Wallis, Belle Starr was not her given name.
“I will always think of her as Myra Maybelle Shirley,” he states.
For most of his writing career, he’s chosen historical characters often cloaked in mythology.
Myra Shirley’s family moved to southwest Missouri during a violent time before and during the Civil War.
She was always more interested in riding horses than boarding school.
She and her brothers were swept up in the border and guerrilla wars between Kansas and Missouri, North and South, at close quarters.
Wallis insists something snapped in her when an older brother was killed in 1863.
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“That’s when she decided, as she famously said several times, ‘I will always give sanctuary to outlaws’.”
He says she ended up with a weakness for two things.
“Bad Boys and horses, including some which did not belong to her.”
Four Marriages produced three children.
Myra, later in life, much more well known as Belle, never robbed a bank or train, never raided a home, or shot anyone.
Judge Isaac Parker’s court convicted Starr on one count of horse theft.
She settled in Indian Territory near present-day Porum, Oklahoma.
Her cabin played host to husband Henry Starr’s outlaw acquaintances.
On a late February evening in 1889, she met her sudden demise, shot from behind a few miles from her cabin near Younger’s Bend on the Arkansas River.
The myth of Belle Starr began with lurid articles in the Police Gazette and a paperback book full of made-up stories.
Treasure hunters plundered and dug up the countryside around her old cabin.
With his 20th book, Wallis does his best to chip away at the fiction.
“In those days, he states, “there were white hats and there were black hats, but there were a lot of gray hats. Belle Starr wore a gray hat.”
“Belle Starr: The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend” is available in most bookstores and through Liveright Press.
To order, click here.
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