Under the bluffs out of the prairie winds, the Canadian River country had good alluvial soil down in the bottoms. Neither whites nor blacks could own Indian land, but a woman shacked up with an Indian leased me a good field in the Cherokee territory. This female became Mandy’s best friend in the Nations, making a fine show of generosity to our small children when we first arrived and didn’t know a soul amongst our neighbors. I will grant she was big-hearted in her way, with her door wide open to strangers and her person, too.
By her own account, Mrs. Myra Maybelle Reed preferred male company to that of the rough women of the Territory. She made an exception of my Mandy, a well-educated lady whose friendship improved Maybelle’s repute, fallen low due to her bedtime predilection for bad Indians and breeds.
Maybelle’s first husband was Jim Reed, who rode with Quantrill, the James boys, and the Youngers during the bloody Border Wars between Kansas and Missouri. Like a lot of armed riders who passed themselves off as guerrilla fighters, Reed was a killer by inclination and by trade who only joined up with Will Quantrill when those men turned outlaw. After the War, he gambled and raced horses for some years around Fort Smith, joined in armed robberies, shot a bystander while holding up the Austin-San Antonio stage, and generally made a nuisance of himself until the early seventies, when a former partner with an eye to the reward deprived him of his life when he wasn’t looking.
The Younger boys were the wild seed of the richest slaveowner in Jackson County, Missouri, who happened to be a family friend of Maybelle’s daddy, Judge John Shirley. She was never Cole Younger’s lady friend the way she claimed, but later in life, her daughter Rosie Reed took the name Pearl Younger for professional purposes. Her son Eddie remained faithful to his daddy’s name and his outlaw profession, too, and even his early end by bullet, as shall be seen.
The Youngers hid out in an old trapper’s cabin about six miles west of Briartown, on a rocky bench facing south across the Canadian River. The land was part of a large spread run by Tom Starr, a huge bloodthirsty Cherokee who rustled cattle all the way south to the Red River. Having taken a liking to the Younger boys for no good reason, Tom Starr called this place Younger’s Bend. Pretty soon, maybe 1880, the Widow Reed moved in there with Sam Starr, one of Tom’s sons, and in no time at all, “boys” on the run were infesting this hideout, including the famous Jesse James, whom she introduced into her social circle as “Mr. Williams from Texas.” Pretty soon, the U.S. marshals got wind of this place, too, but Maybelle-or Belle Starr, as she now called herself-told the newspaper that her hospitality to outlaws had been much exaggerated by “the low-down class of shoddy whites who have made the Indian Territory their home to evade paying taxes on their dogs.” Belle took pride in her fiery reputation and was often obnoxious whether the situation called for it or not. Man and woman, she was the most shameless liar and noisy show-off I ever came across, bar none.
A few years before our arrival, Maybelle and her Injun Sam had been hauled up for horse theft in the Fort Smith federal court and received short sentences from Isaac Parker, the well-known “Hanging Judge.” This was Maybelle’s first and last conviction, not because she was hard to apprehend but because she never committed a real crime. Her popular repute as Queen of the Outlaws was born of her own bare-assed lies, since the closest that bitch ever came to the outlaw life was screwing every outlaw she could lay her hands on. When her Sam was shot to death over in Whitefield, Maybelle soon replaced him in her bed with Tom Starr’s adopted son, Jim July, tacking Starr onto his name to shore up her claim on Starr property.
Maybelle’s haughty airs and gaudy style and even the big pearl-handled.45 shoved pirate-style into her belt did little to distract from her poor appearance. She was a long-nosed thin-mouthed female, hard-pocked and plainer’n stale bread, also wide of waist and slack of buttock from too much time spent on her back with her feet flat to her low ceiling. Her dark skin, leathered by the sun, and the coarse black hair she pinned up under slouch hats when it wasn’t down behind like an old horse tail, made her look more halfbreed than her husband. But Mandy decided that this old sack must have some good in her, and needing a woman to confide in, she let it slip to her new friend that her husband had been unjustly accused of murder in the state of Florida and obliged to flee. Since Belle was the widow of two killers and domiciled with a third, the news that I might be a dangerous man only enhanced me in her eyes (despite her devotion to Mandy) and when I ignored her awful wiles and leering blandishments, she became furious. Tearing up my lease and flinging my payment in my face, she claimed she’d been warned by the Indian agent at Muskogee to harbor no more fugitives from justice lest she forfeit her precarious claim on Indian land.
Refusing to pick up the money, I advised her that my lease was duly paid and rode away, leaving her squalling loud and mean as a horny raccoon. A few days later she sent a formal letter stating that her land had been rented to another sharecropper, Joe Tate. That November, I persuaded Tate to have no dealings with this woman, who would only drag him into her own troubles with the law, and once Tate had backed out of his lease, I rode over to Younger’s Bend to smooth things over. Before I could even dismount, Belle screeched, “Maybe the U.S. marshals won’t come after you but the Florida authorities just might.” Hearing that threat, I felt my shadow brother stir deep in my vitals.