![]() ![]() Looking precisely nothing like the real Belle, Gene Tierney plays the title role, whom the screenplay suggests was the daughter of a Southern aristocrat.” From there, the plot has Belle seeking revenge for the fall of her Southern society. According to Rotten Tomatoes, “20th Century-Fox mixed together elements of its own Jesse James and Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, and the resultant brew was Belle Starr. That year, 20th Century Fox brought a dramatic Western very loosely based on her life to the big screen. The romantic legend of Belle Starr got a further boost in 1941. Instead, they created a persona of Belle Starr as a pistol-toting “Bandit Queen” instead of a mostly-reformed outlaw. But when dime-store novels were written about her after her death, this calm period was not the focus. Still, she settled down a bit in her years with July and also refused to harbor criminals any longer. She became common-law wife to Billy July, who also had outlaw leanings. Belle never married again, but she wasn’t through with bad, bad men. The pair also offered shelter to the James Gang members in times of need. This was the only time an arrest led to a conviction for Belle (for that’s what she was called by then.) Both she and her hubs did time in prison for horse theft. It took her just six years to get hitched to Sam Starr and start running with the Starr gang. But her very next partner was also a warrior bandit. She did leave him behind and move back with her parents before he was killed in a gunfight in 1874. Her husband, though, was a wanted criminal. She became part of the gang, mostly as a tagalong. ![]() From there, things happened pretty quickly for Myra Maybelle. He and Belle fell in love and married in November 1866. Jim Reed, a childhood friend of the Shirley family, came with them to hole up at the Shirley’s Texas spread. In 1866, the James brothers and Cole Younger gangs fled Missouri after robbing their first bank. The Shirley farm in Texas was an ideal outlaw hideout. This drove the Shirley family to Texas, where their daughter would become a legendary outlaw. ![]() The Union also burned their town, Carthage, as part of an effort to remove everyone from the border areas, no matter which side they took in the Civil War. Sometimes the bushwhackers killed their victims and any time they interacted with the Union infantry the motto was “take no prisoners.” Other warrior bandits who began the terrorist life as bushwhackers included Frank and Jesse James.īud was killed in 1864, and it was a turning point for his sister and the rest of the family. As the name implies, they would jump out of hiding to torment and steal from the locals, many of them Union-sympathizing farmers. He was one of the “ bushwhackers,” small bands of renegades who hid in the Missouri backcountry to resist the Union army’s occupation. One of her relatives who may have led her astray was an older brother, Bud. So it wasn’t a foregone conclusion she’d end up hanging out with bandits in the border states. Belle’s formal education included classical languages. Her parents were affluent and owned an inn and a tavern. She was born in Missouri February 5, 1848, and started living in Carthage, Missouri when she was two. The Wild West outlaw started life with the name Myra Maybelle Shirley. ![]()
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