27. The Belle Who Got a Kick Out of Being a Bandit Queen
In 1869 Belle Starr, her husband, and two other outlaws kidnapped and tortured an elderly Creek Indian until he told them where he had hidden about $30,000 in gold. With their share of the loot, she and her husband then returned to Texas, where Belle relished playing up the role of dangerous bandit queen to the hilt. Her hubby tried to walk the straight and narrow for a while and took a stab at farming. He soon grew restless, however, and returned to his outlaw ways.
The couple resumed their social and criminal ties with the James-Younger Gang, and fell in with the Starr clan, a Cherokee Indian family infamous for dealing in whiskey and stealing cattle and horses in the Indian Territory, today’s Oklahoma. The outlaw life finally caught up with Belle’s husband in 1874, when he was killed in a gunfight with one of his criminal associates. The widowed Belle got into a relationship with a Cherokee outlaw named Buford “Blue Duck”, before she finally married another Cherokee criminal named Sam Starr, and settled with him in the Indian Territory.