One Wild Woman in the Old West, and Why Her Story Matters
In Dane Huckelbridge’s Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West, Huckelbridge focusses in on the long-forgotten story of one woman to illuminate an entire chapter of American History, much of which was new to me. I had a passing understanding of the years of the “wild west” when western expansion following the Civil War exploded and outlaws ran free, raiding trains and holding up banks, stealing horses and guns and goods. But I had no idea of the roles played by both whites and Native Americans in both establishing law and order, and in disrupting it. Emigrants to the expanding western territories included whites from Appalachia who lived — and fought — by codes of honor grounded in their backgrounds as transplanted Scottish, Irish, and German clans, while many of the Native Americans had been driven from their southern homelands not only by whites but by internal strife between tribes (I had no idea about the complex negotiations between southern tribes not only with the Federal government but with each other, and knew little about the devastations of their internal civil wars). Many Native Americans chose to move west rather than be forcibly moved by the Federal Government (often bringing along with them the enslaved persons they had relied on for labor). They also brought with them sophisticated expertise in governance, diplomacy, farming, commerce — and warfare — which led them to their prosperity and success, for a time, in the expanding western settlements.
I certainly had never heard of Belle Starr. Her life presents a rich example not only of the outlaw mentality of the wild west, with her own exploits and adventures (she was a compatriot of Jesse James), but also of the complicated relationships between the west’s white and Native American settlers, with her Appalachian background and then her marriage to Tom Starr, a Cherokee warrior. Belle’s story offers a sobering portrait of just how vicious, desperate, and often pathetic those western outlaws (and settlers!) were, trying any way they could to get a piece of the American pie. Huckelbridge pieces together the story of Belle Starr from a variety of sources, and by filling in unknowns with well-founded guesses, he brings to life a woman who is as confounding as she is strong, as greedy for money as she was for fame, but who is also anxiously searching for security, family, and respect from outsiders. In an era that celebrated Annie Oakley for her riding and gunslinging skills, Belle was just as talented on horse and in arms, but her quest for fame and fortune was more gritty, more desperate, and much more grounded in the true story of the late 19th century wild west.
Belle’s story matters not only because Huckelbridge does such a great job telling it — this book reads like a rollicking novel, riveting to the last page — but also because this is the American story where one person’s grit and determination, characteristics we Americans often claim as exclusively our own, guide her to innovative but not always legal tactics for getting what she wanted; her duplicity, greed, and melancholy for a rose-colored past could also be seen as national traits. And so, Belle’s story is as riveting as it is instructive, both a wild ride into the past and a warning of where we’ve been and what we should guard against.
