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Dangerous Women in History that the Law Couldn’t Contain

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2021 35 min

Dangerous bandit queen Belle Starr. Dallas Gateway

28. From Criminal Groupie to Dangerous Wild West Outlaw

When the Civil War broke out, Belle Starr’s family were Southern sympathizers, and her brother rode with Confederate guerrillas. He was killed in 1864, and between that and the dangerous war conditions as both sides’ forces crisscrossed Missouri, Belle’s family upped stakes and moved to Texas. In 1866, her childhood acquaintances the James and Younger brothers, now joined together in the James-Younger Gang, robbed a Missouri bank and fled to Texas, where Belle’s father often sheltered such fugitives in his house.

Among their number was a former pro-Confederate guerrilla turned horse thief named Jim Reed. An associate of the James and Younger brothers, Reed had been Belle’s crush ever since she was a teenager in Missouri. Soon after they renewed their acquaintance in Texas, the duo got married, and eventually had two children. The family eventually fled to California to avoid an arrest warrant for Reed because of an Arkansas murder. Not long after, Belle graduated from criminal groupie to Wild West outlaw in her own right.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.