Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

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.

In January of 1889, I moved my family into a cabin on the land of Jackson Rowe. Another tenant was Belle’s son Eddie Reed, who told me his sister Rosie Lee had seen my hard expression from Belle’s doorway and had warned her mother to make no more threats against Ed Watson. On February third, on the eve of her forty-third birthday, one of the many worthy citizens who had it in for Mrs. Starr took care of that troublous bitch once and for all, shooting her out of her saddle on the muddy river road south of my cabin. The burial took place at Younger’s Bend at noon on Wednesday. Because of that scrape over the lease, it seemed prudent to attend, and poor worried Mandy insisted upon going with me. We crossed on the ferry and rode up the ridge to Belle’s place, where Cherokee relatives and a few outlaw friends were standing silently before the cabin, squinting hard at every rider who appeared. Sure enough, my arrival caused a stir. No one spoke out but Jim Starr stalked me, flaunting his suspicions.

The casket lay inside the one-room cabin, attended by stone-faced Indian women sitting in tight rows. There was no service and no chanting, only the suspense of unfinished business.

Armed men carried the coffin from the cabin and set it down near the rough grave. When the lid was removed, the Starr clan and other Cherokees dropped ceremonial corn bread on Belle’s tight-lipped remains, after which the box was lowered into the pit. I stepped forward to help Jim Cates (who had built the coffin) bank the grave, but I had hardly touched the shovel when Starr and his sidekick Charley Acton drew their guns and yelled at me to put my hands up. Starr pointed his weapon at my eyes, accusing me of murdering his woman, as his Indians grunted beady-eyed assent, without expression.

Unsurprised, I remained steady and my wife did, too, despite the likelihood that her husband would be gunned down before her eyes. I did not trust Starr, who was very drunk, to keep his head, so instead of raising my hands as ordered, I grabbed hold of Cates and yanked him between me and the guns. Cates implored me to raise my hands or else we’d both be killed, and I finally did so, but not before saying to Jim Starr, “If you kill me, Jim, you will be killing the wrong man.” Mandy thought it was my calm demeanor that persuaded those Indians I deserved a hearing, and eventually Starr, growling, put his gun away.

That evening, however, Starr came to my house with other Indians and put me under citizen’s arrest, intending to take me to the U.S. District Court at Fort Smith. He finally agreed to my demand that Jackson Rowe and others be permitted to accompany our party as witnesses. We left for Fort Smith that very evening, stopping for the night at a farm along the way. Next day, February 8, I was marched before the Commissioner in the U.S. District Court for a preliminary hearing. Starr filed a formal affidavit “that Edgar A. Watson, did in the Indian Country… feloniously, willfully, premeditatedly and of his malice aforethought kill and murder Belle Starr, against the peace and dignity of the United States.” Deputized, he was given two weeks to assemble witnesses and evidence for a second hearing to determine whether the defendant Watson should go to trial. And so I sat cooling my heels in jail with my lease still unsettled and spring planting near. Crop or no crop, that was fine by me. I felt a lot safer behind bars than waiting for the murderous Tom Starr in the Cherokee Nation.

“I know nothing about the murder and will have no trouble establishing my innocence,” I told the publisher of the Van Buren (Arkansas) Press-Argus , who quoted me from an interview in the jail. “I know very little of Belle Starr, though she for some reason, I know not what, has been prejudiced against me. I am thirty-three years old and have a wife who is living with me. I have never had trouble with anyone and have no idea who killed her.” Quoted in the same edition, Jim Starr said: “I knew enough to satisfy me that Watson was the murderer. We buried Belle at Younger’s Bend and I went after Watson and got him. He showed no fight or I would have killed him”-lies, of course.