Henry Starr, Last of the Real Badmen by Glenn ShirleyReview by: Walter L. BrownThe Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 1965), pp. 369-371Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40022881 .

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Henry Starr, Last of the Real Badmen. By Glenn Shirley. (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1965. Pp. ix, 208. Illustrations. $4.50.)

Book Reviews

Henry Starr was born December 2, 1873, near Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, When he was eleven, he was forced to leave school and become the family breadwinner on his father's farm. Two years later his father died, and his mother remarried within a few months. Henry disliked his stepfather and periodically ran away from home during his early teens; he had left home permanently by the time he was fifteen or sixteen to become a cowboy on ranches around Nowata.

Henry attributed his entrance to a life of crime upon two brushes with the law in 1890 and 1891. In the first case he was fined severely for peddling whiskey, and in the second he was jailed at Fort Smith on what he claimed was a false charge of horse stealing. Though discharged early in 1892 for lack of evidence, he was, he says, so embittered that he resolved to become a bandit. In July 1892 he and two confederates robbed the Missouri-Pacific station at No- wata. Henry was promptly arrested and jailed at Fort Smith, but was released on bond. When Henry failed to appear for trial, his bondsmen offered a reward for his capture and the United States Commissioner issued a warrant for his arrest.

On December 13, 1892, Henry killed Floyd Wilson, a deputy who tried to serve this warrant on him. Evading an intensive manhunt, Henry Starr's band in 1893 robbed a store in Choteau, a store and train station in Inola, a bank in Caney, Kansas, a passenger train at Pryor, and a bank in Bcntonvillc, Arkansas, after which the gang broke up and dispetsed. Starr fled with his seventeen-year-old

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370 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

sweetheart, whom he never married, to Colorado Springs, where he was captured in July 1893.

Brought back to Fort Smith Starr was twice convicted of the murder of Wilson and twice sentenced by Judge Isaac Parker to be hanged. Both convictions were reversed by the Supreme Court of the United States, and a third trial, after Parker's retirement, resulted in a conviction for manslaughter. In January 1898, after 5 years in jail at Fort Smith, Starr was sentenced to a total of 15 years to be spent in the federal prison at Columbus, Ohio. A com- mutation of his sentence by President Theodore Roosevelt resulted in his release on January 16, 1903.

Five years later, in 1908, he resumed his banditry and robbed banks at Tyro, Kansas, and Amity, Colorado. Ar- rested in 1909 in Arizona, he was returned to Colorado and given a sentence of from 7 to 25 years. Good behavior brought him a parole in 1913.

He settled in Holly, Colorado, where he soon created a town scandal by seducing a local merchant's wife. In 1914 he violated his parole by leaving the state with this woman, "Laura Williams." About this time, between September 1914 and January 1915, a series of 14 bank robberies oc- curred in Oklahoma. It is not certain that Starr committed all of these crimes, but he was identified in connection with one and a reward of $1,000 was offered for his arrest, dead or alive. On March 27, 1915, he was wounded and captured during a double bank robbery at Stroud, Oklahoma.

He confessed his guilt and was sentenced, August 2, 1915, to 25 years in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Again his good behavior won him a parole in March 1919. He re- turned to Tulsa to live, and soon became connected with a motion picture company located in the city. He was the star, portraying himself, in the silent film, A Debtor to the Law} in which the double robbery at Stroud was re-enacted. The venture failed by late 1920. On February 18, 1921, he and three companions drove into Harrison, Arkansas, and attempted to rob the People's National Bank. A bank of-

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BOOK REVIEWS 37 1

ficial, W. J. Meyer, fatally wounded Starr, who was aban- doned at the site by his fleeing confederates. Before he died he boasted to his doctors in Harrison: "I've robbed more banks than any man in America."

Author Shirley's main sources for Starr's life are Starr's autobiography published in 1914 and a series of articles published immediately after Starr's death in the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle, and which apparently were based on the 1914 autobiography but with embellishments. Shirley also used the federal court records for Starr's murder trial, and newspapers for other information. He corrects some of the errors about Starr's life made in other books, but his in- clination to accept Starr's so-called autobiography as his- torical truth makes his own book unreliable as a history. Shirley also seems to have as much animosity toward Judge Parker as Starr had, and he sees qualities- i. e., intelligence and cleverness- in Starr which the man obviously did not possess. Shirley's illustrations, copies of contemporary photo- graphs, are excellent, and his volume is indexed.

University of Arkansas Walter L. Brown

Opie Read, American Humorist, [1852-1939]. By Robert L. Morris (New York: Helios Books, 1965. Pp. 247. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $4.95.) Born in Tennessee in 1852, Opie Read grew to man-

hood during the stormy years of the Civil War and Recon- struction era. Though he was disdainful of formal edu- cation, he read generously enough of Simms and Kennedy, and heard and observed enough all around him, to become a firm believer in the plantation myth of the Old South. And like most Southerners of his day, he was reared as a white supremacist. These two ideas- the legendary planta- tion system and white supremacy- would become twin themes in most of his novels set in the South.

A romantic dreamer, he became an itinerant printer in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. In our state he worked on newspapers in Carlisle, Conway, and Little Rock between

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