Belle Starr

Myra Maybelle Shirley grew up on a Missouri farm that her family lost to Union raiders during the Civil War, and the family's resentment of the occupying army pulled her early into the orbit of Confederate guerrillas, reportedly including the young Jesse James. She married a series of men on the wrong side of the law — horse thief Jim Reed first, then the Cherokee outlaw Sam Starr, whose name she kept — and by the 1880s was running a ranch at Younger's Bend in Indian Territory that doubled as a safe harbor for rustlers and fugitives passing through.

Starr was convicted only once, serving nine months in a federal prison in Detroit in 1883 for helping steal horses, a sentence that became useful proof for the newspapermen who had already started calling her the Bandit Queen of the Indian Territory. The title overstated her actual crimes, which ran mostly to receiving stolen livestock and harboring wanted men, but it sold magazines, and Starr — who dressed for the part in a feathered hat and rode sidesaddle with a pistol visible — did little to correct the record.

On February 3, 1889, two days before her 41st birthday, Starr was shot from ambush and left to die on a muddy road near her ranch. Suspects included her own son, a neighbor she had fallen out with over land, and her husband Sam's killer seeking revenge by proxy, but no one was ever convicted. The murder went into the same undocumented fog as most of her life, which is part of why the dime-novel version of Belle Starr — more legend than record — is still the one most people know.