Petticoat Terror

BELLE STARR--Burton Rascoe--Random House ($3).

Belle Starr went on trial in 1883 at Fort Smith, Ark., for stealing horses.

Newspapermen in distant cities called her: "The Queen of the Bandits,"

"The Petticoat Terror of the Plains." In this rambling, loose book, Burton Rascoe, who spent his boyhood in Oklahoma and is still an honorary deputy of Pottawatomie County, is at pains to show that such names were not altogether deserved.

As a historian, Critic Rascoe is angrily allergic to legend. He worries old news paper accounts like a terrier, impatiently separates fact from fiction, sometimes makes the reader, impatient while doing it. He denies the legend that when one of her unlovely lovers called "Blue Duck" (see cut, p. 87} was fleeced by gamblers of $2,000, Belle stuck up the joint, took $7,000, told the flabbergasted sharpers they could get the change later.

He also denies that Belle Starr (originally Myra Belle Shirley) committed any worse crimes than larceny and mischievous arson. She loved horses and firearms and handled them admirably, was a constant consort of outlaws, but apparently never killed anyone herself. Not even her most ardent admirers called her handsome.

But she was crafty and dominating, drank and cursed like her men friends, with whom she definitely had a way.

Belle was started on the primrose path by a seducer. One day, when she was 18, Bandit Cole Younger and five other horsemen rode up to her father's farmhouse in eastern Texas. A big man with steel-blue eyes and fine, curly hair, Cole Younger, with his brothers and the James clan, had staged the country's first bank robbery --in Liberty, Tex., in 1866. He read theology on the side.

Belle called her illegitimate child Pearl Younger. She left the child with her parents, went to Dallas where she performed in dance halls, made money dealing faro, bought fancy clothes and saddles.

Before and after Cole Younger was imprisoned for murder, she took on other lovers and husbands--some of them Cherokees--in droves.

In later years Belle ran a bandit headquarters at a place she called Younger's Bend, in Indian territory. Near there, in 1889, someone fired a load of buckshot into her back while she was riding. She was buried with her jewels and one of her precious pistols, which were afterward stolen by grave robbers.

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