Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  YOUNGER’S BEND

  Under the bluffs out of the prairie winds, the Canadian River country had good alluvial soil down in the bottoms. Neither whites nor blacks could own Indian land, but a woman shacked up with an Indian leased me a good field in the Cherokee territory. This female became Mandy’s best friend in the Nations, making a fine show of generosity to our small children when we first arrived and didn’t know a soul amongst our neighbors. I will grant she was big-hearted in her way, with her door wide open to strangers and her person, too.

  By her own account, Mrs. Myra Maybelle Reed preferred male company to that of the rough women of the Territory. She made an exception of my Mandy, a well-educated lady whose friendship improved Maybelle’s repute, fallen low due to her bedtime predilection for bad Indians and breeds.

  Maybelle’s first husband was Jim Reed, who rode with Quantrill, the James boys, and the Youngers during the bloody Border Wars between Kansas and Missouri. Like a lot of armed riders who passed themselves off as guerrilla fighters, Reed was a killer by inclination and by trade who only joined up with Will Quantrill when those men turned outlaw. After the War, he gambled and raced horses for some years around Fort Smith, joined in armed robberies, shot a bystander while holding up the Austin–San Antonio stage, and generally made a nuisance of himself until the early seventies, when a former partner with an eye to the reward deprived him of his life when he wasn’t looking.

  The Younger boys were the wild seed of the richest slaveowner in Jackson County, Missouri, who happened to be a family friend of Maybelle’s daddy, Judge John Shirley. She was never Cole Younger’s lady friend the way she claimed, but later in life, her daughter Rosie Reed took the name Pearl Younger for professional purposes. Her son Eddie remained faithful to his daddy’s name and his outlaw profession, too, and even his early end by bullet, as shall be seen.

  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.

  CHEROKEE FUNERAL

  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 b
efore 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.

  On the twenty-first, Starr returned to Fort Smith with Belle’s two offspring and ten other witnesses; the hearing commenced on February 22 and ended the next day. Some of my neighbors gave depositions, mentioned a quarrel, said Watson lived close by the murder scene. But Farmer Watson, who had a good reputation with the merchants as a man who paid his bills, made a better impression than Horse Thief Starr. The Argus de-scribed the accused as a man of “fair complexion, light sunburnt whiskers, and blue eyes” who was “decidedly good-looking and talked well.” Furthermore, he appeared to be “the very opposite of a man who would be supposed to commit such a crime.”

  Jim Starr’s socalled evidence being deemed circumstantial, he was granted an extension while he sought more witnesses, but very little new evidence was forthcoming. On March 4, the plaintiff ’s case was judged too weak to merit the indictment of an honest white American—“a quiet, hard-working man whose local reputation is good,” said the Fort Smith Era next day. Even so, I had spent two weeks in jail before the Hanging Judge threw out the case.

  Furious, Jim Starr rode away to join an outlaw band. He died less than a year later, shot down in the Chickasaw Nation by a sheriff ’s deputy who reported that the dying Starr confessed to killing his own wife with Watson’s gun. By that time, it was widely rumored that Old Tom Starr had killed her to avenge the death of his beloved son Sam, whom she had led into bad company. Pony Starr declared that a white rancher had hired a cowhand to dispose of her and others suspected an outlaw named John Middleton. Ed Watson was the only suspect ever brought to court for the murder of Belle Starr but many others would be nominated for that honor.

  With her death, Maybelle was transformed by the newspapers from the ill-favored consort of robbers to the beautiful Civil War spy, border hellion, and Queen of the Outlaws whose lovers were the terror of the West. Her legend got off to a flying start on the day of her funeral in a brief news flash in the Press-Argus, which made four errors in its single sentence: It is reported that the notorious Indian (sic) woman Bell (sic) Starr was shot dead on Monday (sic) at Eufaula (sic), Indian Territory. The “woman” part was accurate but only barely. Next, a Fort Smith editor filed the following dispatch, duly printed on the front page of the New York Times:

  Word has been received from Eufala, Indian Territory, that Belle Starr was killed there Sunday night. Belle was the wife of Cole Younger [and]the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders. She married Cole Younger directly after the war, but left him and joined a band of outlaws that operated in the Indian Territory. She had been arrested for murder and robbery a score of times, but always managed to escape.

  After the first sentence, this report is inaccurate in every last detail.

  Since Belle’s son Eddie had sworn publicly that he would “slaughter that old sow,” it seemed rather curious that no one wondered if young Reed might not have been the killer, or even if Reed and Mr. Watson, who were neighbors at Jack Rowe’s, had not collaborated in the killing, all the more likely since on that fatal Sunday, Reed had left those premises not long before his mother’s arrival, just as I had. Called by the prosecution in the hope he would testify against me, Eddie never once mentioned my name.

  Dr. Jesse Mooney, who had tended Eddie after a savage beating from his mother, concluded that her son had been her killer, having been told this in so many words by Rosie Lee Reed, alias Pearl Younger, who had covered for her brother by throwing suspicion on me. Rosie Lee related to Dr. Mooney that when she found Belle dying in the road, she lifted her head from the bloody puddle and held her in her arms, at which point Belle opened her eyes and whispered, “Baby, your darned brother done this. I seen him across the fence before he cracked down on me.” Mercifully Pearl seemed unaware that her brother climbed the fence and walked over to his mother and fired a second shot into her face. Otherwise, her account was pretty accurate. I know that because I saw him do it. I was there.

  A STRING OF PONIES

  Unwelcome now in Tom Starr country, I leased a farm in Crawford County, Arkansas. Having lost a month in jail, I got my seed in late and had to watch the weak sprouts wither in that summer’s drought. By winter I was in serious debt, with three hungry kids and a new baby. Sonborn was ten now and helped some with the chores, but Carrie and Eddie were still toddlers who helped most when they stayed out of the way.

  We called our newborn Lucius Hampton Watson, after the family patriarch Luke Watson of Virginia and General Wade Hampton, our great Carolina hero. In ’76, General Hampton was elected governor; later, he became a U.S. senator. People voted for him even though he spoke out against segregation on the railroads. I couldn’t go along with that, not altogether, but I had to admire this rare public man who stood up for his principles, which was why I named my youngest after him. I considered “Lucius Selden Watson,” but with my lifelong nightmares about Deepwood, I thought that name might curse my little boy with evil luck.

  I had not welcomed this little feller, who looked like he had come into this world only to pule and die. Once winter set in, there were times I felt that little Lucius would be far better off dead. He brought no joy to our meager hearth but only plagued us down those cold dark days with his starved fret and yawling. Mandy was shocked when I spoke this way, and reproved me for my “brutal way of talking.” I told her that the world was brutal, man’s lot, too, so if there really was a God, she had better face God’s will. “That is your God’s will, not my God’s, Mr. Watson,” my wife said.

  We had no Christmas that year, none, no friends nor relatives nor even neighbors. Huddling with our offspring in a damp and dirty shack, doing our utmost to forget our stomachs and stay warm, we passed that winter in the nightmare sleep that famine brings, a kind of fitful hibernation. The dull cold misery of dark days without end—dark winter days all but inseparable from night—was worse than Edgefield District in the War, as if somehow I had fallen back into that hellish period. I was tormented by the children’s hollow eyes, the coughing and mute suffering, as those pinched and staring faces shrank against the bone. In my helplessness, I lay there stunned, breath cold and slow as the toad’s breath in winter mud. Poor Mandy did her gallant best to poke up my dead ashes: “Don’t lay too long without breathing, Mr. Watson. Wouldn’t want rigor mortis to set in.” But Mandy’s eyes had gone dull, too, and in the dim light from the single bleary pane, her face looked haunted.

  Was it Plato who said, Life is terrible, but it isn’t serious? Did he mean that man is a hostage to his life while held captive by death, so why take such a life seriously? Fuck it, I thought. Fuck God, fuck everything.

  One frozen day three riders with stiff faces brought a string of ponies, offering twenty dollars in advance if I would tend them for the r
est of the winter. Two did the talking while the third stayed to one side. If nobody came to claim ’em by the spring, they said, then I could sell ’em. That told me these animals were probably stolen, but I was in no place to ask hard questions.

  While those two put their heads together, counting out the coins, the third man, who’d dismounted to piss, eased alongside. He was a halfbreed man in half-uniform, a deserter from the buffalo soldiers from his looks. Says, “Watson? Any kin to a Jacob Watson?” “Reckon so,” I said. He had no time to discuss how he knew my name. “These boys are friends of Belle,” he warned under his breath. “They won’t be back. You better run this string into the Nations, sell ’em quick—either that or chase ’em off your place soon as we’re gone.” He moved away.

  I had no chance to peddle those ponies because the deputies rode in at daybreak the next morning. Pocketed my twenty dollars, lashed my wrists behind my back, and boosted me into the saddle. As we rode out behind the ponies, I heaved around to stare at my huddled family a last time, but with arms bound tight, I could not even wave.

  With bitter weather hard behind an iron sky to northward, and no man to help her and no food, Mandy had finally lost heart and sank down weeping. Though I barked at him to stay out of the way, my oldest in his thin torn jacket and split soggy boots came running and hollering amongst their stirrups until he got knocked sprawling in the muddy tracks. Poor Sonborn thought the world of me and I never did learn why, because my face stiffened at the sight of him and my heart, too. Every time I remember how he ran after me that day, I feel all wrong in my heart but I could not help it.