Red Lands Outlaw: the Ballad of Henry Starr

by Phil Truman

  Still keeping the rifle pointed at Henry, the boy moved over to where the pistol lay, and picked it up. He stuck it in his pant waist and headed for the stockyards. By the time he came around the back corner of the land office building, all the outlaws had mounted and started to ride off, except for one. The rider, leading another horse by the reins, came straight to where the boy stood, apparently heading back to Main Street to get his fallen comrade. The boy raised the short-barreled rifle and fired.

  The bullet hit Estes in the left collarbone and ricocheted into his neck. The impact flung him backwards almost unseating him, but he recovered. He swung his horse about and spurred him away, dropping the reins of the other horse and leaving her behind. Estes had ridden out of sight by the time the boy had opened the rifle’s bolt and put in another round.

  Back on the street, a small crowd had started to gather around Henry. He still lay in the street, seemingly holding court with the curious mob.

  Sam Patrick and his teller returned to their bank a good hour or so after Henry Starr and his gang had first entered the door. Once there, they found little Lorrie Hughes still sitting dutifully in the chair Henry had assigned her. However, the dozen or so quarters the outlaw had given her no longer remained in her hands. She’d deposited those well down into the pockets of her coat.

  Chapter Two

  Bill Tilghman slowly brushed the whisker tips of his mustache over and over with his left thumb and forefinger, moving each from the middle of his upper lip outward, as he stared down at Henry. In all his law enforcement days, he’d never known so audacious, so brash, so prolific an outlaw as the man lying there in that bed.

  Henry floated in and out of a morphine-induced haze while Tilghman stood there looking at him. Lewis Estes, his neck and shoulder and chest wrapped in bandages, in a bed across the room, lay there out cold.

  “Henry,” Tilghman said in a firm voice. Getting no response, he called out the bank robber’s name again, this time a little louder.

  Henry’s eyes fluttered open. He blinked several times, squinting to get his eyes and mind focused on the form standing beside his bed.

  “Well, hello, Bill,” Henry slurred. “What the hell’re you doing here?”

  Tilghman stopped stroking his mustache, and hooked both his thumbs in his vest’s watch pockets. “Come to arrest you, Henry.” He jerked his head to his right in a pointing gesture. “You and that other fella over there.”

  Henry raised his head a little, and looked over at the bed where his patched up colleague lay. “I believe that there is Lewis Estes,” he said. “Guess he caught a little lead, too.”

  Tilghman nodded. “Soon as you boys are able to travel, I’m taking you back to Oklahoma City to await trial. And it’s a good thing I come, too. Folks here in this town are callin’ to lynch you.”

  “Why, hell, Bill, I’m crippled,” Henry responded.

  “Yeah, you are that,” Tilghman said. “But Doc Hanson said he didn’t think it’d be permanent. Boy named Curry shot you in the butt. Bullet broke up your leg bone there, but the doc set it back as best he could. He thinks it’ll heal awright, but figures you’ll probably have something of a limp from here on out.”

  Henry took Tilghman’s prognosis in with a solemn expression. “First time I ever been shot,” he said. “And by a damn kid to boot.”

  “He’s used to shooting living things,” said Tilghman. “Butcher’s kid, I hear. Shot your partner over there, too. Some pretty fair shootin’, considerin’ what he had to shoot with.”

  Henry considered all this, scrunching his eyebrows in a look of puzzlement. “I thought you’d quit marshalling, Bill. Ain’t you a politician, or something, now?”

  “State senator,” Tilghman said. “But I’m also Chief of Police over in Oklahoma City. Town marshal here is an old friend of mine, so he called me. What you and your boys did was a federal crime, so you’ll have to stand trial in a federal court.”

  Henry nodded. “Yeah, I reckon so,” he said.

  Tilghman snorted and shook his head. “I swear, Henry. You just about beat anything I ever seen in an outlaw.”

  “Why, thank ya, Bill.” A pleased smile creased Starr’s face. Coming from as renowned a lawman as Bill Tilghman, Henry considered the man’s comment a supreme compliment.

  “I didn’t mean that as a tribute, Henry. I meant you’ve had several chances to straighten yourself out. When I arrested you down in New Mexico back in oh-eight, you promised me you’d never rob another bank. But in the year since you got out of Canon City Prison, there’s been a whole passel here in Oklahoma with your brand on ’em. And now you pull this double dutch.” Tilghman shook his head and laughed quietly. “I hear you were a model prisoner in Canon City. Warden even made you a trustee; sent you out as a walkin’ boss on the road gangs. But you just keep reverting back to your old ways. How many times have you been in prison? Two? Three times? This here’ll make one more.”

  Henry stiffened a little. “I reckon I’ve robbed more banks than ever anyone did,” he said with pride.

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s true,” Tilghman said. He pulled a chair out from the wall and sat down on it, crossing his legs. He removed his derby and wiped the sweat from the inside headband. “The question is why? You sure ain’t got nothing to show from it. And look at you now; your future prospects ain’t too bright.”

  Henry stared back at Tilghman, but he didn’t have a good response. The lawman had pretty much nailed it. A reason existed as to why Henry kept on committing bank robbery after bank robbery, but he didn’t exactly know what it was, didn’t know how to express it. All he knew, he couldn’t stop doing it. He had quite a few acquaintances and relatives who drank alcohol, and the more they drank, the more they wanted. Finally, they just couldn’t do without it. Henry didn’t drink; didn’t smoke, either, but like the effect of alcohol on some of his red brothers, that’s exactly what bank robbing had done to him.

  Setting his hat on the foot of Henry’s bed, Tilghman fetched a short thin cigar from the breast pocket of his suit coat, and lit it up. “If you took a hard look at it, Henry, I ’spect you’d see it wasn’t so much the money you want as the act of robbing itself.”

  The lawman blew an acrid cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling. “How long you been outlawin’ now?” he asked.

  Henry tried to shift his position, but the pain in his hip and leg stopped him. “Hell, I don’t know, Bill. A few years now.” Since he’d decided to make outlawing his career back in ’92, Henry thought he’d done about two dozen armed robberies, mostly banks, since then. “I’d be obliged,” Henry said. “It you’d call in the doc to give me some more of that painkiller.”

  “Why, sure, Henry. I’ll do that,” Tilghman said as he casually flicked the cigar ash onto the floor. “But I was just curious as to how much you got away with. According to what I know, it ain’t been all that much.”

  With the exception of that bank in Bentonville, Arkansas, Henry and those with him never netted more than about $2,500, and usually less than a thousand. Once he’d gotten no more than $180.

  “I think I done awright,” Henry said. He knew Tilghman was trying to get him to admit to his recent activity. Why in the past five months alone he, and the bunch that attended Henry’s robberies, had accounted for fourteen holdups, two in one day back in October, and five alone that past January. And now, even though he and Estes didn’t make it out, his gang had pulled off the never-before-accomplished double bank hold-up; something even the Dalton Gang hadn’t been able to pull off. The fact that most of Henry’s outfit made off with the money, made it so. By any standard, the quantity, if not the quality, made for a remarkable record, which most newspapers in the Indian Territory, and now the young state of Oklahoma, had reported with relish. Several speculated that the members of the Henry Starr Gang were the culprits, basing their conjecture on other reports where witnesses told of Henry announcing himself before he robbed them.

  During the latter part of the Nineteen
th Century, the northeastern and eastern parts of the Indian Territory—more or less governed by the semi-sovereign Cherokee and Choctaw tribes—were conducive to outlawry. Men, and on occasion a few women, could range into the neighboring states, commit crimes, and retreat back into The Territory without much fear of reprisal. Judge Isaac Parker, the federal judge in Fort Smith, Arkansas, whose jurisdiction included the Indian Territory, would often send U.S. Marshals, themselves not much more than common thugs, into the woolly land to chase down felons. But the tribes, with their own governing bodies, courts, and police forces, seemed reluctant to allow any extradition, and usually refused at the point of a gun. That was especially so if the party or parties in question had Indian lineage.

  This became the land into which Henry Starr was born, some three-eighths Cherokee, in 1873. At the age of eighteen, he had his second run-in with the law, and his first meeting with Judge Parker on trumped-up charges of horse-thieving. Despite his innocence, he never made that court date, but instead jumped bail and decided to dedicate his life to crime, specializing in robbing banks.

  Henry was a good looking man, dark and handsome. Despite his native blood being less than half, he “showed his Indin,” as they said, and considered himself totally Cherokee. He also had a good wit with a fair amount of charm. Kind to women, children, and dogs, people mostly liked him, even some of the jailers and lawmen he’d come to know over the years. The famous Bill Tilghman was one of those.

  Henry tried to start out his life on a lawful track. In his early teen years he thought he’d become a rancher, marry his sweetheart, and live out a normal life in the Cherokee Nation part of the I.T. But fate, bigotry, and politics conspired against him.

  When Henry was sixteen, the long-running blood feud between two Cherokee political factions crossed his path, a path upon which some of Henry’s ancestors had played a prominent role.

  A rift existed in the Cherokee Nation dating back to the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. The treaty involved the cession of sovereign Cherokee land—then in the young American south—to the United States government, and the subsequent removal of the Cherokee people west into the Indian Territory. The split in the nation came between those who’d signed the treaty, led by John Ridge, and those who strongly opposed it, led by John Ross. Each side, the Ridge men and the Ross men, hated the other, and spent much time killing one another. Henry’s grandfather, Tom Starr, created so much havoc in his vendetta against Ross men, for the killing of his own father during this tribal civil war, that it became known as the Tom Starr War.

  Many legends arose about Tom. One says he killed a hundred men. Another says he once rode more than a hundred miles to kill one of his father’s murderers. Hardly a Cherokee family remained untouched by Tom Starr’s bloody retribution. And the family name Starr, in the generations that followed, became greatly feared and hated within the two largest tribes in the eastern Indian Territory—the Cherokee and the Choctaw.

  Henry’s course toward law-breaking began with a frame-up. One day the sixteen-year-old ranch hand was stopped on the road by two tribal marshals. He was on a return trip into town where he’d been sent with a wagon to get supplies. Henry knew the men, although he didn’t much like them. They were both Ross men—Ben Turtle and Stand Whitehawk.

  The big one, Whitehawk, held a rifle with its butt resting on his right thigh, the barrel pointed skyward. He came right to the point. “We was told you got some whiskey on your wagon, Starr.”

  “This here’s Mr. Roberts’s wagon,” Henry said. “I’uz in Nowata getting some supplies for him. Ain’t no whiskey in it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Whitehawk responded. “Well, I ’spect we oughta take a look see.”

  Deputy Turtle had already dismounted and gone to the wagon. He pulled back a corner of a tarp at the front of the wagon bed revealing a small keg of whiskey. Turtle held it up.

  “Ain’t no law agin bein’ a liar, Starr, but it looks like we got ya on haulin’ spirits,” Whitehawk said, grinning.

  “I didn’t know that was there,” Henry said, rising from the wagon seat. “I told you, this is a borrowed wagon.”

  “Well, alls I know is you’re travelin’ down a territory road with whiskey, and we got to bring you in for that. ‘Sides, Roberts is a teetotaler, so I doubt you can lay it on him.” Whitehawk lowered his rifle barrel resting it on his left forearm, the muzzle pointing at Henry’s chest. “You can sort out what you know and don’t know with Judge Glory over in Muskogee. You bein’ a Starr and all, I reckon he’ll go easy on ya.” Deputy Turtle laughed loudly, and Deputy Whitehawk joined him.

  The judge Henry would be hauled before at the Whiskey Court in Muskogee was Joshua Glory, the son of Ethan Glory, one of the men Henry’s grandfather, Tom, is said to have killed.

  Although he maintained his innocence, Henry got a little jail time and was fined one hundred dollars. Still, it was a message of things to come for the sixteen-year-old grandson of Tom Starr.

  Not two months later Henry got accused of horse-thieving. It turned out to be a misunderstanding; a curious misunderstanding between Henry and a prominent rancher, who just so happened to be a Ross man. Henry was arraigned in Judge Parker’s court and bound over for trial, but the judge had a rare soft spot for the teenager and let him out on bail. Henry’s cousin Kale Starr, a well-respected landowner who promised Parker he’d return the boy for trial, posted his bail, but Henry ran off and hid, failing to appear.

  Judge Parker sent two deputy U.S. marshals into the Territory to bring the boy back to Fort Smith. The deputies found nineteen-year-old Henry on a road outside the settlement of Lenapah, and one of the marshals, Floyd Wilson, tried to shoot him. Unfortunately for Wilson, he missed. A deadeye shooter, Henry shot back and sent a .45 slug through Wilson’s heart.

  Henry knew Wilson by reputation, as did most in the Nations. He was a vicious and cruel man, who’d killed two Cherokees in cold blood, one a thirteen-year-old boy. But he’d been acquitted of those murders by an all-white jury in Fort Smith. There’d been another time when he’d brutally raped and beaten a Choctaw woman, but no charges were ever brought against him, despite eye witnesses. No being in heaven or on earth, white or red, was sorry to see Floyd Wilson shot dead, but when an Indian killed a white man in 1892, no matter how despicable the victim, and even in self-defense, it was still considered a crime.

  Wilson was the first man Henry had shot and killed, and as it would turn out the only one ever, but it cemented his life in crime. Henry decided that if everybody around him wanted him to be an outlaw, then, by God, that’s what he’d be. He sealed that bargain with the Devil by shortly thereafter robbing a train depot in Nowata, and the general stores in two other towns.

  Less than a year after his killing of Deputy Wilson, Henry got into a running gun battle with some Indian police in the town of Bartlesville. They’d gone after Henry mainly because he was a Starr. His recent robberies had only given the Ross men a legitimate excuse to chase him down and kill him, like the son of a dog they considered him. It didn’t much matter to them that Henry was wanted for killing a white man, even the vile Floyd Wilson; but they’d take the reward for bringing him in, just the same. He escaped their treachery, though, and robbed his way south into more politically-friendly territory.

  Henry didn’t discriminate between his red brothers and white men, though. He distrusted them both with equal and balanced enmity.

  Chapter Three

  Spring 1893

  Indian Territory

  Henry didn’t quite know what to make of the boy. He stood there in the street strapped with six-shooters, his brown leather hat thrown back onto his shoulder blades, held there by its drawstring around his neck. He wore a faded blue cotton shirt and well-worn jeans tucked into plain cowhide boots, but he didn’t appear to be a farm or cow hand. His stance, the tight leather gloves he wore, and his surly attitude made him look like a range tough, a gunslinger wanabe. Henry himself was only nineteen, but he judged this yout
h to be no more than about fourteen or fifteen. He had a boy’s face, pocked with pimples, and no whiskers. He was a white kid, and a fair-haired one at that. The late afternoon sun almost gleamed off his thin blond hair, and he stared back at Henry with a look of insolence.

  The boy had called out to Henry as he and Frank started up the wooden steps leading to the general store. “Henry Starr?” he’d yelled from twenty feet away. That annoyed Henry because he and Frank were going to rob the store they were about to enter, and it drew attention to him. The name Henry Starr had gained some notoriety in that part of the country, especially amongst the mercantile, as several of them had recently been robbed by him and his partner Frank.

  Henry stood with one foot on the top step looking back at the youth. On the one hand he was pleased that the kid knew who he was; on the other, calling out his name on the town street of Inola at that particular moment was downright inconvenient and annoying. From the looks of it, the boy appeared to be calling him out for a gunfight, but Henry couldn’t be sure. He turned on the steps and walked back the twenty feet between him and the adolescent. Henry didn’t know if the kid would draw on him or not, but his irritation prevented him from calculating the risk.

  When he stood two feet from the boy, he looked him in the eye and asked him, “How’d you know my name?”

  Although three inches shorter than Henry, the lad didn’t appear intimidated.

  “Didn’t really,” the youngster said with a smirk. “I’uz looking for a Indin about your description, and when I saw you making for that store, I thought I’d ask. A Indin named Henry Starr is said to be fond of robbing general stores in these parts.”

  Henry placed his right hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. His partner, standing to one side of the boy, did the same. “You after the reward money, son. Is that it?”

  “Aw, hell no,” said the boy, still smirking. “Can’t make no money on rewards. I want to join up with you.”