The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  She was still married to Sam Starr and would remain so for the rest of her brief life, but by 1884 that relationship had cooled, and she’d moved in with Blue Duck in a house in the Cherokee Nation, where they lived without an Indian residency permit, a misdemeanor in Parker’s court. Deputies escorting the tumbleweed wagon carried warrants to arrest them next time their route passed near enough to take the trouble to bring them in. But before that, Belle’s companion moved himself to the top of the priorities list when he got drunk on trade whiskey in the Flint District of the Cherokee, remembered an old insult, and emptied his revolver into a farmer named Wyrick. Whooping and whirling his horse, Blue Duck reloaded and snapped off a wild shot at an Indian boy working Wyrick’s field, missing as the boy ran for cover. He was equally off the mark minutes later when he fired three times at a neighbor named Hawkey Wolf, frightening him seriously but causing no physical injury. None who heard of this incident could come up with a reason for the visit, so it was decided the shooter was only amusing himself on this occasion.

  Blue Duck committed the additional indiscretion of boasting of the Wyrick affair over a jug of busthead in a store near Vinita. One of his listeners sent for Deputy Marshal Frank Cochran, who arrested Blue Duck and a friend said to have accompanied him on his raid. The friend was acquitted, but the jury found against Blue Duck. He was sentenced to mount the Fort Smith scaffold on July 23, 1886.

  Belle Starr was in the gallery when the sentence was pronounced. Some who knew her and were not influenced by her purple press said she had dead eyes, cold as wax, but there was plenty of fire in them that day, all of it directed at Prosecutor Clayton, who had humiliated Sam on the witness stand when the Starrs were tried for horse stealing three years before, and his remarks upon Blue Duck’s character during his turn in the dock had to her mind gone beyond the purpose of merely convicting him. Had Bailiff Winston not taken care this time to disarm her of the riding whip she carried everywhere as a sort of trademark, she’d have given the man a good lashing and she didn’t care how many chairs she had to cane in Detroit to square things with Parker. She considered Clayton a coward who used the safe cover of the courtroom to assault men who if he crossed their path in the Nations would make him wet his drawers with a hard look.

  It was a quirk of Belle’s nature that she carried no such passion against the judge for condemning her man, or for any of the five times she herself stood accused before him. She thought him a man who did his job, no more and no less than that, and he seemed as quick to lecture Clayton as his opponent at the defense table whenever he strayed over some line. For his part, Parker seemed more bemused than angered by Belle’s offenses against justice, and was possibly a bit starstruck by her reputation in the yellow journals. Certainly the sentences he passed upon her were milder than those he’d brought against men who had committed similar crimes. Belle considered him a gentleman, with all the contempt a woman of her background felt for that breed; she had, after all, acquired some of her most effective weapons at the Carthage Academy for Young Ladies. She took particular care selecting a dress and some delicate scent for her appearances in court.

  The gavel came down on Blue Duck’s case at the end of January. While he was in the old jail, listening to George Maledon testing the trap and his ropes, Belle returned to the Nations and Sam Starr.

  Sam had never lost his interest in her, and had demonstrated the point by trailing a man she’d dallied with shortly after their return from Michigan and removing his face with a charge of buckshot. The outlaw wasn’t as shrewd as his infamous father, welcoming her back without question. Blue Duck’s blunder and conviction seemed to him sufficient cause for her affections to fade. Sam was still in this frame of mind some weeks later, when he fled a posse of Cherokee Lighthorse over some old difference of opinion and jumped his horse off a twenty-foot cliff into the Canadian River. The dive was reckoned the longest in equestrian history, and the fact that horse and rider survived and swam to freedom gave him the edge for a while over old Tom Starr.

  This episode, and Starr’s enforced absence thereafter, threw Belle’s plans seriously out of gear. Her real motive in coming back to him was to assemble a new criminal enterprise and raise money for a brilliant lawyer to appeal to President Cleveland for Blue Duck’s pardon.

  Despite the stories told about her, Belle was strictly an adjunct, and no leader. She was arrested in short order after she and three men of Sam’s acquaintance were accused of robbing an elderly man named Farrell and his three grown sons in the Choctaw Nation. She was said to have been dressed in male gear at the time—a man’s wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, and duck canvas shirt and trousers, as endemic in that country as lederhosen in the Swiss Alps—but still riding in ladies’ fashion, with one knee hooked over the pommel. However, at a preliminary hearing in Fort Smith, none of the four victims could identify the woman attired in the height of that season’s style as their bandit, and she was released, only to be brought in again a few weeks later for stealing horses from a ranch belonging to a man named McCarty. In restraints on the way back to Arkansas, she wept bitterly; but since that was inconsistent with the legend they’d created for her, the hack writers ignored the report. She failed Blue Duck and was certain he’d hang while she was still fighting this new charge.

  But there was no sign of tears on her face when, free on bail, she entered the office of J. Warren Reed and sat in the embossed leather chair in front of his desk, resting a large carpetbag on her lap.

  Reed was a vain man who wore corsets to accommodate his snug coats and pointed his handlebars with Pearson’s Wax. In the woman’s blue velvet dress and Sherwood Forest hat trimmed with ribbons—itself a fat two-dollar item in the proliferating millineries in Fort Smith—he saw the possibility of a substantial fee, and something to his account at the tailor’s to keep himself out of small claims court. Her frank flat stare, and her notoriety, gave him no qualms. He was the kind of man who cut across cemeteries after midnight and feared nothing worse than a bruised shin on an inconveniently placed headstone. He’d determined to beard Old Parker in his den at his first opportunity, but had no intimation that the opportunity was so close at hand.

  “I’m familiar with your case, Mrs. Starr,” he said. “I read all the city and territorial newspapers. This rancher McCarty has a reputation for casting a wide loop when it comes to foals belonging to his neighbors. With his testimony in tatters I feel I can win you an acquittal, if not indeed a directed verdict in your favor.”

  The corners of her lips twitched upward in a parched, thin-lipped smile that reminded him of some portraits of Elizabeth the Great, another mannish woman who just might possibly have lived up to her reputation. “Anytime I can’t twist my way around Judge Parker is time I took up lacework in St. Louis,” she said. “I’m here about Blue Duck.”

  “Blue Duck? I’m afraid I’m not—” It wasn’t often he was dismasted in his own office.

  She filled him in on the particulars, with scarcely a word wasted. It occurred to Reed that she would have made a fine legal secretary. And as the details seeped into the honeycomb material of his singular brain, J. Warren Reed caught the bittersweet scent of challenge. He could not wait to tell his wife of this day. She was the only woman in the world who was more ambitious than he, and damn few men could match him for his faith in himself and his future.

  “I can’t promise anything,” he said, once Belle had finished speaking and the regulator clock on the wall opposite his desk, a twin of the one in Parker’s courtroom, had clonked twice in the vacuum. “I’ll need to study the transcripts. Offhand, the fault most consistent in the judge’s method lies in his summations to the jury, and the language he chooses when he pronounces a sentence of death. The first is often prejudicial—shockingly so—and there is an element of sadism in the second. I truly believe the old hypocrite enjoys the role of Jack Ketch.”

  “I don’t know who that is, but if you can get Blue Duck clear of the scaffold, I’ll pay the freight.�
�� She stood up, inverted the carpetbag above the desk, freed the catch, and dumped stacks of banknotes bound with India rubber bands onto the leather top.

  Reed, managing to dissemble the pounding in his chest, didn’t trouble to count the notes in her presence. He slid them together into a block, dipped a horsehair pen into a squat bottle of iron-gall ink, and wrote her out a simple receipt stating that her account was paid in full. She surprised him then by offering him a limpid hand in a kid glove—the reward tendered a gentleman by a lady of fine breeding, and not at all the hearty grasp of a woman who rode, cursed, took the Lord’s name in vain, and generally trafficked in the same vices as men.

  “I’m stopping at the Hotel Le Flore,” she said. “You can report to me there, if I’m not tied up in court or in Parker’s Dungeon of the Damned.”

  She demolished the government’s case, as she had predicted; although she knew little of the labyrinthine passages through the American legal system circa 1886, she had the mea sure of Judge Parker and the drab, simple men who sat on the panel—farmers, mostly, with dirt under their nails and no conception of a lady lathed in the mills of society beyond a furtive glance at forbidden sections of the Montgomery Ward catalogue—and felt confident in the revolutionary allure of her saga reprinted endlessly on brown sawtooth paper bound between crimson-and-yellow covers; the callow public defender she’d drawn in the lottery had little to do but allow the jurors to compare his client’s refined posture in the dock to rancher McCarty’s slumped figure and yellow-stained beard in the witness box to secure the exchange Belle had foreseen:

  “Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

  “Sure thing, Your Honor. We—”

  “Wait until I ask, sir. How do you find?”

  “We find”—the man in overalls and a rusty funeral coat consulted a scrap of paper in his horned palm—“we find the defendant not guilty as charged in the within indictment.”

  Parker slapped his gavel, dismissed the jury with thanks, and shooed Belle Starr from his courtroom. His calendar was filled with cases to try.

  J. Warren Reed drafted and redrafted his letter to the White House, gave it to his wife to transcribe in her refined hand on good rag paper—she made improvements and corrections from her own extensive knowledge of the law—and posted it by special delivery. He sent word and a copy of the letter to his client at the Hotel Le Flore and waited. He had not met with Blue Duck and had no intention to seek a personal conference. The man had nothing to offer that would help obtain clemency, and much that could prevent it. Anytime an attorney for the defense could work the system without soiling his cuffs on an actual defendant was cause for self-congratulation.

  Grover Cleveland’s situation was complicated. His Republican rivals, who had been slow-roasting him for two years over his personal morals, were sharpening their blades for the congressional elections in November, the railroads were pressuring him to pressure Congress to assign them rights-of-way to build more spurs in the Indian Nations, and his support among his fellow Democrats was eroding. Many of them were sworn enemies of Isaac Parker, who had deserted the party a dozen years ago, and their diatribes on the grisly situation in the Eighth District had been reported at gassy length in the columns of the Congressional Record.

  Reed had known all this when he’d composed his plea, and also that Cleveland had robbed Parker of a record-setting, scaffold-testing eight-man hanging on April 23 of that year by commuting the sentences of six of them to life imprisonment in Detroit. Once the presidential pen had been whittled to so fine a point, an experienced petitioner had but to strike before the momentum slowed. Within two weeks of its posting, his letter brought Cleveland’s reply, signed in his heavy hand. Blue Duck was ordered to be transferred from the jail in Fort Smith to Menard, Illinois, there to begin a life sentence in the federal penitentiary.

  If Reed expected one of Belle’s rare George Washington smiles when she returned to his office in response to his note, he was disappointed. Her skirts rustled across the floor in a straight line and she leaned forward to rest both hands atop his desk, the famous riding crop in one.

  “Blue Duck is no good to me behind bars,” she said. “I need him pardoned.”

  The lawyer was amused. “My dear madam, what you’re asking has happened only once, and the man was convicted of rape, not murder. Chester Arthur had already been defeated for the Republican nomination, so he had nothing to lose. This president’s friends and enemies take a dim view of killing farmers. They need their votes.”

  “I don’t follow politics. It isn’t a ladies’ game. How much have you got left from what I gave you last month?”

  “It isn’t a matter of what’s left. I’m paid for my time, and the amount of that I’ll need to reopen the case, interview witnesses, and establish grounds for a presidential—”

  “Draw what you need from what’s left. I’ll be back with more.” She walked out, the crop under one arm like a folded parasol.

  THIRTEEN

  Sam Starr, fresh from the legend of his twenty-foot plunge into the Canadian River on horseback, rode the same splendid animal between tall stacks of September corn smack dab into the same Cherokee Lighthorse officers whose pursuit had led to that stunt. This time, Starr charged straight into them Missouri guerrilla fashion, his reins in his teeth and Colts barking in both hands. They parted, giving him the right of way, then wheeled their horses and took out after him. A slug killed the most celebrated horse since Comanche of the Seventh and Starr was captured, only to be rescued by confederates from the farmhouse where he was being held for the tribal council.

  Informants told Belle that the Lighthorse and marshals both had had their fill of Sam Starr and his like and were recruiting a small army to kill or recapture him and burn down the homestead on the Canadian that Belle had named Younger’s Bend, where criminal gangs were known to congregate. Without a base of operations, her plans to raise funds to pay Lawyer Reed were worthless. She advised Sam to surrender to the marshals, who would give him a fairer hearing through Parker’s court than he’d find before the Cherokee council. Sam was disinclined to reverse the policy of a lifetime, and their debate on the matter was overheard, some said, as far as Going Snake; which was scarcely possible, but then business in the Nations showed small regard for the laws of man and God. In any case, Ned Christie had begun his campaign against the United States, and if the row reached his ears in Rabbit Trap Canyon he ignored it, because he had more personal concerns to occupy him. But Belle’s temper was waspish, she had a mule’s own disposition, and Sam’s people-handling skills were restricted to others of his gender. On October 11, Deputy Marshal Tyner Hughes watched in wonder, drawing his pistol and working his jaws on a plug in his cheek, as the most wanted man in the Nations rode up to him in front of the jail, stepped down, and spread his coat to show he carried no weapons.

  Many years later, when Parker was dead and buried and oil had been discovered in the State of Oklahoma, men who as children were present on that occasion, and some who weren’t but claimed the distinction anyway, told of the day the great Sam Starr, wearing the butternut coat and sweat-stained campaign hat in which his father had ridden with Captain Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, trotted a fine sleek racing stallion straight up Garrison Avenue while every marshal and Indian policeman was scouring the Cherokee for him and calmly handed himself over to the mercy of Parker’s court. The members of the Eastern press who had come to interview them in their newfound wealth waved aside such ancient history; they were more interested in why an old red man in a moth-eaten blanket had decided to buy himself a private railroad coach with no tracks to run it on.

  The coda to the affair was anticlimactic. Starr was arraigned, posted bond out of Belle’s tight budget, and rode back to Younger’s Bend, scratching his head, to await trial. He considered the law a contrary critter and harder to predict than a badger.

  Belle remained behind in Fort Smith, where Parker one day beckoned her to join him in his
chambers. She hesitated, but the absence of an armed escort assured her she was in no trouble, and the tea service on his desk bespoke hospitality rather than incarceration. She watched him fill the delicate cups with his fine pink hands, as hairless as an old woman’s and calloused only where the fingers gripped his pen, and wondered if he had brewed the tea himself; there was something spinsterish in the judge’s manner that escaped his demonizers back East.

  They sipped. Belle noticed that the judge preferred his justice strong and his tea weak. He cleared his throat, cleared it again; his Adam’s apple dented the careful crease in his cravat. He appeared ill at ease in a social situation; one, at least, in which his gavel served no purpose. “You know, perhaps, that I am president of the Sebastian County Fair Association.” His manner begged an affirmative reply.

  “I don’t come to Fort Smith often, and not usually by my choice,” she said. “You could claim you ran the fire brigade and I couldn’t contradict you.” She was enjoying his discomfort.

  “I can’t claim that distinction. As one who has the honor to attest to the former, I hope to persuade you to play a part in the festivities.”

  “I’ve never been good at raising hogs. When one gets big enough to consider showing, I slaughter it. Sam is partial to ham steak.”

  “I don’t judge livestock. I haven’t the credentials.” He betrayed something of the impatience he reserved for audacious attorneys. “Would you consider leading a mock raid on a stagecoach, purely for the entertainment of spectators during the event?”

  She rotated her cup in its saucer. Had she been drinking, she felt she would have choked.

  “It’s a grotesque spectacle,” he hastened on, oblivious to her reaction, “one I should not have given my assent to five years ago, when such atrocities were far more common and carried out in deadly earnest. However, I suppose it’s a signal of progress that we should put forth the thing as an attraction instead of something to be eradicated.”