A year after Belle and her man Reed came back from California, things took a dark and twisted turn.
Reed, along with two shady associates, paid a visit to Watt Grayson and his wife — neighbors of the notorious Tom Starr — and decided that hanging them from a tree was the fastest way to get directions to a stash of $30,000 in gold coins.
That’s not a typo. Thirty. Thousand. Dollars.
At a time when most families were scraping by on less than $1,000 a year, this was a jackpot that could set you up for life — or, at least, a few years of high-stakes trouble.
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Once they hit outlaw country, Belle cozied up to another familiar name: Tom Starr. She didn’t marry him, though — she married his son, Sam, in a tribal ceremony in 1880.
Belle now had a husband, a thousand acres near Lake Eufaula in current-day Haskell County, Arkansas, and a new kingdom to rule: Younger’s Bend, which some say had nothing to do with Cole Younger.
She played landlady to farmers, but that was just the cover. In reality, Younger’s Bend became an outlaw’s paradise. Some say Belle merely hosted the meetings. Others swear she called the shots.