![]() She was the real San Francisco treat, taking the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lauren Hutton under her wing. Thompson to former mayor Willie Brown feel at home. If every great party needs a great host, “the Tosca” had Jeannette Etheredge, a true dame, who bought the bar in 1980 and made everyone from Bono to Hunter S. Nobody hounded you to pay your tab on time. That was Tosca Cafe, a North Beach staple that has been a dimly lit home to everyone from the Beats to Rudolph Nureyev to…Kid Rock? There was no velvet rope, no bottle service-just some ripped-up red vinyl booths and a jukebox playing opera and a vintage espresso machine that barely heated water anymore. Or where the owner would leave the keys with the drummer from Metallica-and tell him to lock up when he’s finished. All this despite the lack of a contemporary account or court record to show that she ever held up a train, bank or stagecoach or killed anybody.Imagine a bar where the mayor of San Francisco would chat up Sean Penn and Christopher Hitchens until four in the morning. “She had been elevated to a seat of immortal glory as a sex-crazed hellion with the morals of an alley cat, a harborer and consort of horse and cattle thieves, a petty blackmailer who dabbled in every crime from murder to the dark sin of incest, a female Robin Hood who robbed the rich to feed the poor, an exhibitionist and clever she-devil on horseback and leader of the most bloodthirsty band of cutthroats in the American West. ![]() “Almost overnight, the name of Belle Starr became a household word throughout the nation,” he writes. Two days following her death, The New York Times called her “the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders.”īut according to Glenn Shirley, author of Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts, and the Legends, the only truth in the report was the fact that she had died. Some suspect her son, Ed Reed, whom the Texas State Historical Association asserts she had recently beaten for mistreating her horse. Starr herself was murdered February 3, 1889, at the age of 40, close to her Oklahoma cabin in the Cherokee Nation. But in the meantime, her husband and an Indian policeman had shot each other to death. This time, because of her legal skills, she was acquitted. In the years that followed, Starr married three outlaws: Jim Reed in 1866, who ran with the Younger, James and Starr gangs and was killed in 1874 by police Bruce Younger In 1878 and Sam Starr, a Cherokee, in 1880.Īfter Belle and Sam Starr were later charged with horse stealing, a federal offense for which she served time, she was again charged with horse theft in 1886. ![]() "I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte." "We are not thieves, we are bold robbers,” James wrote in a letter Edwards published. The James legend grew with the help of newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, a Confederate sympathizer who perpetuated James's Robin Hood mythology. "He was audacious, planning and robbing banks in the middle of the day and stopping the most powerful machines of the time-railroad engines-to rob their trains and successfully get away,” wrote Bill Markley in Billy the Kid and Jesse James: Outlaws of the Legendary West. WATCH: The James Gang: Outlaw Brothers on HISTORY Vault.Īs newspapers began to mention James, his love for the attention grew. While they usually focused more on robbing train safes than individual passengers, they did ruthlessly murder countless people who got in their way. ![]() Overall, between 18, they are believed to have committed more than 20 bank and train robberies, with a combined haul estimated at around $200,000. At times, he saw himself as a modern Robin Hood, robbing from the politically progressive Reconstruction supporters and giving to the poor.Īccording to the State Historical Society of Missouri, the James-Younger gang operated widely, from Iowa to Texas to West Virginia. For some historians, James never stopped fighting the Civil War, translating his fury over the defeat of the secessionist cause into a career sticking up banks, trains and stagecoaches.
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