Lost Man's River(23)
In the federal archives at Fort Worth, Texas, is a lengthy transcript of the hearings held in U.S. Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late February and early March of 1889, to determine if there was sufficient evidence of his guilt to bring “Edgar A. Watson” before a grand jury on the charge of murder. From this transcript, together with reports from the local newspapers, and also some speculative testimony winnowed from the exhaustive literature on the life and death of Maybelle Reed, I have ascertained beyond the smallest doubt that “the man named Watson” accused in Oklahoma was the man gunned down in Florida two decades later. Whether or not he was the “Man Who Killed Belle Starr” may never be known, but it should be noted that many of her acquaintances disliked the victim, and that almost as many were suspected of her death by her various authors.
Additional material from the Indian Country is taken from rough notes taken by Mr. R. B. Collins, who has made a lifelong avocation of his distant kinsman.
I went out to eastern Oklahoma in the winter of 1940, about fifty years after the February when Belle was killed. That part of the old Indian Nations is mud river and small dark gravelly buttes, hard-patched with snow—very lonely flat high bare brown country broken here and there by river bluffs, swamp forest, rock ridge, and windswept barren farms. The nearest community to where Edgar Watson lived was Hoyt, south of the highway, on a bluff on the Canadian River. I rapped on the door of the only house with a thin smoke from the chimney and inquired if I might ask a few questions.
Ask ’em, then!
This old feller makes me shout my questions through a glass storm door that would hold out a tornado. No matter what I ask him, he shouts back at me, “Shit, no!”
“Shit, no!” he hollers. “This damn place is named for a old Injun used to farm it. Hoyt Bottom! Belle Starr got killed over yonder under the mountain, by Frog Hoyt’s place! Shit, no, you cain’t find it! Ain’t even a road out there no more! Be knee-deep in mud and water, just gettin near to it!
“Shit no. Ain’t nobody knows who killed her! I’m just tellin you where she got killed at! What? Shit, no! Ain’t never heard of him!”
Next, I tracked down this old widow who owns Belle’s cabin site above Younger’s Bend, on the north side of the Canadian. This widow has no storm door, only a rusty screen, but she won’t open up for love nor money, never mind that I could walk right through it. The widow says she’s been down sick so she won’t let me on the property, but before I can reason with her, she decides she trusts me; if I will pay her one dollar up front, I can go trespass on her historical-type property, with a look at her old photo of Belle thrown in. The photo was kind of hazy through that rusty screen, but it sure looked like the same one you can see in every book and article ever written about Belle—egret plume hat, pearl-handled guns, and a face that would stop the Mississippi, as the old folks said.
When I shook my head over Belle’s dead dog appearance, the widow thought I might be losing interest, so she told me I could take a gander at a picture of herself—the way she looked “back then,” she says, meaning back in Belle’s time, from the look of her. Says, “Thet’s me settin right thyar with my hy-ar fuzzed up, way I’m s’posed to look!” Between the widow before and the widow after, there wasn’t really all that much to choose.
“Now,” says she, “you go on down yonder under the mountain till you see a real purty yeller trailer, and a real purty brick ranchette up in the holler, and you foller that road up to where them trespissers has destructed our iron gate.” I did as she bid me and sure enough, the iron gate is face down in the mud. A path goes east along the ridge to a fenced grave in a hackberry grove that overlooks the river, which flows down around under the mountain. There’s no cabin up at Belle’s place anymore, and not one brick or broken bottle left to steal, which made me wonder why that widow was so nervous about trespissers. Course a body can’t be too careful around strangers.
The river has been dammed since Watson’s time. The dam must kill fish in the turbines, because ten or more bald eagles were flapping up and down the river or setting in the winter trees. That’s a lot more eagles in one place than I have seen anywhere since a boy, and it sure did my heart good to see them. I had figured they were mostly gone out of America.
Here’s the opinion of the latest book on Belle at the nearest library, which turned out to be about sixty miles east, on over the state line at Fort Smith, Arkansas:
“The case against Watson was exceedingly weak, only Jim Starr seeming anxious to secure an indictment of murder. Belle’s son, Ed Reed, refused to testify against Watson, saying he knew nothing against the man, and neighbors of Watson testified that the accused was a quiet, hardworking man of refinement and education, well-liked, and never before in trouble of any kind.”