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Cherokee
Bill |
It was during his stay in jail
at
Fort Smith,
Arkansas
awaiting trial, that fellow
prisoner,
Crawford Goldsby; alias
Cherokee
Bill attempted a jailbreak with a gun smuggled to him by a trustee.
There was a gun battle between
Bill
and the prison guards, in which one of the guards was killed. However, the
guards were unable to disarm
Bill
and it was standoff.
Henry and
Bill
were old acquaintances and
Henry
offered to disarm
Bill if
the guards would in turn promise not to kill
Cherokee
Bill afterwards. The promise was made and
Henry
entered the cell telling his friend that he had no chance of escape.
Cherokee
Bill gave up his revolver and
Starr
turned it over to the guards. This incident
helped
Henry to later acquire his
freedom.
In 1901,
Henry, with help from his
family and the
Cherokee
Tribal Government, applied for a pardon. President T. Roosevelt so
admired the man for his courage in the
Cherokee
Bill incident that he reduced his
sentence and
Henry was released from
prison on January 16, 1903.
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After his release from prison,
Henry returned to
Tulsa, I. T.
and worked in his mother's restaurant. It was here he met and married his
second wife, Miss Ollie Griffin in September 1903. A Short time
later, in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt
Starr was born.
Henry led an honest life
for a while until officials in
Arkansas
learned of
Starr’s release. They immediately began seeking his extradition for
the 1893 Bentonville robbery.
Henry took to the safety
of the Osage Hills, quickly falling in with his old partners. Later,
he would write, “I preferred a quiet and unostentatious interment in a
respectable cemetery rather than a life on the
Arkansas
convict farm.”
On March 13, 1908,
Henry and his gang crossed
the Kansas
border and robbed the bank at Tyro,
Kansas.
Though pursued by a posse of over twenty men,
Starr and his gang were
able to get away.
Henry, then headed west,
along with Kid Wilson.
When the pair hit Amity,
Colorado in
May, they robbed the local bank of $1,100. Soon after the Amity robbery,
Kid Wilson and
Starr separated. History fails to tell us what ever became of Kid Wilson but
Starr spent the summer and
fall of 1908 hiding in
New Mexico
and Arizona. However, when he wrote to a friend back in
Tulsa, the
supposed friend betrayed him, and on May 13, 1908,
Starr was once again
placed under arrest to be extradited to
Colorado.
 In November 24, 1908,
Henry plead guilty to the
Amity robbing and was sentenced to 7 - 25 years in the Canon City,
Colorado
Prison. During his imprisonment,
Henry worked as a trustee,
studied law in the prison library and wrote his autobiography entitled
'Thrilling Events, Life of Henry Starr'.
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On September 24, 1913, he was paroled by
the governor and was free again, with the stipulation that he never leave
the state of
Colorado.
Starr did not keep his
promise, instead returning to
Oklahoma, and his old ways.
Between September 8, 1914, and January 13,
1915, fourteen different bank robberies were attributed to
Henry Starr.
All were daylight robberies, carried off quickly and efficiently, at
two-week intervals. This was the worst streak of robberies the people of
Oklahoma
had ever witnessed, and in response to the cries of the citizens, the
state legislature passed the “Bank Robber Bill,” which appropriated
$15,000 for the capture of bank robbers and placed a $1,000 bounty on
Starr’s
head. The reward was payable "Dead or Alive".
The banks robbed in this period included:
09/08/1914
Keystone State Bank, Keystone,
Oklahoma of
$3000
09/30/1914
Keifer Central Bank, Kiefer,
Oklahoma of
$6400
10/06/1914
Farmers' National Bank, Tupelo,
Oklahoma of
$800
10/14/1914
Pontotoc Bank, Pontotoc,
Oklahomaof
$1100
10/20/1914
Byars State Bank, Byars,
Oklahoma
of $700
11/13/1914
Farmers State Bank, Glencoe,
Oklahoma of
$2400
11/20/1914
Citizens State Bank, Wardville,
Oklahoma
of $800
12/16/1914
Prue State Bank, Prue,
Oklahoma
of $1400
12/29/1914
Carney State Bank, Carney,
Oklahoma of
$2853
01/04/1915
Oklahoma State Bank, Preston,
Oklahoma
(no money taken, but $1200 damage done to vault)
01/05/1915
First National Bank, Owasso,
Oklahoma of
$1500
01/12/1915
First National Bank, Terlton,
Oklahoma
of $1800
01/12/1915
Garber State Bank, Garber,
Oklahoma of
$2500
01/13/1915
Vera State Bank, Vera,
Oklahoma of
$1300
Convinced that
Starr
was hiding in the Osage Hills, the law was relentlessly tracking all of
his old hideouts. However, the clever
Henry
was living in the heart of
Tulsa, at 1534
East Second Street, just two blocks from the
Tulsa County
Sheriff and four blocks from the mayor of
Tulsa.
Continued
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