New Book Spotlights Bank Robber-Turned-Silent Film Actor Henry Starr

Long before Hollywood perfected the outlaw antihero, Henry Starr was writing his own script across the banks and backroads of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. A Cherokee bank robber who famously vowed that no one would die in his heists, Starr was sentenced to hang twice, won a commutation from President Theodore Roosevelt, and ultimately stepped in front of the camera as a silent “movie Starr,” dramatizing his own life for audiences across the West. In his new book and ongoing film and theater projects, writer and filmmaker Mark Archuleta traces Starr’s remarkable trajectory from “gentleman bandit” to matinee idol, peeling back the layers of myth, racism, and dime-novel sensationalism to reveal the complex man behind the legend.

Transcript

Cowboys & Indians: What first drew you to Henry Starr and his story?

Mark Archuleta: So, I was a literature major at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I kind of had the idea of writing the Great American Novel. When I graduated, I moved to Los Angeles to be an actor and screenwriter — and things had changed. Now you wanted to write the Great American Screenplay. I don’t know if anybody remembers, but there was a famous screenplay called "The Cheese Stands Alone" that Arnold Schwarzenegger bought; it went for a million dollars. So I was an actor and a writer, and I always kind of had my antenna out for a great story.

I was in Burbank — this is around 1990, so ancient history — and there was a Crown bookstore. I found in the bargain bin this book right here, which is Henry Starr’s autobiography, The Thrilling Events of the Life of Henry Starr, By Himself. And I said, “Hey, that kind of looks like me.” Then I started going through his story, and here’s a guy who was the greatest bank robber of his era. He was sentenced to hang twice. He had his sentence commuted by President Teddy Roosevelt for bravery. And then I learned even more: he was the first person to pull off a double daylight bank robbery — something Jesse James and the Dalton Gang could never accomplish. And then, as you mentioned, he later becomes a matinee idol. What a strange story. I said, “Well, this is a movie.”

So I’ve been working on trying to get this made into a film for decades, collecting lots of information on the story. And I thought, well, if the movie never gets made, all of this research will go away. So I decided, you know what? I’m going to put this book together. I pitched it to the University of North Texas Press. They loved the idea, and now it’s available.

C&I: Well, we love the book too. And for those listening now, the book is available — I believe it came out right at the end of July. Tell us a little bit about the background research for this book. Henry Starr isn’t necessarily a name like Jesse James or Billy the Kid. How’d you go about finding information about Henry Starr? How difficult was it, and was there anything that surprised you in your research?

Archuleta: Most people, when they hear the name Henry Starr, say, “Oh, is he related to Belle?” Belle Starr is much more famous. He was tangentially related to Belle Starr. Belle Starr’s maiden name was Belle Shirley, and she was born in Carthage, Missouri. She loved hanging out with outlaws. She had Cole Younger’s love child, but one of her husbands was Sam Starr, a cousin of Henry Starr. So she became a Starr in that way, but not by blood. She would’ve died when Henry was about 16, so he knew her, but they weren’t related. Newspapers always got it wrong. They said they were husband and wife, or that he was her son. So we’re setting the record straight now.

I began researching this in 1990 — so for the youngsters out there, that means going to actual libraries and looking at previous publications. Glenn Shirley, a great Oklahoma historian, had written books with a lot of information. As the years went on, we gained more access to newspaper archives, so I was able to find out a lot more that way.

Then there’s something called the Pioneer History Interviews — a Works Progress Administration project where interviewers talked to old-timers and captured their stories of the Old West. Henry Starr was often referenced in those. I gleaned a lot of great information there.

The reason he’s not as famous is because he wasn’t a bloodthirsty outlaw like the James–Younger Gang. They killed people. Later outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde or Dillinger left bloody wakes. But Henry Starr always lived by the motto of making sure nobody got killed during a bank robbery — and nobody ever was.

C&I: Wow. What about his life drew him into a life of crime?

Archuleta: He was born in 1873 in Indian Territory, Fort Gibson. His father was Hop Starr — half Cherokee — and his mother, Mary, was quarter Cherokee. His father fell ill when Henry was about 12, so he had to leave school, and his father died shortly after.

A lot of people don’t know that Deputy U.S. Marshals didn’t get paid a salary. It wasn’t like every two weeks they got a paycheck. They were paid per diem for delivering writs, warrants, or transporting prisoners. So they were incentivized to create work.

And how did you create work? You arrested people on false charges — and the people they preyed on were poor whites, Blacks, and Indians who had no social status or money to defend themselves. So Henry Starr, without a father, fell victim to this corrupt deputy marshal system. He was falsely accused of bringing liquor into Indian Territory — even the deputies later admitted he probably wasn’t guilty.

More seriously, he was arrested for horse thievery at age 16, thrown into chains, and transported to Fort Smith, Arkansas. He had to sell all his possessions to hire a lawyer. There was no juvenile system, so he was thrown in with hardened criminals. He was attacked by prison gangs but fought them off — he was good with his fists. But he came out of that experience changed. They described it as his “rollicking boyishness was gone,” and the community now viewed him as a criminal based on false charges. So he said, essentially, “If I’m going to have the name of being a bad guy, I’m going to be the best bad guy I can be.”

Mark Archuleta. Photo by Edgar Garibay

C&I: Wow. And not to forget either — Starr was Cherokee, and that obviously influenced public opinion at the time. What did you learn in your research about the dynamics surrounding his Cherokee ancestry?

Archuleta: He talks in his autobiography about how the West changed during his life — how white settlers came into the Territory and how the Cherokee took pity on them. They didn’t know how to raise crops, so the Cherokees allowed white children to attend their schools for free. Henry went to the Cherokee Female Seminary, and Cherokee families had to pay, but whites attended free.

Then over time, the white settlers grew arrogant and began treating the Indians as second-class citizens. So the world had kind of turned upside down.

Once Henry became a criminal, you can see in newspaper articles how racial language shaped public perception. They used terms like “savage,” or they’d say he was “very dangerous when drunk.” But Henry Starr didn’t drink — he was a teetotaler. They forced him into racist clichés. They even claimed he left “a trail of bodies in his wake,” which wasn’t true. So he carried both the stigma of being an outlaw and the added racist portrayals that other bank robbers didn’t face.

And later, when he made his silent film A Debtor to the Law, racism played a role in how it was marketed — or suppressed.

C&I: Before we get into that, I want to jump back to Fort Smith, where he says, “Well, I’m going to be labeled a criminal; I might as well act like one.” What did that transition look like for him? What was his first bank robbery, and how did he build that reputation from there?

Archuleta: Apparently, it was pretty easy to find people willing to pull off heists at that time. He joined with a couple of fellows and robbed the Nowata depot — that was one of his first. Then he robbed a bank in Caney.

But his big debut was June 5, 1895 — the bank robbery in Bentonville. He goes in with an armed gang, and they pull off the robbery. What’s interesting is he was only 19 years old, yet he was such a leader — so charismatic — that he could command older, hardened men. I always think of the cast of The Wild Bunch, but he was the teenage leader.

And he set the standard: nobody gets killed. So nobody was killed.

They got away with it. I was in Bentonville two weeks ago for a book signing; they really love the history. They used to recreate the robbery.

What’s interesting too: at 19, he had his own dime novel series. Only one other outlaw ever had that — Jesse James.

C&I: That’s good company, if you’re a criminal — using “good” loosely.

Archuleta: Exactly. So he was already famous at 19 in the most common entertainment of the day: dime novels. Which is interesting, because later he becomes a silent movie star — the next generation’s equivalent of dime novels.

C&I: To get to that — that’s so striking to me about Henry Starr. Not only is he a bank robber — almost a Robin Hood–esque figure with morals and scruples — but he becomes a silent film star. How did that transition happen?

Archuleta: Yeah. You mentioned the Robin Hood aspect. The subtitle of my book is "From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again." Beyond not letting anyone get killed, he did have these Robin Hood qualities.

There’s a story where he found a bunch of bank loan notes during a robbery, and he took them so people wouldn’t have to repay debts the bank could no longer track. He dropped them in a river.

Another time, a man depositing $70 complained that he hadn’t gotten a deposit slip when Henry robbed the bank. Henry said, “Reach into the bag and get your $70.”And the greatest story is the Stroud robbery. In the middle of the robbery, the screen door slams — but nobody’s there. He looks down and sees a 4-year-old little girl. On Saturday mornings, she always came to the bank for a shiny penny from the cashier. She wasn’t leaving without it.

He said, “You’ve got to scram — this isn’t a place for a little girl.” But she wouldn’t budge. So he said, “Okay, I promise I’ll buy you an ice cream if you sit here and be good,” and he gave her a lapful of shiny pennies.

Five years later, when he returns to make the motion picture recreating that robbery, she’s too old, so they hire another little girl. After the director yells “Cut!”, Henry sees the real girl — now older — and says, “I promised you an ice cream, didn’t I?” He gives her a dollar, and she skips off with her friends.

Those are the kinds of remarkable stories that make him such an interesting outlaw.

C&I: Were a lot of these stories from newspaper accounts and interviews?

Archuleta: Newspaper accounts, interviews with people, and interviews with the little girl — who, as an older woman in her seventies, retold the story. And also those Indian Pioneer Histories I mentioned.

C&I: So how did Henry Starr find his way to silent films after skirting the law?

Archuleta: There were 10 star filmmakers who were U.S. Marshals or Deputy Marshals that transitioned into directing or producing movies. And three outlaws also became actors: Henry Starr, Al Jennings, and Emmett Dalton of the Dalton Gang. I profile all three in the book.

Here’s what happened: Henry Starr was shot and captured in 1915 during the attempted double bank robbery in Stroud. Almost everyone else got away; he was captured. While recuperating upstairs in a building, he heard the crowd below calling for him to be lynched. So he sent a telegram to former Deputy Marshal William Tilghman, who lived in Chandler about 20 minutes away by train.

Tilghman was making a motion picture called Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws — this is 1915 — and he always cast surviving outlaws when he could. He had Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Arkansas Tom, etc.

Tilghman comes to Stroud and makes Henry a deal: “If you let me film you being transported to jail, I’ll keep the crowd from lynching you.”

C&I: I guess Hollywood deals haven’t changed much.

Archuleta: Exactly. So that was the first time Henry Starr ever appeared on film — and I think it planted the seed.

He then went to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for five years. By 1919, the motion picture industry had exploded — the fourth-largest industry in the U.S. Westerns especially were booming.

Producers approached him and said audiences were tired of Shakespearean-trained actors pretending to be cowboys. They wanted authenticity. And it didn’t get more authentic than Henry Starr.

So at 45 years old, out of prison with limited options, wanting to lead an honest life — if motion pictures can be called honest — he was offered the chance to make this film. He recreated his life story, returned to the actual locations, hired real people like Paul Curry, the boy who shot and captured him in Stroud, to play themselves.

He wanted to show what made him an outlaw and to dissuade young kids from following his path — especially his teenage son, Teddy. He wanted to send a message that the outlaw life wasn’t glamorous.

C&I: One thing that strikes me about Henry Starr is that he lived during a transition — outlaws were now trying to outrun cars, trains, automobiles, and, of course, film. Was his film partly a PR move? A way to reform himself and warn the next generation?

Archuleta: He was very smart. He began his career robbing banks on horseback. By 1915, when he attempted the double bank robbery at Stroud, he had pulled off many heists. He used Tulsa as his base and had amassed a lot of money — so he actually owned a car in 1915. And he had enough money that his garage had a cement floor.

C&I: Big time.

Archuleta: Exactly. When he planned the Stroud robbery, he could have used his car. But he knew a few things: there weren’t many roads, so escape routes could be blocked; tires were thin rubber; roads were rough — high risk of blowouts. So he reverted to the old ways. He got a chuck wagon, filled it with Winchesters, and rode into Stroud on horseback.

The idea was that after escaping, they’d disappear into the blackjack forest where cars couldn’t go. He used technology against the police. He was very cagey. And he transitioned from six-shooters to automatics — he embraced technology.

C&I: Talk to me about his film A Debtor to the Law. It’s 1919, right? What did the process look like — who was involved, how was it funded?

Archuleta: The Pan-American Motion Picture Company out of Muskogee or Tulsa approached him. They signed a contract and then ran a newspaper advertisement seeking investors.

They got enough investors, but there was something called the Blue Sky Commission at the time — it oversaw bad investments. Henry was originally supposed to get a big cut of the profits, but the commission said, “We can’t approve people investing in a reformed criminal.” So they revised the contract and cut Henry out of most of the profits in order to proceed.

I think that impacted his later decisions — especially his desperation to make a second film. He didn’t make the money he’d hoped from A Debtor to the Law.

They hired a director from Pathé — someone who had worked with D.W. Griffith — a legitimate director. They shot the film, watched the dailies, and realized they were too dark and unusable.

So they asked Patrick S. McGeeney — a former U.S. Marshal who now had sound stages and lighting in San Antonio — to take over. They moved production to San Antonio. McGeeney not only directed but made himself the star in some ways. There are cast photos where McGeeney is in the center. His lights, his studio — so he took center stage.

The movie came out, and people who never met Henry didn’t like him due to what they’d read. But people who knew him loved him. PS McGeeney had first met Henry at age 19 when Henry was robbing the train McGeeney worked on — Henry had a gun in his belly. Decades later, McGeeney initially disliked him, but after Henry explained the corrupt deputy system, McGeeney became his biggest advocate.

That happened repeatedly. Bank presidents he once held at gunpoint later visited him when he was injured and even testified on his behalf. He won people over with intelligence, charm, and authenticity.

C&I: And his film is lost to history, correct?

Archuleta: Unfortunately, yes. Still hoping someone digs through their great-grandfather’s closet and finds a film canister. I’ve been gathering what I could — lobby cards, the press kit, marketing materials. In the book, I try to recreate what it was like, so you can feel like you’re in the audience.

C&I: And obviously it didn’t work out quite as Starr had hoped in terms of getting more movie deals. What did his path look like after the film came out?

Archuleta: He tried to raise financing himself. He went to Claremore — Will Rogers’s hometown — which at the time thrived on radium baths. An oilman found sulfur water instead of oil and decided to market it as “radium baths” — exotic and curative. Claremore had tons of hotels, and pamphlets claimed the baths cured everything from dandruff to aches. Will Rogers joked they cured everything except presidential ambition.

So Henry pitched a new movie to the Claremore Commercial Club. The plot: an outlaw on the run (not a stretch), injured, healed by radium baths, redeemed by the love of a good woman. The film would promote the baths and draw crowds. But the club dragged its feet, and Henry couldn’t find money.

He was a man who always knew where to find money when needed.

C&I: At the bank.

Archuleta: Exactly. So even though he was reformed, he decided to rob one last bank. I won’t give away more than that.

C&I: And what year was that?

Archuleta: 1921.

C&I: So he’s only three years removed from prison.

Archuleta: Yeah.

C&I: One thing that’s interesting about Henry Starr is that the Old West — where he came from — was constantly rewritten by Hollywood, dime novels, or even the outlaws themselves. Now that you’ve read his autobiography and primary sources and put together your book, how do you see myth vs. reality with Henry Starr’s life?

Archuleta: He published his autobiography in 1913 after getting out of the Colorado State Penitentiary, fully reformed — but the book ends before two major events: the 1915 double robbery in Stroud and his movie career.

Another interesting discovery: there was an unpublished first draft of his autobiography. Some overlaps exist, but the earlier draft is more forthcoming in places. I’m creating an annotated revised version using that earlier material.

It’s always difficult to separate fact from fiction. The famous quote: “Print the legend.” Bank robbers are notorious liars. He denied involvement in many robberies — do we believe him or not? On his deathbed, he boasted that he had robbed more banks than any man in America. But during his reformed years, every robbery was blamed on him.

Sensationalistic journalism also shaped his legend. His autobiography and film tried to set the record straight, but we’ll never truly know everything. I root for Henry Starr because he’s charming, funny, and a great storyteller — I’d have loved to meet him.

C&I: He’s walking a tightrope — sensationalizing his story for interest, but also trying to turn another cheek. Did you see that reflected in his autobiography or later personal stories?

Archuleta: There’s always that duality in film: the violence must be exciting, but there must be a moral message. Unfortunately, his film came out in 1919 — the same year Prohibition started. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), emboldened by their success, turned their attention to stopping film corruption.

They targeted Henry Starr specifically — pressuring Oklahoma legislators and even federal lawmakers to ban films featuring bandits. Some legislation mentioned Henry Starr by name.

They pressured theater owners. The Theater Owners and Managers Association didn’t want censorship, so they compromised: they refused to show Henry Starr’s film if the legislation was dropped.

So Henry’s film debuted in 1919 — and he couldn’t show it anywhere. He hired a teenager to haul the film canister around in a roadster, screening it in small towns. He’d show it to ministers and city councils first; most would approve it as a good moral lesson. He made some money — but it could have been much bigger.

He was told: if you make one more film, you could punch your ticket to Hollywood. That pressure is why he was desperate to make a second picture.

C&I: Do you think that pressure on the first film contributed to it being lost?

Archuleta: Partly. It wasn’t made by a major studio like Universal, so likely few prints were made. I know it played in Dallas, Kansas City, and throughout Oklahoma, but probably not widely. And maybe people later thought, “We don’t like bank robbers,” as times changed.

C&I: You’re a screenwriter. Is Henry Starr’s story one you plan to adapt for film?

Archuleta: Yes — in fact, I worked backwards. I wrote the screenplay in the ’90s. I’ve submitted it to Sundance and many other places. It’s an awesome script — I just need financing. And I’m considering robbing a bank.

C&I: It worked for him. Sort of.

Archuleta: Well, yeah. You’ll have to read the book.

C&I: Final question: What other projects are you working on? You mentioned an annotated autobiography. Anything else forthcoming?

Archuleta: Yes — I’m finishing the annotated version and will narrate it as well, hopefully out in a month or so. I’m also thinking of creating a one-man show based on this work, similar to Will Rogers USA or the Mark Twain one-man shows. Touring Oklahoma and Arkansas, I’ve felt there’s a real audience for this story. So I’m working on bringing it to life onstage.

C&I: Well, Mark, thank you so much for your time today and for bringing Henry’s story back into the light. Without that, I don’t know if we’d ever have the true, full story from our perspective

Archuleta: I found his autobiography in the bargain bin at Crown Books — and I’m trying to bring him out of the bargain bin of history.

C&I: Perfect way to say it. The Real Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr is available now wherever books are sold. I encourage anyone listening to pick it up and experience this collision of history, outlaws, and early cinema in the West. And if you enjoyed this conversation, share the episode, give us a rating, and join us next time on Writing the West. Mark, thanks again for joining us.

Archuleta: Thank you for having me.