FULL TEXT: The Elmore Bulletin, published at Rocky Bar,
Idaho, announces the death of "Spanish Belle," one of the most
desperate women who ever lived on this coast. She resided In Eureka about six
or seven years ago. When she stabbed "her man" in 1864 in Idaho City
in a dance house one night, her victim walked out of the building and fell dead
in the street it is reported of her that she asked that a light be brought that
she might make an examination and satisfy herself that be had breathed his last
remarking immediately after it was ascertained that he was dead, that if not
she proposed to finish the work. The Bulletin gives the following brief history
of her:
A woman known all over the Pacific coast as “Spanish
Belle," or "Belle Rogers," died in this place last
Sunday-morning, aged 87 years. There is scarcely a mining camp on the coast
that this woman did not visit during its prosperity since the days of 1849. Her
history, if correctly told would doubtless fill a large volume—and it would be
a volume of bad deeds only, for no good deeds have ever been attributed to her,
in the knowledge of those few who have known her history for the past forty
years.
It seems that she gloried in the crimes she had committed,
and during her convivial moments would relate some incidents of her past life.
At an early age, in her native land of Central America, she became the mistress
of a noted sea pirate named Valzaj, whose vessel was a terror to the merchant
ships plying the waters of the Pacific Ocean. She boasted that her duty was,
when this pirate ship anchored at a port of prominence, to decoy rich men
aboard the vessel, where they would surely be murdered and robbed. She followed
this criminal career until the discovery of gold In California, when she left
her pirate paramour clandestinely and landed in San Francisco in the summer of
1849. She soon drifted to the gold mines and followed every excitement from
that date to the time of her death, plying her nefarious calling and a terror
in the community in which she happened to cast her lot.
It is said "Spanish Belle" boasted of having
murdered four men herself alone for money (one in Idaho), and two women of her
own character, who were so unfortunate as to excite her jealousy. It is claimed
that she was buried with a finger ring that belonged to one of her unfortunate
victims. The men whom she had cut almost unto death in Boise Basin, Atlanta, Rocky
Bar, Idaho. Eureka and Virginia City, Nevada, are entirely too numerous to
mention.
Yet in the long career of crime this woman, by her devilish
cunning, man-aged to escape just punishment by law. In her young days she was
doubtless a hand-some woman, and at her death did not look to be over 60 years
of age. She was quietly buried Sunday evening about 7 o'clock, with but one
solitary person following her remains to the grave.
[“Her Life of Crime. Death of "Spanish Belle."
Whose Evil Deeds Were Notorious.” The Helena Independent (Id.), Sep. 30, 1889,
p. 1]
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For similar cases, see: Female Serial Killer Bandits
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[243-1/11/21] Typos corrected 8/6/21
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