Lawman: Bass Reeves and the wild true history of the black ‘Lone Ranger’

NB. This article from 2013 is being republished ahead of the release of the Paramount+ series Lawman: Bass Reeves

Art Burton listened intently as the old man on the other end of the phone cleared his throat and began telling him a story. Burton had only been researching the life of Bass Reeves for a short while but that afternoon what Reverend Haskell James Shoeboot, the 98-year-old part-Cherokee Indian, was about to tell him would persuade Burton he’d stumbled upon one of the greatest stories never told.

Born in 1838, Bass Reeves was a former slave-turned-lawman who served with the US Marshals Service for 32 years at the turn of the 20th century in part of eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas known as Indian Territory. Though he was illiterate, Reeves became an expert tracker and detective – a man who, in Burton’s words, “walked in the valley of death every day for 35 years and brought in some of the worst outlaws from that period”.

That afternoon on the phone sometime in the late Eighties, Shoeboot recounted an event he’d witnessed with his own eyes in the early 1900s: Shoeboot had been chauffeur to Deputy US Marshal James Franklin “Bud” Ledbetter and early one morning a posse had gathered at Gibson Station, 12 miles north of the east Oklahoma town of Muskogee, to track and capture an outlaw. By the middle of the day they hadn’t made any progress and Ledbetter was irate. “That’s when somebody suggested heading back into town to get Bass Reeves,” Shoeboot told Burton.

By the time Reeves arrived, the sun was setting and Shoeboot saw the outlaw jump up from where he was hiding and begin running across a field. “The posse started shooting but kept missing,” Shoeboot said. Reeves “cooly and calmly told Ledbetter he would break the outlaw’s neck with one shot from his Winchester rifle at a distance of a quarter of a mile”, and with that he took aim and did exactly that.

It reaffirmed what Burton had suspected: that Bass Reeves – perhaps the first black commissioned deputy marshal west of the Mississippi – could well have been one of the greatest lawmen of the Wild West. But most people hadn’t heard of him. Over the next 20 years, Reeves would become an obsession for Burton, culminating in a very interesting hypothesis, which he puts forward in his book Black Gun, Silver Star. Bass Reeves, he argues, was almost certainly the real-life inspiration for The Lone Ranger.

In Disney’s big-screen version of The Lone Ranger, Johnny Depp plays the famous fictitious lawman’s Indian sidekick Tonto, and actor Armie Hammer is the eponymous Ranger. The Lone Ranger has always been white, yet Art Burton’s evidence to support his conclusion that Reeves was the real-life lawman is pretty compelling. It goes something like this: federal law dictated that deputy US marshals had to have at least one posseman with them whenever they went out in the field and “often, the men who assisted Reeves were native Americans”. Tonto was said to be a Potawatomi Indian – the same tribe that was forced to move to Oklahoma.

The fictional character’s last name was Reid (he was never given a first name), which Burton points out is very close to Reeves. Burton discovered that Reeves often wore disguises while tracking fugitives – the Lone Ranger, famously, wore a black mask. But, he says, “you’ve also got to realise that in the late-19th/early-20th century, black people were pretty much invisible. The first images of the Lone Ranger in the Thirties saw him wearing a black mask covering his whole face. For me that’s interesting. Why would you have a black mask covering his entire face?”

Burton reckons Reeves’s calling card could have been a silver dollar, citing a story he was told in which Reeves left coins with a family who fed and housed him while he was on the trail of a gang of train robbers. The Lone Ranger’s calling card was a silver bullet.

Another similarity, Burton points out, is that, like the Lone Ranger, Reeves rode a white horse. He cites transcripts from trials of outlaws Reeves captured which describe his horse as a “large grey” (adult greys usually have a white coat).

Many of the fugitives arrested by Reeves were sent to prison in Detroit in the 1890s and early 1900s. The Lone Ranger story first appeared on the radio in Detroit in 1933 (the series conceived by George W Trendle and written by Fran Striker) and Burton says it’s very likely that anyone connected with the prison system during that time would have heard the incredible stories about Bass Reeves.

“Prisoners were singing songs about him,” Burton says. “He was a celebrity. They would have been talking about him in Detroit.” And Burton wasn’t the first author to make the connection. In his book Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier, John Ravage also suggested Reeves could have been the inspiration for the Lone Ranger. Burton says “unequivocally” that Reeves is the closest real person to resemble the fictional character.

After his conversation with Rev Shoeboot, Burton became obsessed with finding out everything he could about the mysterious lawman. He knew Bass Reeves had killed 14 men during his career and captured 3,000 felons – once bringing in 17 men at once. Burton says he first set out to disprove some of the overly dramatic stories about Reeves but each time came across information that seemed to back them up.

For his research, Burton’s starting point was a man named Richard Fronterhouse who had written a 60-page college dissertation on Reeves called “The Forgotten Lawman”. According to Burton, Fronterhouse had gathered first-person testimony for his essay and among those he spoke to was Reeves’s own daughter, Alice Spahn, who was still alive at the time.

Burton visited Oklahoma himself to dig up more stories. One woman, who grew up on the Osage Nation reservation, said her grandmother once told her of the day Reeves stumbled upon a lynch mob near a large Oklahoma cattle ranch. “Evidently a rustler had been caught and was about to be strung to a tree on the prairie by a group of cowboys,” the woman told Burton. “Without any thought of the danger he might be in, Reeves rode straight up to the mob, cut the man down with his knife, and rode off with the man without saying a word to anyone.”

In his book, Burton relays a conversation in which he’d heard Reeves was so quick with a pistol he was likened to a “Methodist preacher reaching for a platter of fried chicken during Sunday dinner at the deacon’s house.” Another story had Reeves using “superhuman strength” to free a steer that had become stuck in a bog, despite failed attempts by a group of cowboys to help the animal. One book about Reeves had it that his hat and clothes were riddled with bullets, his horses killed, his gunbelt shot off his body – but “miraculously, he was never wounded”.

“He was bigger than anything I’d seen in fiction,” Burton tells me. “I always said when the public heard about Bass Reeves it was going to blow the lid off everything. He’s actually like a combination of Sherlock Holmes, the Lone Ranger and Superman.”

Reeves was born a slave in Arkansas Territory, and grew up in north Texas. According to court records, he murdered his “owner” following a card game and escaped into Indian Territory where he lived among local tribes, even learning their language, and earning money as a bounty hunter. Because of his skills as a polyglot, he was recruited by the Federal Marshals Service – Reeves was the ideal person to capture outlaws in that hostile environment.

Uncovering biographical information about a black lawman in America at the dawn of the 20th century is tough. Although there was a vibrant press through which these lives could have been documented, and slavery had been abolished, the Jim Crow laws had come into effect, mandating racial segregation in all public facilities in former Confederate states.

One person who could shed some light on Reeves was Paul Brady, a retired judge living in Atlanta, Georgia. Reeves was Brady’s great uncle – his grandmother’s brother – and while he never knew him personally (Reeves died before Brady was born), Brady’s father was close to the lawman and stories of his escapades became family folklore.

“It’s funny,” Brady tells me over the phone. “I grew up hearing stories about cowboys and Indians and we were told the cowboys were the good guys and the Indians were the bad guys. But hearing stories from my father about Uncle Bass confused me because he had lived with Indians and had such a good experience with them; he had their trust and they had faith in him. So I couldn’t rectify in my young mind how they could be the bad guys.”

So fascinated was Brady with his great uncle’s legend that he wrote his own book about him, The Black Badge, published in 2005. When he began his research, Brady was amazed at how little people knew about Reeves – even in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he had worked as a marshal. “Unfortunately, had Bass Reeves been white he’d be known from coast to coast, by the old and young. At the time when Judge Parker appointed him, it was totally unheard of to give a black man a badge and a gun with jurisdiction to arrest white men. So a lot of credit goes to Judge Parker. He was ahead of his time.”

Brady says his father told him stories of how Reeves would trot off on his horse into Indian Territory and return to Fort Smith with prisoners. “After he’d drop them off he’d clean up and go over to Van Buren where he lived on his farm. My father and other kids always knew when Bass was expected back. They’d wait for him to arrive. Dad said Bass sat so tall in his saddle, and had such a large horse. His badge always shone brightly on his vest.”

Nonetheless, Brady doesn’t accept that his great uncle was the real-life inspiration for the Lone Ranger. When I mention it he tells me it’s the first he’s heard of the connection. “It’s not acceptable to compare him to a fictional character,” Brady says. “This was a real man who never had the distinction he deserved for many, many years.” Bass Reeve’s final days were tragic, Brady told one US magazine last year.

“He witnessed a backward spiral of segregation and had to relinquish his position as a deputy marshal in 1907 when Oklahoma became a state.” Two years ago, Brady attended a ceremony honouring Reeves when the lawman was included in an exhibit at the US Marshals Museum in Fort Smith. Brady donated Reeves’s gun, badge and several bullets, which had been handed down to him by his father.

Included in the information about Reeves at the museum is the story that Belle Starr, a notorious female outlaw from Missouri, apparently gave herself up after discovering Reeves had a warrant for her arrest; and that in 1902, Reeves conducted the most difficult arrest of his career: taking his own son, Bennie, into custody for the murder of his wife.

Then, in May last year, 1,000 people gathered at a small park in Fort Smith to witness the unveiling of a 20ft bronze statue of Reeves. And there he sits, high in the saddle of his horse, under the hot Arkansas sun – one of the first and most feared federal lawmen on the early western frontier.

Following his death in 1910, nobody knows where Reeves was buried. Art Burton likes to tell people it’s because he’s still in disguise.

Lawmen: Bass Reeves begins on Paramount+ on Sunday November 5