While there, he served in the Union’s first Indian Home Guard regiment and in 1875 became U.S. He served a stint in the Civil War as a servant and fought in several battles before escaping into Indian Territory as a fugitive slave. Reeves was born into slavery in Arkansas in 1838. marshal west of the Mississippi and despite being illiterate, managed to memorize the warrants for every suspect he sought to apprehend.
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Lawman Bass Reeves is one of the best-known Black historical figures from the Old West. “Black cowboys were some of the very first cowboys on the cattle trails because many of them used the skills they already had from handling cows as slaves,” said Gloria Austin, co-founder of the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth. In actuality, at least one in four cowboys was Black. The film offers rare representation for Black cowboys, frontiersmen and lawmen who have largely been written out of Hollywood’s cinematic depictions of the Old West. It’s not a biopic, so I wasn’t looking at who looks like any of those characters, because none of them do. " was biracial, he had mixed heritage,” said Samuel. And Samuel’s blind casting process led him to choose Idris Elba for the role of Buck, an infamous outlaw who was just 18 when he was executed. In real life, the two men likely never crossed paths. Jeymes Samuel’s revisionist western “ The Harder They Fall” assembles an all-star cast of both actors and legendary Black western figures from across time for a fictional story about two rival groups, the Nat Love and the Rufus Buck gangs.