The Ohio winter kept us inside for long stretches, so there I was, lying across our living room floor, sinking into the lore and legend of the American cowboy. I begged Santa to bring me the all-black cowboy outfit worn by Paladin (Richard Boone), the main character on “Have Gun — Will Travel.” Paladin had such style.
We lived — my sisters, my brother and I — with my grandparents and my mom, who was yet again between hotel kitchen jobs. Money was tight. Still, I dashed down the stairs on Christmas morning and there it was, laid out, my Paladin cowboy outfit, with two pearl-handled six-shooters in holsters and silvery beads sewn into the hat.
I was soon quick-drawing my six-shooters on imaginary bandits lurking in our basement. When weather permitted, I took to the outdoors as Paladin, looking for varmints. Cowboy lingo had entered my vocabulary.
We lived six blocks from the state fairgrounds coliseum where the rodeo came to town every year. I saw flesh-and-blood cowboys up close, galloping on horseback. I was the happiest horseless cowboy around.
Yet, now, looking back through the eyes of a little Black boy, one thing was constant with all of my beloved cowboys, from TV screen to local rodeo: They were all White. I adored them, sure enough, but none of those cowboy figures looked like the grown Black men I knew.
It was but the glory and myth of the way America — on both small and big screens — introduced cowboys. Black cowboys were mostly absent, washed away.
It’s been thrilling, therefore, to watch the first three episodes of the series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” (premiering Nov. 5 on Paramount Plus). The eight-episode series stars David Oyelowo as Reeves and is executive-produced by, among others, Taylor Sheridan, Jessica Oyelowo, David Glasser and David Oyelowo himself.
Sheridan is the creator of Paramount’s “Yellowstone” juggernaut and its spinoffs, which consistently have drawn high ratings. Cowboys are having a moment.
In the new show, Reeves escapes slavery, takes a bride, tries farming, flails at it, and eventually comes to the attention of a judge who has heard about his prowess as a tracker. Reeves is offered a job as a deputy U.S. marshal. There is not any fanfare around his appointment, no matter how historic.
Upon the rough-and-tumble frontier, Reeves — sometimes accompanied by other deputies — is soon seen making arrests, knocking down doors, galloping hard toward trouble and outwitting crooks. His legend grows. “You a lawman or an outlaw?” a small Black kid, mesmerized, asks Reeves.
“A bit of both, I reckon,” Reeves answers.
It’s a revelatory moment, illustrating for me how little Black boys, like myself, were also missing from all those old cowboy shows.
Few cinematic treatments in any genre, however, have been as tethered to myth as cowboys have. In the 1800s, cowboys were vulnerable to mythmaking. They existed in a rural landscape often visited by dime-store novelists.
Fictions flew like wild geese from town to town. The number of victims in shootouts seemed to multiply on the back end of telegrams. Good Samaritan acts morphed into tales of unimaginable heroism. A genre was created that saw few boundaries when it came to telling the truth.
In the 1962 John Ford western movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” there is an exchange between two characters, one asking a reporter about a possible story:
“You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?”
“No, sir,” the reporter answers. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Bass Reeves was a revered law enforcement legend during his lifetime. Unlike other Wild West figures who were lathered in hagiography, Reeves needed no embellishment.
There was a factual paper trail: Born in 1838, he had been enslaved, and that could be proved, as could his escape from the Confederate Army into which he and his enslaver had been forced.
The Emancipation Proclamation finally freed him. He lived with Native Americans for a while, learned multiple languages. He gave farming a try when he abandoned tribal living.
A reputation soon spread that Reeves could hunt and track things, including people. His renown got him hired as a deputy U.S. marshal, believed to have been the first Black person hired in the position west of the Mississippi.
He worked mostly in and around Arkansas and present-day Oklahoma. White people were so astonished by his presence they often looked at him as if he had just dropped from the sky. There were thousands of arrests. And untold shootouts. The lawman Bass Reeves died in 1910 — and then his legacy was forgotten.
The whitewashing of his legacy had actually begun before his death. S.W. Harman published a book, “Hell on the Border,” in 1898 about the various lawmen who operated throughout the federal district overseen by Judge Isaac Parker, the area where Reeves mostly worked. Since Reeves had apprehended a legion of dangerous criminals — sometimes donning disguises to do so — it was assumed he’d be a major figure in the Harman book.
“But he’s omitted. And that’s just tragic!” says Sidney Thompson, author of two Bass Reeves historical novels, “Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves,” and, jumping off the Harman title, “Hell on the Border” — which the Paramount Plus series is based on.
On the phone from Oklahoma, Thompson, 58, says he never knew of Reeves until he heard actor Morgan Freeman talking about him while being interviewed on a television show. Freeman lamented he couldn’t find much material on Reeves.
Thompson then became obsessed with Reeves. He enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of North Texas and plowed into the forgotten lawman’s life.
He visited the territories where Reeves worked. He studied old arrest warrants and documents linked to Reeves, nearly bringing himself to tears while pondering why such a figure had been disrespectfully lost to history. “The African American canon has a vacancy,” he says of Reeves. “There’s no one like him anywhere.”
It is that vacancy that Oyelowo has now filled. The actor — who hoisted himself into the upper echelons of major Hollywood talent with his galvanizing portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 2014’s “Selma” — was unable to talk about the Reeves series because of the actors strike. But before the strike, he said this to Entertainment Weekly: “When you contextualize that life with these seminal moments in American history of slavery, Reconstruction, going into Jim Crow, and to have that level of success and notoriety as a lawman is just extraordinary.”
Oyelowo is joined in the series by, among others, Dennis Quaid, Barry Pepper, Shea Whigham, Donald Sutherland and Lauren E. Banks, a Howard University graduate who plays Reeves’s wife, Jennie.
Because such imagery is so rare in the western screen genre, it will seem jarring for many watching a Black lawman manhandling White criminals (while White townsfolk watch) and bringing those criminals to justice. Reeves had no option but to watch his back at all times.
One of the flaws of retelling American history — especially when it comes to Black heroic figures — is that it is not mentioned enough that they often operated under death threats.
From Frederick Douglass to Reeves, from Rosa Parks to Medgar Evers and King — their journeys were rife with worry and threats of constant harm. A prominent aspect of “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” is how devoted he is to family life, keeping his wife and children safe upon the frontier. Little wonder he slept with weapons nearby.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the 1862 Homestead Act in an effort to get people to go west and farm. Any Blacks encountered by Reeves were most likely beneficiaries of that act. If one successfully farmed over a period of a few years, the land would be given to them, provided they paid certain fees and taxes.
In 1904, Oscar Micheaux, an enterprising Black man born in Illinois, began dreaming of getting land in South Dakota. He took advantage of a homesteading lottery and became a farmer. But eventually he turned to filmmaking, becoming America’s first major Black director. Micheaux, who died in 1951, also was forgotten, only to be rediscovered in the 1970s.
The myth of the screen cowboy had received one of its earliest boosts with the 1915 opening of “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s racist “epic” in which White men on horseback seek to avenge the Black gains made during Reconstruction. That film — an orgy of violence perpetrated by stereotyped Blacks against White damsels in distress — was so popular it was treated to a special screening at Woodrow Wilson’s White House.
The movie, with its colossal success, would haunt the cinematic aspirations of Blacks for decades. It would propel Micheaux to make films — “Within Our Gates,” “The Exile” and “The Homesteader” among his most popular — that he hoped would show Black cinema’s growth and counter the damage Griffith’s picture had done.
By the 1940s, the cowboy myth was in full and roaring form throughout America. Cowboy pictures helped sustain the financial success of Hollywood, populated with legendary performers: Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Tex Ritter, Rory Calhoun, Alan Ladd and Gary Cooper. They shot the bad guys. They elevated White women to angelic dimensions. They defeated Indigenous tribes.
It was one-sided history. The visionary writer James Baldwin wrote a lot about cinema. “It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, [you realize] that the Indians are you,” he wrote.
Hollywood is trying to take corrective measures in addressing its past, which is a long-overdue and noble thing to do. But we are in an era of book banning and rampant misinformation about Black history, even about the slavery world that Reeves escaped from — and made a decision to bring justice to a world that had tortured him.
It is a good thing that Reeves is kicking up dust again.
Wil Haygood, a former Washington Post reporter and now a visiting scholar at Miami University (Ohio), is the author of “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World.”
correction
A previous version of this article misstated that “Yellowstone” is on Paramount Plus. It airs on the Paramount network. The article has been updated.
