Was the Real Lone Ranger black?

The Telegraph ^ | 06 Aug 2013

[nickcarraway]

Bass Reeves's talent for rounding up outlaws in America's Old West made him the stuff of legend. But did this former slave-turned-lawman also inspire Johnny Depp's new film? Alex Hannaford goes on the trail of the real Lone Ranger.

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.

[okie01]

My Great Grandfather was a U.S. Marshal in Kansas during Jessie James day,

Was your great granddaddy Henry Newton Brown?

[Mike Darancette]

Probably wasn’t but you can bet he was “gay”. That study will be coming out soon.

Heard a story that Abe Lincoln was gay.

[FlingWingFlyer]

I’ve seen that one going around too.

[itsahoot]

No he wasn't. He survived the Civil War and migrated from Virginia to Illinois, then down through Missouri and finally settling in Northeaster Oklahoma, where he died from a head wound, deemed accidental. I know next to nothing of his escapades, just a few stories told at family re-unions, and none of those for 30 years or so.

He is buried in GAR Cemetery in Miami, Oklahoma. Captain A. J. Xxxxxx of the Virginia Volunteers, Union Army.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Bass Reeves makes Johny Depp look like Barney Fife.