Description
By the end of his illustrious career, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves may well have been the preeminent lawman of the Old West. He brought upwards of 3,000 outlaws to justice and served in law enforcement for 32 years during Reconstruction after the Civil War.
In this documentary, we explore Bass’s life from captive slave to legendary lawman, through the antebellum South to the fierce battlefields of the Western Theater of the Civil War and the untamed plains of the Indian Territory where Native American tribes engaged in chattel slavery, holding African Americans in bondage on plantations that resembled those of the American South. We follow Bass as he strives to uphold the Constitution while fighting accusations against his character by a hostile press intent on riling up the local population against him as he endured great family tragedies that would break a lesser man. We pursue the long- hidden truths of his life as a father who arrested his own son for murder, a Black man who hunted down outlaws of all races, and a deputy marshal who is one of the greatest lawmen of the Old West. His story is one of an escape to freedom and the dangers of the West for a former slave who rose to become a legend of the law. Join us as we go in search of Bass Reeves.
Interviewees
Art T. Burton is a former professor of history at South Suburban College in South Holland, Illinois. He is the author of Black Gun, Silver Star, the Autobiography of Bass Reeves.
Bill O’Neal is an historian who served as the Official State Historian of Texas from 2012-2018. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Johnson-Sims Feud and The Johnson County War (2005 NOLA Book of the Year. He is retired from teaching at Panola College.
John W. Ravage is professor emeritus at the University of Wyoming where he lectured on African Americans in the West. He is the author of Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier.
Robert Moore is a retired United States Marshal, appointed by President Clinton. He has served the nation as a Deputy Chief of Police, United States Marshal and Police Chief of Jackson, Mississippi. His first book, The Presidents’ Men: Black United States Marshals in America, depicts the appointment of black Marshals by Republican and Democratic Presidents.
David S. Turk has served as Historian of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) since October 2001―the second to hold this position. He is the author of seven books, including Forging the Star: The Official Modern History of the United States Marshals Service (2016).
David Kennedy is Curator of the U.S. Marshals Museum, Fort Smith, Arkansas. During his tenure as the Curator of the Cody Firearms Museum, he authored Guns of the Wild West: A Photographic Tour of the Guns that Shaped our Country’s History.
