Most likely, the three white men who conjured the Lone Ranger from pulp magazines and Hollywood tropes had never heard of Reeves. Apart from a few passing mentions of Reeves by elderly white marshals recollecting their glory days to local newspapers, not much was written about Reeves from his death, in 1910, until a few academic articles appeared starting in 1971. It wasn’t until Burton came along that folks in the general public became aware that the lawman had even existed.
So what does it matter whether Reeves is the foundation for a fictional character whose cultural relevance has largely ridden off into the sunset?
Some find the whole discussion beside the point. Paul Brady, Reeves’s 93-year-old great-nephew, told the Telegraph in 2013, “It’s not acceptable to compare him to a fictional character. This was a real man who never had the distinction he deserved for many, many years.”
Maher agrees. “The Lone Ranger makes him a white guy,” he told me. “It fundamentally denies him his Blackness. Denies him his humanity.” By distorting Reeves into the Lone Ranger, his narrative becomes “more readily digestible,” he said.
“I believe that Bass can stand alone,” Nkokheli told me. “To tie a fictional character with Bass Reeves in order to give him some kind of validation, to me, is bullshit.”
Burton, who got this whole conversation started, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more forgiving. “If the Lone Ranger analogy will help people understand who Bass is and what he did and make his name connect somehow,” Burton told me, “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” Burton was born in 1949, the same year The Lone Ranger debuted on television. “It was on TV all through my formative years. When I was growing up, there was a ton of westerns on television. But the Lone Ranger was definitely in the forefront of those, because as a kid I liked that he stood for truth and justice and the American way of life.” But the Lone Ranger didn’t look like him. Neither did any of the other cowboys on TV. Burton didn’t have any Black heroes he could point to, and eventually Reeves filled that spot for him.
Burton’s not alone. Donald W. Washington, the current director of the U.S. Marshals Service, grew up in the town of Sulphur Springs, some forty miles south of the federal courthouse Reeves worked out of in Paris. In the mid-sixties, his mother insisted that he and his siblings leave the segregated Black school they’d been attending to integrate into one of the town’s white schools. “I understand the need for a kid to have a hero-like figure that he desires to mimic, to inspire him to go forth and do great things,” he told me. “I don’t know if there has been a solid connection between Bass and the Lone Ranger,” he continued. “But I also don’t know of any other person in American history who more solidly fits the definition or the image of the Lone Ranger than Bass.”