'Black Gun, Silver Star' by Art T. Burton
The idea of a Black lawman in the Old West once sounded so improbable, it was the gag Mel Brooks rode for his 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles. But although few knew it back when Brooks' western spoof was first released, there were several Black lawmen on the frontier, chief among them Deputy U.S. Marshall Bass Reeves. His beat was Indian Territory before it was colonized as Oklahoma and his story is told in a new biography, Black Gun, Silver Star.
The author, retired history professor Art T. Burton, built his academic career through assembling histories of Black soldiers and gunfighters on the western frontier—the sort of people excluded from the dime novels and Hollywood pictures that continue to form the pop culture memory of the Old West. In many ways, the story that emerges from Burton’s research conforms to the stereotype of the western lawman—except that Reeves was Black and faced many obstacles in a society that wouldn’t let him forget about race. He was tough and undaunted by life on the range, as fast on horseback as with a six gun. The Indian Territory he patrolled, where an unusual number of Black federal lawmen were posted after the Civil War, was the most dangerous district in the west for anyone wearing a star.
