Was the real Lone Ranger a black man?

THE original Lone Ranger was a black man, according to Art Burton, an author of westerns.

He bases his theory on a story told to him by the Rev Haskell James Shoeboot, a 98-year-old part-Cherokee Indian, about Bass Reeves, a slave turned lawman in the Old West of the US who tracked down and arrested outlaws in the 19th century.

Shoeboot said Reeves was a crack shot, rode a white horse and was an expert tracker. And Burton said Reeves — perhaps the first black commissioned deputy marshal west of the Mississippi — could well have been one of the greatest lawmen of the Wild West. In his book Black Gun, Silver

Star, Burton argues that Reeves was almost certainly the real-life inspiration for the Lone Ranger. The Disney movie The Lone

Ranger, starring Armie Hammer, a white man, as the masked crime fighter and Johnny Depp as his sidekick, Tonto, has been showing in South Africa for the past month.

Burton said federal law dictated that deputy US marshals had to have at least one “posse man” with them whenever they went out in the field and “often the men who assisted Reeves were native Americans”. Tonto was said to have been a Potawatomi Indian.

The fictional character’s last name was Reid — he was never given a first name — which Burton points out is close to Reeves.

Burton discovered that Reeves often wore disguises while tracking fugitives. “You’ve also got to realise that in the late-19th and 20th century, black people were pretty much invisible. The first images of the Lone Ranger in the ’30s saw him wearing a black mask covering his whole face. For me that’s interesting. Why would you have a black mask covering his entire face?”

Reeves could well have been one of the greatest lawmen of the Wild West

Burton reckons Reeves’s calling card could have been a silver dollar, citing a story he was told in which Reeves left coins with a family who fed and housed him while he was on the trail of a gang of train robbers. The Lone Ranger’s calling card was a silver bullet.

Burton is not the first author to make the connection. In his book Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier, John Ravage also suggested Reeves could have been the inspiration for the Lone Ranger.