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The Real Black Cowboys That Inspired Netflix’s The Harder They Fall

The Harder They Fall starts with a message plainly stating that its “events are fictional.” Over 137 sprawling minutes, director and co-screenplay writer Jeymes Samuel weaves an epic and blood-splattered tale of revenge in the Wild West, tracing an outlaw as he hunts down the man who killed his parents.

But while the story is fake, many of the characters in the film share their names with real life historical figures: Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Rufus Buck, Cherokee Bill. Samuel’s characters share some resemblances with their namesakes while diverging drastically in other ways; most have no actual connection to each other. In making The Harder They Fall, Samuel hopes to call attention to how Black pioneers shaped the culture and history of the American West but have since been cut out of its legacy. “We have been ignored from the history of the Old West and the cinematic presentation of what the Old West was,” Samuel told the New York Times earlier this month.

The Harder They Fall continues a current wave of Black storytellers mining this historical material for their work, joining titles like Watchmen, Hell on the Border and the upcoming Outlaw Posse, Mario Van Peebles‘s follow-up to his 1993 western, Posse. “Most people don’t know that history: They don’t know Isom Dart or Deadwood Dick or Stagecoach Mary. White male supremacy has reigned supreme in Westerns,” Van Peebles told TIME earlier this year. Two of those names appear in The Harder They Fall.

There’s captions in the photoset above. The photos of Regina King as Gertrude “Trudy” Smith, Lakeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill, and Edi Gathegi as Bill Pickett aren’t included in the article so I’m adding them below.