"The Harder They Fall" Director Wants You to Google the Real People From the Film (2024)

Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Harder They Fall.

“While the events of this story are fictional…These. People. Existed.”

If you are also one of those people Samuel was hoping to reach—an excited Googler eager to learn more about a lesser-known part of history—below we've detailed the real stories of the historical people we see in The Harder They Fall.

Nat Love, played by Jonathan Majors

Love was born into slavery in 1854 in Davidson County, Tennessee, but following Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he and his parents became free. UNC's Documenting the American South reports that at the age of 15, motivated by his skills in cattle driving, herding, and roping, he set out on his own to become a cowboy.

Despite Major's portrayal as a broody outlaw determined to bloodily amend his family's death, there is no evidence that the real Love's life was quite as criminal. However, the cowboy did document his eventful years on the Western trail in The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, an autobiography he published in 1907. It chronicles time spent in Kansas, Texas, and beyond, as he joins a Black cowboy gang, is held captive by a group of Native Americans for a month's time, meets gunfighter Billy the Kid, and earns the title Deadwood Dick for his legendary shooting, roping, and horseback riding skills.

Historians note that the book reads more like a boastful, fantastical work of folklore rather than a succinct account of his life, but it's known as the only first-hand retelling of a Black cowboy's life at the time. "I ended up reading it a few times," Majors tells us about the book. "This idea of the outlaw pseudonym of Deadwood Dick... That tells me a lot about how much confidence this man had. There's a lot of quiet truth when you read something like that. It let me know, this is a man whose mind is more acute than you would think. So I began to bring that in [my character] and believe that."

Unlike in The Harder They Fall, Love never met Stagecoach Mary, let alone fell madly in love with her. He had one child with a woman named Alice and after retiring from the cowboy life at age 36, worked on the railroads and as a security guard. Love died at the age of 67 in 1921.

Rufus Buck, played by Idris Elba

Like Elba's character in the film, the real Rufus Buck was a ruthless outlaw who exacted terror across the West. (But he was not, as the movie depicted, Nat Love's half-brother.) This reputation was built over two weeks in the summer of 1895. Soon after being released from Arkansas' Fort Smith jail, 18-year-old Buck—who was half-Native American, half-Black—rounded up four of his fellow inmates and formed the infamous Rufus Buck Gang. According to historians, like their leader, the entire group was of Native and African American descent.

With motivations to both fulfill a record-breaking crime spree and exact revenge on white settlers in the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, Buck led his gang in 13 days of violence across Oklahoma and Arkansas. Their crimes include the murder of Deputy Marshal John Garrett, the robbery of a grocery store and a rape. They were captured following a shootout with law enforcement and sentenced to hang despite a failed appeal to the Supreme Court. The gang was hung on July 1, 1896.

"Stagecoach Mary" Fields, played by Zazie Beetz

Born into slavery in either 1832 or 1833, then freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Mary Fields earned a fearsome reputation across the Old West but was also highly respected. Beetz's film version of the woman is a saloon-owning, Blues-singing, wild (but dainty) youthful beauty and love interest of Nat Love. But the real Stagecoach Mary earned notability as a quick-tempered 6-foot tall woman who dressed in men's clothing, freely cursed, drank and smoked heavily, and was hardly ever seen without a shotgun.

In the years following the Civil War, Fields lived in Toledo, Ohio, where she worked at the local convent keeping the grounds, managing the kitchen, and maintaining the gardens. Her abrasive nature clashed with the resident nuns and, as the Smithsonian National Postal Museum reports, she eventually moved on to do the same work at a mission—also run by nuns—in Cascade, Montana. In her early 60s, Fields became the first Black woman to be a Star Route Carrier for the United States Postal Office, delivering the mail via stagecoach across Montana. It's from this role, in which she fearlessly worked to protect the mail from bandits, that she earned the moniker "Stagecoach Mary."

Fields worked the route for eight years before retiring. She came to be much loved by the locals of Cascade, particularly for her natural ease with children. When Fields died in 1914, her funeral was one of the largest the town had seen, according to the Postal Museum.

Gertrude "Trudy" Smith, played by Regina King

King told Oprah Daily that Trudy Smith was a real person, but very little is known about her story. However, the Oscar-winner reflected on getting the chance to play a villainous character as the right-hand woman of Elba's Rufus Buck.

"I've never really gotten a chance to be a baddie," King says. "But her intentions are good. The Rufus Buck gang really feels they have an opportunity to be self-sufficient; to not be dependent on any white person. We've got the opportunity to do that. Now the way in which they may go about establishing that may not be agreeable to some people, but the intention behind it, I think, positive."

Cherokee Bill, played by Lakeith Stanfield

Named by the Oklahoma Historical Society as "one of the most famous outlaws in the history of the Indian Territory," Crawford Goldsby (known in later years as Cherokee Bill) first clashed with the law in his teens. The Texas native was born in 1876 and was of Mexican, white, Sioux, Cherokee, and Black descent, according to the National Park Service.

He earned notoriety after joining the infamous Cook Gang when he was 18, taking part in a series of bank robberies, gunfights, and holdups across the Cherokee and Creek Nations. Goldsby was executed at Fort Smith jail in 1896 at the age of 20, but not before shooting and killing a guard in an attempt to escape.

Bass Reeves, Played by Delroy Lindo

Dubbed by The Washington Post as the "fiercest federal lawman you never knew," Bass Reeves was one of the first Black U.S. deputy marshals west of the Mississippi—and he's said to be the inspiration for the iconic Lone Ranger.

Reeves earned legendary status in the Indian Territory—now known as Oklahoma and ruled by the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek—for his arrest of nearly 3,000 outlaws in the region. And he was able to accomplish them all without sustaining one gunshot wound himself, according to History.com. His experience as a Civil War soldier, skills with a rifle, knowledge of Native languages, and tendency to don disguises put him one level above the rest of law enforcement at the time. The Washington Post reports that his arrests even included white men who carried out lynchings. Reeves died at 71 in 1910.

Wiley Escoe, played by Deon Cole

Not much is known about the life of Wiley Escoe, spare for the fact that he's one of the few known Black U.S. marshals of the Old West during the 19th century, according to the AP.

Bill Pickett, played by Edi Gathegi

Of Black and Native American descent, Bill Pickett was a famed rodeo showman during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907 he joined the 101 Ranch Wild West Show and became famous for creating "bulldogging," a rodeo event in which a mounted cowboy wrestles a steer to the ground. Pickett also famously rode and wrestled a bull for a full 7 minutes. The Texan appeared in two silent Western films before dying in 1932 in his early 60s.

James Beckwourth, played by R.J. Cyler

Though he was born enslaved in Virginia in 1905, James Beckwourth went on to become a respected outdoorsman, mountaineer, explorer, and fur trader. The Sierra Nevada Mountains' Beckwourth Pass is named for him, as he discovered the trail and made it safer for travelers. He wrote about his adventures in an 1856 autobiography titled The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth.