Was ‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ Esau Pierce a real person?

So you’ve been watching Lawmen: Bass Reeves on Paramount Plus, and you want to know if Esau Pierce was a real guy.

Who could blame you? He’s a creep. History is full of creeps. Bass Reeves is based (very, very loosely) on history. It’s nice to know how invested you should be in disliking a bad guy if you don’t want to seem like a creep yourself – folks don’t mind if you say “I love the Joker in The Dark Knight,” but tell them “I really relate to that Bundy looker in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” and your social calendar will open right up. 

And so, for the sake of context in your future television viewing, no. Esau Pierce was not a real person. 

You’d be forgiven for thinking that he might be. There is, after all, something terribly familiar about the man, especially in a Western setting. He’s played by Barry Pepper, an actor with what passes for a Wild West pedigree in this cowboy-light era. Pepper can be seen looking every bit as conniving and road-weary in 2010’s True Grit, and as a corrupt 19th century politician in the 2013 cinematic… experience The Lone Ranger. He was also in 2016’s Monster Trucks as a sheriff, which barely relates to all of this, it’s just a movie that seems to have fallen through the cracks of the collective cultural psyche in a really frightening way. Monster Trucks exists. It cost $125 million to make.

There are aspects of Esau Pierce that can be traced back to the real world. Lawmen: Bass Reeves portrays the character as a member of the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, an actual Confederate regiment out of what would  eventually become Oklahoma. They lost a lot of battles, took part in a lot of events with the word “massacre” in the title, and they were the last southern regiment to surrender in an official capacity. But they never counted a corrupt lawman named Esau Pierce among their number.