Cherokee Bill was cowboy LaKeith Stanfield played in The Harder They Fall

Source: Jason Mendez / Getty

Black History Month is in full swing and we here at BOSSIP thought it important to highlight some notable Black names that may not necessarily be on the tip of everyone’s tongue but have important, interesting, or even infamous histories that we think you should be aware of. With that said, let’s get into our first entry of Black History Hidden Figures.

LaKeith Stanfield played a “character” called Cherokee Bill in the Netflix western shoot-em-up flick The Harder They Fall last year. However, Cherokee Bill wasn’t some figment of a writer’s imagination. He was a living, breathing, trigger-squeezing cowboy who was quick to fill dastardly varmints with lead. In 1876, Crawford Goldsby was born to parents of multiple ethnicities. According to a Men’s Health article, his father identified as Black, Sioux, Mexican, and white while his mother was said to be half-Black, one-quarter Cherokee, and one-quarter white. He would spend most of his childhood with his mother between Kansas and Pennsylvania.

By the time Bill became a teenager, murder was on his mind, reporting says that he was between the ages of 12-18 when he caught his first body. After becoming of a member of the stagecoach-robbing Cook Gang, Bill formed his own posse which allegedly gave membership to the infamous Billy The Kid. Despite the lore of his criminal career Bill wasn’t running the dusty streets of the west for too long. Cops caught up to him after just a few robberies in 1895. Following a second murder conviction, Bill was hanged. Legend has it that his last words were, “I came here to die, not to make a speech.”

If that ain’t a Hot Boy, then what do you call that?