Pleasant Reynolds Manes was born about 1811 in Bradley County, Tennessee, the son of George R. and Malinda (Lawson) Maness. He married Mary Lucinda Gibbs in Rhea County, TN on February 23, 1832.

The family resided in Hamilton County, TN in 1850. The marriage produced at least six children before the mother's death in the early 1850's in Arkansas: Elizabeth, John Wesley, Sr. (see McCarty Cemetery, Taney County, MO), Nancy Ann, William George and Millie.

Pleasant then married Mary Lane and the couple had the following children: James, Mary E., Asbury "Burr", Eveline, Erastus Ruford, Margaret and David Allen. By 1860, the eve of the Civil War, the family resided in Carroll County, AR although in May of that year, Pleasant received a land patent for 40 acres in Searcy County of the same state.

By the end of the decade, the family resided in rural Greene County, MO where Pleasant died in June of that year near the village of Fair Grove. He belonged to the Cedar Bluff Baptist Church, founded in 1858. Graves in the nearby cemetery date to 1874 and it is entirely possible he was buried there. Although there is no evidence he was interred at the Old Fair Grove Cemetery, contemporaries are buried there and it is the only extant cemetery dating from the years just after the Civil War.

Several tragedies struck Pleasant's family in the years after his death. In 1879, two of his sons from his second marriage, James and Asbury, were killed in an altercation near Kirbyville, in Taney County. In 1886, a grandson, Deputy John Manes, Jr., was killed while helping a posse pursue James Brown, a thief from Arkansas, near Taneyville, also in Taney County.

Pleasant's second wife, Mary outlived him 35 years. She applied for and received a pension for her husband's military service. Referenced in the United States Index of Pensions for the Indian Wars is Pleasant's service at age 24 in a Captain Elliott's Tennessee Mounted Infantry in the Indian War in Florida. Mary died in August 1904 while living with her son Erastus and family and was buried in the Crossroads Cemetery, Newton County, AR.