Bass Reeves

Born a slave in 1838 Arkansas, Bass Reeves grew up in Lamar and Grayson counties in Texas, where he was the property of future Texas legislator, Col. George R. Reeves. Escaping north into Indian Territory, Reeves learned the ways of the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole people, before serving as a foot soldier with the Union Indian Home Guard during the Civil War. Settling as a farmer in Van Buren Arkansas at war’s end, due to his extensive knowledge of the Indian Territory—“like a cook knows her kitchen,” he once boasted—Reeves found lucrative employment as a guide and tracker for peace officers in search of desperados, thieves and murderers rampant in the Territory.

First Commission

After hanging Judge Isaac C. Parker took over the federal court at Fort Smith in 1875, based on Reeve’s proven effectiveness in apprehending criminals in the Indian Territory, the Judge commissioned Reeves as a deputy U.S. Marshal, making him one of the earliest African American lawmen west of the Mississippi. While towns like Tombstone, Deadwood and Dodge City have come to embody the image of the wild west, all these towns stayed wild for no more than four or five years, while Indian Territory towns like Fort Reno, Fort Sill, Anadarko and in particular Muskogee remained wild for well over 40 years—costing the lives of 130 U.S. Marshals out of a total western loss of 200. And while the average U.S. Marshal generally stayed on the job for one four-year term, Reeves signed on for an astounding 32 years in one of the most dangerous jobs in the early west—the only deputy to begin with Parker’s court and work until Oklahoma gained statehood in 1907.

Legend in his Time

Becoming a celebrity in his lifetime, Muskogee Police Chief Bud Ledbetter was once quoted as saying that Reeves “never quailed in facing any man.” Becoming an expert marksman with both pistol and rifle, territorial newspapers claimed that he killed fourteen outlaws over the course of his career, which would sometimes take Reeves, his cook and a posseman on 800-mile roundtrips into the more than seventy-five thousand square miles that made up the Indian Territory. According to the November 28th, 1901 edition of the Chickasaw Enterprise, the paper claimed that Reeves had arrested more than 3,000 men and women for violating federal laws in the territory. He passed away on January 12th, 1910—just three years after Oklahoma became a state— making the life and devotion of Bass Reeves, an unsung hero of the American wild west.