Deputy U. S. Marshal Bass Reeves had tracked horse thief Tom Story to the Red River, catching him in the act of fleeing back into Texas with a pair of stolen mules. Reeves ordered the man to raise his hands.
Story chose to go for his pistol instead. According to Reeves’s own account, Tom Story committed suicide right then and there. Over more than three decades as a lawman, Reeves arrested more than 3,000 criminals and killed as many as twenty men in the line of duty. Newspaper accounts of his day described him as a holy terror and one of the greatest man hunters ever to work the Indian Territory.
He routinely rode into lawless country and returned with wagon loads of prisoners. Many of those prisoners came willingly, knowing that resistance was pointless. Others, like Tom Story, ended up in unmarked graves. Bass Reeves was born into slavery in Crawford County, Arkansas, in the summer of 1838.
His owner, farmer William S. Reeves, moved the family south to Grayson County, Texas, in 1846. Young Bass worked in the fields as a water boy, then cared for horses and assisted the blacksmith. In his teens, he was chosen to serve as companion to George Reeves, the owner’s son, who also happened to be the sheriff and tax collector of Grayson County.
Bass acted as coachman, valet, butler, and occasional bodyguard. When Bass asked permission to learn to read, the request was denied. Instead, George allowed him to learn to handle firearms. Bass became so skilled that George entered him in shooting contests and pocketed the prize money.
Legend holds that Reeves was eventually banned from turkey shoots just to give the other competitors a chance. When the Civil War broke out, George Reeves joined the 11th Texas Cavalry as a colonel, and Bass went along as his body servant. Precisely what happened during this period remains unclear. Bass later claimed he had been present at Pea Ridge, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge, and said he witnessed the death of Confederate General Ben McCulloch in March 1862.
But family tradition tells a different story. His great-nephew, Judge Paul Brady, maintained that Bass defected and fought alongside Creek and Seminole forces at the Battle of Chustenahlah in December 1861. Some believe he served as a Union sergeant, though no records verify this. At some point, Bass fled bondage.
The most common account holds that he and George Reeves quarreled over a card game, Bass knocked him out with his fist, and then ran for the Indian Territory. His daughter Alice later said her father fled with the hue and cry of a runaway slave hounding him until emancipation. Bass hid out among the Creek and Seminole, learning their languages and adopting skills that would serve him well for the rest of his life. By 1870, he had resurfaced in Crawford County, Arkansas, farming with his wife Jennie and their four children.
Seven more children would follow. He began earning money on the side as a scout and tracker for U. S. marshals out of Van Buren.
In 1875, Judge Isaac Parker took the bench in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and all of Indian Territory fell under his federal jurisdiction. Parker deputized a force of men to carry the law into that country. Bass Reeves was among them. Indian Territory in those years was a refuge for outlaws.
After the Indian Removal Act forced dozens of tribes onto the land, tribal courts had jurisdiction only over crimes committed by tribal members against their own people. Anyone else could steal, rob, and murder with near impunity. By one 1888 estimate, only a quarter of the white people living in the territory were law-abiding. The popular saying was that there was no Sunday west of St.
Louis and no God west of Fort Smith. Somewhere around eighty miles west of Fort Smith lay the deadline, marked by railroad tracks, beyond which a deputy’s life expectancy shrank dramatically. Outlaws would leave notes there, calling deputies out by name and warning that they were dead men if they advanced. Roughly seventy-five to one hundred deputy marshals were killed in the line of duty during Parker’s two decades on the bench.
To survive, a deputy had to outfight and outsmart his opponents. Bass excelled at both. He traveled undercover, dressing as a farmhand, a cowboy, a circuit preacher, or even an outlaw. On one occasion, he approached a cabin on foot, ragged and exhausted, and asked for shelter.
The outlaw brothers he was hunting lived there with their mother and fell for the ruse, inviting him to join their gang. That night, while the fugitives slept, Bass handcuffed them both without waking them. In the morning, he kicked them awake and marched them twenty-eight miles to his wagon, with their mother following for the first few miles and cursing him the entire way. Reeves stood about six feet two inches tall, with hands that, according to author D.
C. Gideon, would do credit to a giant. He needed a large horse, noting that for a man his size, a small horse was as worthless as a preacher in a whiskey joint fight. He could not read or write, so he studied warrants closely after hearing them read aloud, memorizing distinctive marks on each paper and matching them to the names of fugitives.
When necessary, he forced prisoners to read their own warrants aloud to confirm their identity. Not every encounter went smoothly. When the three Bruner brothers drew pistols on him while he was chasing someone else, Bass calmly pulled out his warrant and asked what day it was so he could date the arrest for the court records. The brothers laughed at his boldness, and that distraction was all he needed.
He shot two of them dead and took the third into custody. In 1884, Reeves went after Jim Webb, a Texas ranch foreman who had murdered a neighbor who happened to be a minister. Acting as a down-and-out cowboy, Bass got close to Webb and his friend Frank Smith. After a meal, while the men sat outside, something briefly caught Webb’s attention.
Bass knocked Webb’s gun away and grabbed his throat. Smith fired twice, but Bass, still clutching Webb, spun and shot Smith in the belly. Smith died shortly afterward. Webb spent nearly a year in jail before posting bond and fleeing back to the territory.
Bass tracked him to a general store in the Chickasaw Nation, where they exchanged fire. Webb’s bullets shredded Bass’s reins, cut through his saddle horn, tore his hat, and snapped a button off his shirt. Bass returned fire and dropped Webb with two rifle shots. Newspaper accounts placed the distance at five hundred yards, which later writers have questioned, but the killing itself was confirmed by witnesses and reported in the papers.
Just a month later, Reeves had another close call. The Muskogee Indian Journal described how Bass, hunting two men named Frank Buck and John Bruner, met the pair without recognizing them. They volunteered to guide him, never knowing they were his quarry. At noon camp, Bruner reached for his pistol.
Bass stepped behind his horse, grabbed Bruner’s gun before it cleared its holster, and drew his own. When Buck went for his weapon, Reeves shot him dead while still holding Bruner’s pistol in his other hand. Bruner was taken to Fort Smith to face a double charge. But not every shooting came in the line of duty.
In 1884, while Reeves was camped in the territory with prisoners, his rifle discharged accidentally and struck camp cook William Leech in the neck. Leech died. A persistent rumor later claimed the shooting was revenge for the cook pouring hot grease down a puppy’s throat, but court testimony told a different story. Reeves and Leech had quarreled over a dog in camp.
Leech threatened to kill Reeves’s horse. Reeves had been working on his rifle, trying to dislodge a . 45 caliber round stuck in the chamber of his . 44-40 Winchester.
The rifle went off during the attempt. Witnesses, including one of the prisoners and his wife, agreed that the discharge was not intentional, though they differed on whether the quarrel was serious or in jest. Nearly two years later, a new marshal, a former Confederate officer, pushed for charges. In January 1886, Bass Reeves was indicted for first-degree murder and locked up in the notorious Fort Smith jail.
The courtroom stench rose from the basement, where prisoners were packed into one overcrowded, unventilated room. Reeves spent six months awaiting trial, unable to work. The jury acquitted him, persuaded that the killing was not intentional. The consequences, however, were severe.
Reduced to bankruptcy, Bass sold the family home, an eight-room house in Van Buren, to pay his legal bills, and moved his family to more modest quarters on the outskirts of Fort Smith. Reeves went straight back to work, returning again and again to the territory and bringing prisoners in by the wagon load. When a warrant was issued for the famous lady bandit Belle Starr, she surrendered on her own, the only time she willingly did so. Word had spread that when Bass Reeves came looking, the smartest thing a man could do was give up and hope for a good lawyer.
By November 1890, Bass Reeves was on the trail of the notorious Cherokee outlaw Ned Christie. His career, however, was far from over. He would continue as a deputy marshal, arrest the killer Bob Dozier, take the one bullet that ever struck him, and fight his last gunfight when he was nearly seventy years old. He served more than thirty years in law enforcement, until close to the end of his life.
Historian Art Burton, who devoted years of research to Reeves, called him the greatest frontier hero in American history. For thirty-two years, Burton said, Reeves walked into the valley of death every day and came out alive.