The tall man lying flat on his belly in the dry yellow grass on the slope above Bywater Store in the Chickasaw Nation of the Indian Territory on the warm morning of the 11th of June, 1884, was 6 ft 2 in in height and weighed almost 210 lb. His name was Bass Reeves. He was 45 years old.
He had been born into slavery on a small Arkansas plantation in July of 1838. He had been a Deputy United States Marshal for 9 years. He had a thick black mustache, a worn black hat pulled low across his forehead, and a Winchester 1873 lever-action rifle chambered for .44-40 cartridges resting across his right forearm. The rifle was clean, the action was oiled, the magazine held 14 rounds.
Beside him in the grass lay his posseman, a small wiry tracker named John Cantrell, who had been with him on the trail for 11 straight days. The man Bass Reeves had come to arrest was named Jim Webb. Webb had been, until the spring of 1883, the foreman of one of the largest cattle operations in the southern half of the Indian Territory, the Washington-McClish ranch on Spring Creek, owned jointly by a Texan cattleman named Bill Washington and a wealthy Chickasaw freedman named Daniel McClish. He was a hard, lean, light-skinned Texan with a quick temper and a reputation for handling trouble before it had time to develop. In the spring of 1883, a small black homesteader and Methodist preacher named William Stewart had let a brush fire on his own property burn across onto Washington-McClish grazing land. Webb had ridden to Stewart’s cabin to discuss the damage. The discussion lasted less than 10 minutes. Webb shot the preacher in the chest with a Colt .44 caliber revolver, mounted his horse, and rode south. The preacher died on his own porch in front of his wife and three children.
The warrant for Jim Webb, signed by Judge Isaac Charles Parker at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in May of 1883, was given to Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves the same week. Reeves had ridden after Webb almost immediately. He had cornered him for the first time in November of 1883 at this very same trading post called Bywater Store.
On that earlier visit, Webb had been eating breakfast in the back room when Reeves walked in. Webb had jumped through a window, fired a single shot that grazed Reeves’s deputy partner Floyd Wilson across the cheek, and disappeared into the brush. He had spent the next 7 months drifting south into Texas, then north again, then west into the Wichita Mountains, then finally back to the Chickasaw Nation, sheltered by old friends from his ranching days.
Now, on the morning of June 11th, 1884, the tip had come in a second time. Webb was back at Bywaters store. He was eating breakfast in the same back room, and Bass Reeves, who had been waiting almost a year for this exact morning, was lying in the grass 300 yards out, watching the front door of the store through the iron sights of his rifle.
What happened in the next 20 minutes between the slope and the store and the open ground in between would become one of the most famous gunfights of the entire Indian Territory era. It would be reprinted in newspapers from St. Louis to San Francisco. It would be told and retold by old marshals and old outlaws sitting on the porches of small Oklahoma towns for the next 50 years.
And it would be, by every account that survives, the longest documented pistol and rifle range duel ever recorded between a single lawman and a single armed fugitive in the entire history of the American frontier. The first shots opened at less than 30 yards. The final shot, the shot that ended the duel, was fired at a measured distance of approximately 500 yards.
The man behind the Winchester on the morning of the 11th of June, 1884, was a former Arkansas slave who, by the day he hung up his badge in 1907, would have arrested more than 3,000 fugitives across an area of more than 75,000 square miles, would have killed only 14 men in 32 years of dangerous federal service, and would have never, not on a single morning in those three decades, been wounded by a bullet.
And here is the question that drives this entire story. The Indian Territory in the 1880s was not Tombstone. It was not Dodge City. It was the most violent, most lawless stretch of land left anywhere in the United States. A place where 200 deputy United States marshals tried to keep order across an area larger than the state of Missouri, and where 65 of those deputies would be killed in the line of duty between 1875 and 1896.
In a place that murderous, a place where almost every fugitive he hunted had killed before and would kill again, how did a single black lawman, born into slavery in Arkansas, working alone or with a single tracker for 32 years, arrest more fugitives than any other federal officer of his generation and walk out of every single confrontation with his hat still on his head? That is what we are going to spend the next 40 minutes answering tonight.
Before we go any further, do me one small favor. Tell me where you are watching from tonight. I read every single comment and I want to know who is sitting with me on this one. Whether you are in Arkansas, where Bass Reeves was born into a world he was not free to leave, or in Oklahoma, where he is buried under a small headstone on a quiet hillside above the town of Muskogee, or anywhere else across this country, drop your state in the comments below.
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That is the whole reason this channel exists. Now, let us go back to the beginning. Not the beginning of the gunfight, the beginning of the man. Bass Reeves was born in July of 1838 on a small tobacco and corn plantation in Crawford County in the Arkansas River Valley, about 12 miles south of the present-day town of Van Buren.
He was born into slavery. He was named after his maternal grandfather, a man called Bass Washington. The plantation was owned by an Arkansas state legislator named William Steel Reeves, who, by the customs of the time and the place, also owned the boy himself. The boy never knew his father. He grew up in a single-room slave cabin with his mother, Perlina Lee, and three or four other relatives.
He ate cornbread and salt pork. He slept on a corn shuck mattress. He learned from his mother and his grandmother to read the stars and to track game and to sing the spirituals very softly in the evenings so that the white family up at the main house would not hear him and tell him to be quiet.
When he was 8 years old in 1846, the entire Reeves household pulled up stakes and moved south into Texas, settling in Grayson County near the small new settlement of Sherman in what was then called the Peters Colony. The reasons for the move were never written down. The land in Crawford County was probably exhausted. The cotton economy in North Texas was rising. The young boy went with them.
He grew up among the Texas Blackland Prairies learning to handle horses, learning to shoot at small game with a borrowed flintlock rifle, learning to listen to the wind and the dust and the language of the long grass on the open plains. He had, by every account that survives from the years after his eventual freedom, an extraordinary natural gift for marksmanship.
He could shoot equally well with either hand. He could load and fire a Sharps rifle from a galloping horse. By the time he was 18 years old, the white men of Grayson County would lay small bets on his shooting at country fairs, and the boy himself, who could not legally accept payment for anything, was simply allowed to keep what he won in trade for cornmeal and tobacco.
By the late 1850s, he had been moved, through some form of inheritance, into the household of William Steele Reeves’s adult son, Colonel George Robertson Reeves. George Reeves was a different kind of master from his father. He was a sheriff. He was a state legislator. He would later be elected speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.
He was, by every account, harsh and unyielding. He took Bass with him almost everywhere he traveled. He used him as a body servant and a hunting companion. He played long games of poker against him in the long Texas evenings despite the fact that any winnings the slave accumulated could not legally be kept.
When the Civil War came in the spring of 1861, Colonel George Reeves enlisted in the 11th Texas Cavalry of the Confederate Army. He took his slave Bass with him as a personal attendant. They served, by all surviving records, in the Indian Territory campaigns of 1861 and 1862, fighting alongside Cherokee and Creek Confederate troops under the command of General Stand Watie.
And somewhere in those months, in a soldier’s tent late one night, over what one Reeves family oral tradition remembers as a hand of cards and what another remembers as an argument over a missing shirt button, the slave Bass Reeves attacked his owner, knocked him to the ground, and ran out into the darkness of the Indian Territory.
He never went back. He was 23 years old. He had no map. He had no money. He had no compass. He had the clothes on his back, a stolen pistol in his belt, and by his own later account, the whole United States Army and the entire Confederate States Army, both willing to shoot me on sight if they caught me.
He survived. He survived in the Cherokee Nation, in the Creek Nation, and the Seminole Nation by working for small Native farmers who were too far from the war to care who he was. He learned to speak Cherokee. He learned to speak Creek. He learned to speak Choctaw and Chickasaw and Seminole. He learned the names of the rivers and the names of the mountains and the names of the trails.
He learned by sleeping in the woods for almost 4 years, every hiding place between the Red River and the Arkansas River, every cave, every box canyon, every abandoned trading post, every cabin where a fugitive might pause for a night before riding on. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1863, set him legally free, but he did not learn about it until almost a year after the fact.
By the end of the war, in the spring of 1865, he was 26 years old, fluent in five indigenous languages, and he had spent more time in the Indian Territory as a free man than almost any other African American then alive. He went home to Crawford County, Arkansas, in the summer of 1865. He bought a small piece of bottom land near Van Buren with money he had saved working for the Creek farmers.
He married a woman named Nellie Jennie, called Jennie, in 1864. They began to raise a family. Over the next 10 years, they would have 10 children together. He farmed corn and raised a few horses. He hunted to put meat on the table. He paid his property taxes on time. He went to church every Sunday at a small Baptist congregation outside of Van Buren.
He was, by every account from those years, a quiet, careful, deeply religious man who never raised his voice and who never, not once, walked away from a problem he believed he was being asked by God to solve. In May of 1875, the man who would become his commanding officer for the rest of his federal career stepped off a steamboat at the wharf at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and looked across the brown water of the Arkansas River into the Indian Territory beyond.
His name was Isaac Charles Parker. He was 36 years old. He had just been appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as the federal judge for the Western District of Arkansas, which included, by the federal judicial map of that year, all 74,000 square miles of the Indian Territory. The territory, when Judge Parker arrived, had become almost ungovernable.
White outlaws fleeing warrants in Texas and Missouri and Kansas had been hiding there for almost a decade. Cattle thieves operated in broad daylight. Whiskey peddlers sold rotgut to native communities the federal government had pledged to protect. Murderers walked openly through small trading settlements knowing that no white sheriff had legal authority to arrest them on tribal land.
In the year before Judge Parker took the bench, more than 200 murders had been recorded inside the borders of the Indian Territory. The actual number was almost certainly much higher. Judge Parker, on his first afternoon in Fort Smith, gave his United States Marshal, a Pennsylvania-born former Union officer named James F.
Fagan, a single, simple instruction. Fagan was to hire 200 Deputy United States Marshals. They were to be paid $2 per arrest plus mileage. They were to ride alone or in pairs into the Indian Territory and bring back, alive when possible and dead when necessary, every fugitive named on every federal warrant that had accumulated in the previous 5 years.
Fagan was given 6 weeks to fill the roster. Fagan asked everyone he met in the saloons and the steamboat landings and the country stores of Western Arkansas who knew the Indian Territory best. The same name kept coming back. A black farmer near Van Buren, almost 40 years old, who spoke five indigenous languages and who could ride a horse for 16 hours without changing his seat in the saddle.
Fagan rode out to the small farm in late June of 1875. He sat at the supper table with the Reeves family. He explained the offer. The black farmer asked his wife what she thought. The wife, by every family account, sat in silence for almost a full minute before she answered. Then she said, “If the Lord is sending you, Bass, you have to go.
” Bass Reeves took the oath of office the following Monday morning. He was 37 years old. He was one of the very first black men ever commissioned as a deputy United States Marshal west of the Mississippi River. He would hold the badge for the next 32 years. What he was about to do in those 32 years would seem in retrospect almost impossible to credit if it were not for the fact that the federal court records at Fort Smith and Muskogee preserve almost all of it in detail.
He would ride more than 75,000 square miles alone or with one or two helpers, sleeping in the open, eating cold corn dodger out of his saddlebags, drinking creek water through his teeth to strain the silt. He would arrest, according to the most careful surviving counts, more than 3,000 fugitives.
He would be shot at, by his own later count, on more than 30 separate occasions. He would have his hat shot off his head twice and his gun belt shot off his hips once. He would never, in those three decades, take a serious bullet wound. He would kill, according to his obituary published in the Muskogee Phoenix on January 13th, 1910, exactly 14 men in the line of duty.
Every single one of them, after the other man had drawn first. He would never, on any morning of those three decades, fire the first shot in any confrontation he was personally involved in. How did he do it? The records show three things, and we are going to walk through them tonight, one at a time, because together they explain the man and they explain the gunfight at Bywater Store.
And they explain why outlaws from Texas to Kansas to Missouri came to fear the name Bass Reeves more than they feared any other deputy marshal whoever rode under Judge Parker’s commission. The first thing was disguise. Bass Reeves understood from his very first month on the job that a black federal lawman wearing a badge and riding into a small native settlement in the Indian Territory was a man who would never get within rifle range of any fugitive who was paying attention.
So, he stopped looking like a lawman. He grew his beard. He let his clothes wear thin. He rode an old saddle. He carried his badge in a small leather pouch inside his vest with the warrants folded in a sealed oilcloth packet beneath his shirt. He walked into trading posts pretending to be a cowboy looking for work.
He walked into Creek settlements pretending to be a freedman drifter seeking a meal. On at least one famous occasion recorded in detail by the historian Art T. Burton, Reeves dressed himself in old farm clothes, knocked a hole in his hat with a rock, smeared his face with red Oklahoma clay, and walked 28 miles on foot to the cabin of two brothers named Jim and Pink Brassfield who were wanted for murder.
He arrived at their cabin at dusk claiming to be a hungry on the run from his own troubles. The brothers fed him. They let him sleep on the floor by the fire. They told him stories about the lawman they had outsmarted. At dawn, while they were still sleeping, Reeves drew his pistols, handcuffed both of them in their bedrolls, and marched them 28 miles back to the federal jail at Fort Smith.
The Brassfield brothers, when they realized at sunrise who their visitor actually was, were too astonished to resist. The second thing was patience. Reeves did not corner fugitives. He waited until they cornered themselves. He would camp half a mile from a wanted man’s cabin for three or four days running, watching the smoke from the chimney, watching who rode in and who rode out until he understood the rhythm of the household.
He would sometimes shadow a fugitive for 2 weeks before making contact, riding parallel trails through the brush, sleeping when the fugitive slept, waking when the fugitive woke. By the time the warrant was finally served, Reeves usually knew the man he was arresting better than the man knew himself.
He once spent 11 days in the autumn of 1888 tracking a Cherokee killer named Ned Christie through the Cookson Hills eating only what he could shoot and what he could trap before he finally made the arrest. Christie escaped from him on a technicality four days later, was hunted by other deputies for another four years, and eventually died in a famous final shootout at his fortress cabin in November of 1892.
But Reeves was the only deputy who ever took him alive. The third thing, the thing that mattered most on the morning of the 11th of June 1884, was marksmanship. Bass Reeves, by every surviving account, was one of the finest rifle shots and finest pistol shots in the entire United States in the second half of the 19th century.
He shot equally well with either hand. He could put six revolver rounds into a coffee can at 50 yards in less than 4 seconds. He could hit a man-sized target at 500 yards with a Winchester rifle from a prone position in any wind of less than 15 miles an hour. Native marksmanship contests held at country gatherings in the Creek and Choctaw nations sometimes banned him from competing, not because of his color, but because the result was a foregone conclusion.
He was known in the small towns of eastern Oklahoma by a single nickname the local farmers gave him in his last years. They called him Mr. Sure Shot. And so, on the warm morning of the 11th of June 1884, Mr. Sure Shot lay in the dry yellow grass on the slope above Bywater Store with his Winchester rifle in his hands and his possum man John Cantrell beside him, watching the front door of a small log trading post on the south edge of the Arbuckle Mountains in what is today Carter County, Oklahoma, and waiting for Jim Webb to come out into the open ground. The plan, when they had crawled into position before dawn, had been to wait for Webb to walk to the well behind the store and then to close in from two sides. The plan came apart almost immediately. Webb came out of the store at about 7:00 in the morning carrying a tin coffee cup. He saw something on the slope. Whether it was the gleam of a rifle barrel or the movement of a horse 200 yards to the rear, no one ever fully established. He dropped the coffee cup. He drew his pistol, a Smith & Wesson .44. He shouted a warning back through the
open door of the store to his companion inside, a man named Bywaters, the proprietor himself. And then he ran for his horse, which was hitched in the front yard about 40 yards from the door. Reeves stood up out of the grass. He shouted across the open ground for Webb to halt.
He shouted that he was a Deputy United States Marshal. He shouted that the warrant was for the killing of the preacher William Stewart. Webb’s only answer was to swing his pistol up and fire two rounds at Reeves at a distance of about 120 yards. Both rounds went wide. Reeves did not return fire immediately. He shouted the warning a second time.
Webb fired three more times. The third round struck the brim of Reeves’ hat and tore it sideways across his head. What happened next is preserved in two separate accounts. One published in the Muskogee Phoenix in 1910, and one preserved in the oral history collected by the journalist Richard Fronerhouse from old deputies who had known Reeves personally.
Both accounts agree on the essentials. Webb leaped onto his horse. He spurred south, riding low against the animal’s neck, trying to put the bulk of the store between himself and the slope. Reeves did not chase him on horseback. He raised the Winchester to his shoulder. He laid the front sight on a point about 3 ft above Webb’s lower back. He took a long, slow breath.
He held it. He waited until the horse cleared the corner of the store at full gallop. He pulled the trigger one time. The distance from where Reeves was standing to where Webb was riding when the bullet struck him has been variously measured by historians and surveyors over the past 140 years. The shortest credible estimate is 450 yards. The longest is 600.
The most carefully measured figure, taken by a survey of the original ground in 1948 by an Oklahoma historian named Glenn Shirley, comes out to approximately 500 yards. At that distance, even with a perfectly sighted Winchester rifle, the bullet drops more than 7 ft from horizontal during its flight.
And the wind of any morning in June can blow it 3 or 4 ft sideways. Reeves had compensated for both factors in the half second he held his breath. The bullet entered Jim Webb’s lower back just above the right hip, traveled through his torso at an upward angle, and exited near the base of his throat. He fell from his horse before the report of the rifle had finished echoing off the limestone walls of the Arbuckle Mountains.
Reeves walked the 500 yd down the slope to the place where Webb had fallen. The fugitive was still alive. He was bleeding heavily from the mouth. The pistol was lying in the dust a few feet from his right hand. Reeves picked it up. He sat down in the grass beside the dying man. According to the account preserved by the Muskogee Phoenix, Jim Webb looked up at the deputy who had finally caught him and said, in a voice that was almost a whisper, “Give me your hand, Bass.
You are a brave, brave man. I never met a man like you in my life. Take my revolver. I want you to have it.” Reeves took the pistol. He held the dying man’s hand for almost 10 minutes until the breathing stopped. He carried the body back to the wagon. He carried it home the full 170 mi to Fort Smith. Witnesses who saw Reeves later that summer reported that he never spoke about the gunfight at Bywater store unless someone asked him directly.
And that when he did speak about it, he spoke about it without pride and without satisfaction. He spoke about it the way a carpenter speaks about a difficult piece of cabinetry, or the way a farmer speaks about a hard year. He had done a thing that had to be done. He had not enjoyed doing it.
He carried Jim Webb’s .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in his saddlebags for the rest of his life. He never used it on another man. He served 23 more years after the Webb shooting. He arrested in those 23 years somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 more fugitives. He arrested whiskey peddlers in the Creek Nation.
He arrested cattle rustlers in the Cherokee Nation. He arrested horse thieves in the Chickasaw Nation. He arrested in 1886 a tall, thin Cherokee outlaw and his small, dark-haired Missouri-born wife at a place called Younger’s Bend on on Canadian River. The man’s name was Sam Starr. The woman was Belle Starr. He took them both to Fort Smith in chains without firing a single shot.
He was in 1902 asked to perform the hardest assignment of his entire career. His own 25-year-old son, a young man named Benjamin Reeves, whom the family called Benny, had killed his wife in a moment of jealous rage in Muskogee. The other deputies offered to take the warrant. Bass Reeves, by every account, refused.
He saddled his horse. He rode alone to the place where Benny was hiding. He brought his son back in handcuffs. He stood in the courtroom of Judge C.W. Raymond on the 22nd of January, 1903, and watched Benny be sentenced to life in the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He never once, by any surviving account, asked the judge for mercy.
When Oklahoma achieved statehood on the 16th of November, 1907, the office of Deputy United States Marshal for the Indian Territory was officially abolished. Bass Reeves was 69 years old. He hung up his federal badge. He took a job, 3 weeks later, as a uniformed beat officer with the Muskogee Police Department.
He walked a four-block patrol in the small downtown district. He carried, on his uniform belt, the same Colt single-action army revolver he had carried for the previous 15 years. By every surviving account from those 2 years, no crime, not so much as a stolen melon from a fruit stand, was ever committed on Bass Reeves’ beat during the entire time he walked it.
He retired in 1909 at the age of 71 when his health began to fail. He died at his home on North Howard Street in Muskogee of a kidney disease then called Bright’s disease and today known as chronic nephritis on the 12th of January, 1910. He was buried in an unmarked grave in a small black cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
The Muskogee Phoenix ran a one-column obituary the following morning. The obituary called him, in its first paragraph, “the most feared US Deputy Marshal who ever rode in the Indian Territory.” It said he had killed 14 men. It said he had arrested more than 3,000. It said he had never been wounded.
It said, in its closing line, that “the country will not soon see his like again. For almost the next 80 years, the country did not see his like, and the country did not remember him either. The textbooks of the 20th century did not mention Bass Reeves. The Hollywood Westerns of the 1940s and the 1950s did not mention him.
The myth of the Old West, as it was sold to the American public in the long afterglow of the frontier, was a myth of white lawmen and white outlaws and native warriors on the wrong side of a destiny that had already been decided. The black deputy who had spoken five indigenous languages, who had arrested 3,000 fugitives, who had killed only when killed at first, did not fit into the story the country had decided to tell about itself. So, he was forgotten.
The remembering, when it finally began, came slowly. The historian Art T. Burton published the first serious biography of Reeves in 2006 titled Black Gun, Silver Star. The bronze statue was raised in Pendergraft Park in Fort Smith, Arkansas in May of 2012. The bridge over the Arkansas River between Muskogee and Fort Gibson was renamed in his honor in 2011.
The Paramount streaming series Lawmen Bass Reeves, starring the actor David Oyelowo, premiered in November of 2023. The country, more than 100 years after his death, finally began to see what the outlaws of the Indian Territory had always known. Now, think about this for a moment. In a West that has been remembered in the country’s imagination for the men who drew first and shot fastest and built reputations through noise and through anger, Bass Reeves built his entire career on the opposite of all of that. He did not draw first. He did not shoot fastest. He did not build his reputation through noise. He built it through silence and through patience and through the long, slow gathering of information and through 500 yards of empty Oklahoma grass between the barrel of his rifle and the man he had been hired to bring in. He was not a celebrated gunfighter. He was a working federal officer who happened to be the best rifle shot in the federal service of his generation. He did not enjoy the killings. He did not boast about them. He buried the men he had to kill with his own hands when no one else would. And he carried their
weapons in his saddle bags for the rest of his life as a kind of moral weight he was unwilling to put down. They were not savages. They were not heroes. They were people. And in the middle of those people, riding through the long Oklahoma summers from 1875 to 1907 on a chestnut horse with a worn black hat and a Winchester rifle.
