Lone Star State boasts ‘the greatest frontiersman’
PARIS — Wandering into the stately Lamar County Courthouse one morning not long ago, I asked the sheriff ’s deputy manning the metal detector where in the building I could find Bass Reeves. He didn’t know, even though Reeves was a fellow lawman and, like the deputy, had Paris connections.
As it turned out, the man who may have been the model for the Lone Ranger and who may be on the verge of a turn in the spotlight rivaling Disney’s Davy Crockett was upstairs. Installed on a stairway landing in the form of a small statue was a formidable-looking Black man in boots, duster and western hat, cigar clenched in his teeth, a badge attached to his coat, double-barreled shotgun at the ready.
Created by Eddie Dixon, a Lubbock-based sculptor known for his renderings of iconic Black figures, the Reeves work has been in the courthouse since being donated by a local benefactor in 2010.
Bass Reeves, for now, is not a household name, although among frontier-history aficionados, he’s the one Black lawman everybody knows. For good reason. As his biographer, Art T. Burton, told me by phone last week from his home near Chicago, “He’s the greatest frontiersman in American history. He was a phenomenon.”
He was born in July 1838 — near Paris, according to the Handbook of Texas, although biographer Burton maintains he was born near Van Buren, Ark. As Burton tells the story in “Black Gun, Silver Star,” Bass and his family — bearing the surname of their enslaver — were owned by William Steele Reeves, originally from Tennessee. When the youngster was 8, the Reeves family and its slaves moved to North Texas as part of the Peters Colony, an empresario grant founded by 20 English and American investors in Grayson County, just south of the Red River. Burton, a retired college history professor, mentioned last week that William S. Reeves may have been, just may have been, Bass Reeves’ father.
At some point after the move to Texas, Bass became something of a bodyguard, valet and companion to William Reeves’
son, George Reeves, who would go on to serve as Grayson County’s tax collector and then sheriff before being elected to the Texas House in 1855. Bass Reeves was always in his company. At the outbreak of the Civil War, George Reeves was made a colonel in the 11th Texas Cavalry Regiment. Bass Reeves rode into battle with him as the regiment took part in the Battle of Chustenahlah in Indian Territory, the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas and other engagements.
After the war. George Reeves — for whom Reeves County is named — would win reelection to the Texas House, eventually becoming speaker. He died of hydrophobia in 1882 after being bitten by a rabid dog.
George Reeves and Bass Reeves had parted years earlier, and not only because Bass had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. During the war, the two young men were playing cards and got into an argument. Burton, quoting Bass’s youngest daughter, wrote that Bass “laid him out cold with his fist and then made a run for Indian Territory.”
Seminole and Creek Indians, always hospitable to runaway slaves, took him in. He learned their languages, honed his already-formidable shooting skills and became a superb horseman. According to Burton, he also perfected techniques of disguise and stealth in combat.
No longer a fugitive after the war, he left Indian Territory and settled near Van Buren, becoming a stockman and farmer. He married Nellie Jennie (or Jenney), a Texan, and the couple had 10 children, five boys and five girls. After the death of his wife, Reeves married Winnie Sumter of Muskogee, Okla., and started a second family.
Occasionally serving as a scout for deputy U.S. marshals venturing into Indian Territory, Reeves himself was commissioned as a deputy U.S. marshal in 1875. According to Burton, he wasn’t the first Black deputy marshal west of the Mississippi, but he soon became the best known. At 6 feet, 2 inches tall and 190 pounds, he not only cut a formidable figure but also developed a reputation as a tough, resourceful and relentless lawman. Working alongside mostly white U.S marshals on the trail of outlaws who had taken refuge in Indian Territory, he was a sharpshooter familiar with the land and languages. The tribes, always wary of whites, knew and trusted the Black lawman.
Working out of Fort Smith under Judge Isaac Parker, the famous “hanging judge” presiding over the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, he would head into Indian Territory on the trail of fugitives — Black, Native American and white — who assumed they were beyond the reach of both federal and tribal law. Often he would return with more than a dozen outlaws in custody. Reeves himself said he once brought in 19 horse thieves operating in the Fort Sill area of today’s Oklahoma.
Christian Wallace, writing about Reeves in Texas Monthly a couple of years ago, had this to say about his reputation: “Some criminals were so afraid of Reeves they turned themselves in as soon as they heard he was after them. He stalked others in their nightmares. Once, Reeves even arrested his own son for murder.”
“He is six feet tall, 68 years old and looks to be forty,” the Fort Smith Times wrote in 1907. “He was never known to show the slightest excitement under any circumstance. He does not know what fear is, and to him the supreme document and law of the country is a ‘writ.’ Place a warrant for arrest in his hands and no circumstance can cause him to deviate.”
Burton credits Reeves with having arrested more than 3,000 fugitives during his 32year career as a marshal in Fort Smith, Paris and Sherman. He not only relied on his prowess with a gun but occasionally disguised himself to apprehend the unsuspecting. One among numerous Reeves tales that blend into legend has him trudging along the trail for nearly 30 miles dressed as a beggar on the run from the law. Arriving at the home of his targets, two brothers hiding out in their mother’s house, he accepted an invitation to spend the night. Before sunrise, the bedraggled beggar had the two men handcuffed and making the long walk back to the camp he and his posse had set up.
Burton uses Reeves’ penchant for disguise as evidence that he might have been the model for the Lone Ranger — that and the fact that many of the fugitives he arrested ended up in the Detroit House of Corrections, in the same city where radio station WXYZ introduced the masked lawman on Jan. 30, 1933. It’s a stretch, I’m thinking, but there’s no doubt that Reeves deserves a more prominent place in popular culture, including a show of his own.
He’s about to get a couple. The man from Cranfills Gap, Taylor Sheridan, the actor/ writer/producer/director behind “Yellowstone” and other gargantuan hits, will soon begin shooting a “Yellowstone” spinoff called “1883: The Bass Reeves Story.” David Oyelowo, the British actor who played the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Selma,” will star as Reeves in the six-part limited series, with Houston native Dennis Quaid as U.S. Marshall Sherrill Linn.
Burton, who discovered Reeves when he was a youngster yearning to find a Black Wyatt Earp, told me that actor/ director Morgan Freeman also has a Bass Reeves series in development for Amazon called “Twin Territories.” He’s a consultant on the project.
“Black Bass,” as he was known, died in 1910 at age 72. Where he’s buried, no one knows, Burton said.