The Legend of Bass Reeves

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS

BRIAN’S HUNT,
Gary Paulsen
ACCELERATION,
Graham McNamee
LADY ILENA:WAY OF THE WARRIOR,
Patricia Malone
BLUE SKIN OF THE SEA,
Graham Salisbury
UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN,
Graham Salisbury
DR. FRANKLIN’S ISLAND,
Ann Halam
THE CANNIBALS,
Iain Lawrence
HOW I FOUND THE STRONG,
Margaret McMullan

With utmost respect
for his focus and resolve
this book is dedicated to
peace officer
David Thomas
.

Think of the American West as the Wild West. These phrases conjure up a vision of our past filled with mountain men and Indians, cattle drives and cowboys, desperadoes and gunfighters. But the Wild West lasted only a very short time, from perhaps 1830 to 1890. At most, sixty years.

Yet that era has had a powerful effect on our culture. Clothing, speech and the frontier mentality of that time are widespread and popular to this day. Every year, it seems, Hollywood produces a new crop of films and television programs that draw from the myths and legends of the Old West. There are even social clubs where members dress as cowboys and practice quick draw, mimicking what they believe gunfighters did.

The men of the West we now regard as legendary figures loom large in our culture, many as daring criminals, some as heroes. But actually, there weren’t very many of them.

There was Kit Carson—mountain man, trapper, explorer—who was said to have been one of the first white men to reach the Rocky Mountains.

Jeremiah Johnson—another mountain man, trapper
and supposed explorer—was the inspiration for dime novels of the time and a popular film in which Robert Redford starred a hundred years later.

William F. Cody, known as Buffalo Bill—scout, Pony Express rider, hunter—was another subject of popular novels of his day. He originated the famous Wild West Show, a huge hit in America and Europe.

Wyatt Earp—a lawman who became a legend in his own day—was also a character in adventure books of his time. Ned Buntline, who wrote many of those little melodramas, commissioned the Colt firearm company to make a special long-barreled handgun that he could present to Mr. Earp.

Wild Bill Hickok—so well known back then that Buffalo Bill tried to make him a star of his show—was the focus of dime novels that featured his prowess with a gun and his courage in upholding the law. Numerous films were later made about his heroism.

William Antrim—called Billy the Kid and known for fighting in the Lincoln County War of 1878 to 1881 in New Mexico—was supposed to be a master gunfighter and tragic hero who was gunned down at the age of twentyone. Publishers and Hollywood loved his story too.

Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the Hole in the Wall Gang were a group of train and bank robbers. Because of Hollywood, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, they’ve become known as raffish, almost lovable scoundrels.

The American West stretched from St. Louis, Missouri, to California and the Pacific Ocean, from Canada down to Mexico. Physically, the West was huge. But it was very small in terms of population. When it was time to look for
heroes, people had to take what they could get. This might be one reason that most of these figures lose credibility when examined more closely.

Much of Kit Carson’s fame came from mercilessly attacking Native American people during battles in which he led groups of poorly trained and poorly disciplined men notable for committing atrocities. He had such a big ego that he insisted on being called Colonel Carson, though he’d never been in the army.

In reality, Jeremiah Johnson was completely insane. He was known as Liver-Eating Johnson because he hunted Crow Indians and, after killing them, ate their livers raw.

Buffalo Bill Cody came closer to living up to his legend. He was a scout, an explorer and a hunter and had ridden for the Pony Express as a boy and scouted for the army in the Indian Wars, during which he truly did face a Native American warrior in man-to-man combat. But his fame was largely built on his tracking down often helpless Native Americans with the army and killing them. As a hunter, he slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands, of defenseless buffalo that stood in herds on the wide-open plains. He spent his later life starring in his own show, posing for portraits, life masks and hand molds, and promoting his legend.

Wyatt Earp could be the classic case of the legend having little to do with the truth. He had been a sort of lawman in Dodge City, Kansas, and in Tombstone, Arizona, but he was no hero. He went to Dodge City because he was a fugitive horse thief from back East. At the time, this was a hanging offense. In Dodge, he gambled and managed a string of prostitutes for the cowboys who came up there on trail drives. He stole from almost every drunk he ever arrested
(and there were many) and was finally “asked” to leave town because he was known to mistreat and offend even the rough trailhands who came up with the cattle drives.

Seeking his fortune in Tombstone, Arizona, Earp engineered a showdown with a group of men who were in financial control of the little boomtown and shot them down in the famous gun battle at the OK Corral. He had arrived thinking they were unarmed and helpless, but it turned out they had weapons. Once again he gambled and managed prostitutes. He spent the last years of his life in Hollywood, manipulating his legend into a more favorable light by courting movie stars like William S. Hart and Tom Mix and publishing his own versions of the truth.

Wild Bill Hickok was a chronic alcoholic and gambler who was only in one true gunfight in his life, during which he killed a man because the fellow had won Hickok’s watch in a poker game. Hickok was so incompetent that one dark night, in an alcoholic stupor, he shot and killed his own deputy, thinking the man was sneaking up on him. Hickok died drunk, shot in the back of the head while gambling in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota.

Billy the Kid was a shiftless coward who shot men in the back, murdered his own friends and killed a deputy who was guarding him as the man pled for his life. Billy was so afraid of being captured and punished that he wrote a letter to the governor of New Mexico saying that if the governor would pardon him, he would turn against all his friends, his so-called gang, and testify against them. He was a horse and cattle thief, a drunkard and a merciless killer who was reputed to have shot an unarmed clerk simply because Billy wanted his horse. When he was finally gunned down in Fort Sumter, New Mexico, by Pat Garrett,
many thought it was a rightful end to a brutish, short and squalid little life. Today he’d probably be called a sociopath and a serial killer.

Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang were criminals, plain and simple, not the easygoing clan of Robin Hood–like characters we know from films and folk legend. The real men robbed banks and trains and stole cattle and horses. They were thugs who attacked unarmed men and innocent women and children. They blew up a railway express car with so much dynamite that they maimed and crippled everyone inside. Hunted and driven out of the United States, they were shot down during a grubby attempt to rob a bank in South America.

All in all, poor stock to consider when looking for role models from our frontier.

And yet …

And yet …

There was a man who truly qualified as legendary and heroic.

He was born in 1824, lived until 1910, and was the most successful federal marshal in the history of the United States. Working in the Indian Territory, he brought out thousands of fugitives. He was involved in fourteen gunfights that resulted in the deaths of his opponents. True to the mythical code of the West, he never drew first and most often let the other man shoot before he returned fire. He would ride alone into hideouts containing whole gangs of fugitives to get his man. In these attempts he was the target of hundreds of rounds of gunfire. His hat and clothes were riddled with bullets, his horses were killed, his gun belt shot off his body, boot heels shot clean away, rifles shot to pieces.

Miraculously, he was never wounded.

This man was honest and honorable. He rejected countless bribes, and when his own son killed his wife, he tracked his son down, brought him to justice and sent him to prison for life.

His name was Bass Reeves.

He was an African American.

And this is his story.

Ever since I first heard of Bass Reeves, I have wanted to write about him, and make Bass come alive to readers.

This book moves back and forth among three sections that discuss the facts of Bass’s life and times, and three imagined sections that follow him from his boyhood until he was an old man. I shaped the book this way because there was so little written about Bass Reeves in his day. Most information about him in books is based on word of mouth. There aren’t many accounts to refer to beyond a few newspaper articles and records of the arrests he made. The fictional sections are based on events in Bass’s life, as well as my own experiences riding, hunting and living rough in the West. The part about his boyhood is the longest because to me it was the most important part of his life, the fire that forged him.