The Legend of Bass Reeves (9 page)

The place that Bass ran to was known as the Indian Territory. It’s called Oklahoma now. Back then it included parts of Kansas and Arkansas and an edge of northern Texas. It is filled with people now, and towns and cities and schools, and churches and hospitals and miles of highways and roads, and airports and strip malls and hot and cold running water, and forced-air heating and air-conditioning systems and electricity and streetlights—all the beauty and some of the ugliness of what we know as civilization.

But a hundred and sixty-five years ago, it was a vastly different kind of place. So pitch dark at night that people lived from sunup to sundown, staying close to a modest campfire once night fell or safely inside the dimly lit cabins they called home. The stars and the moon were the only illumination on those vast plains once the sun went down.

Even in the long, tragic story that is the history of how the United States government has mishandled its Native American population—some parts seem so horrible they are virtually unprintable—it is hard to fathom how settlers could have stooped as low as they did when the government formed the Indian Territory.

A land-hungry fledgling government attempted to wipe out a people by allowing starvation and disease and hardship to go unchecked. It is frightening to contemplate what might have happened if the American government had possessed the technology for mass extermination of a culture.

The Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, Cree and Seminoles— the United States government called them the Five Civilized Tribes of Native Americans—lived in the eastern and southern parts of the country in the early 1800s. The first four tribes were scattered across the southeastern states, with the Seminoles in Florida.

They were by all modern standards truly civilized.

They had towns and settled farms with livestock, and roads between the towns, and farms and written languages and religions (many were Christian), and schools and churches and art. Their culture was in some ways equal to and in many cases better than that of white Americans.

They had spent generations settling their land and cultivating the soil, raising crops that filled complete nutritional needs (corn, beans and squash were unknown to Europeans before they came to the Americas). Since ninetyseven percent of Americans then lived on farms, and since the tribes’ farms were successful and, sometimes, large and wealthy …

America wanted them.

The U.S. military drove the people off their farms, out of their towns, away from their homes, killing those who refused to go, destroying their culture. Many of the tribes fought to keep their homes, but they could not overcome the might of the American army. The Seminoles fought the hardest, actually defeating the army in a fight called the Battle of Fallen Timbers. They are the only tribe that has to this day never surrendered to the United States government. But in the end, even the Seminoles were driven off their farms and out of Florida.

All these people—men, women and children—had no place to live and seemed condemned to simply wander until they died.

So the United States stipulated a place (the phrase “concentration camp” comes easily to mind) where all the tribes should be forced to go. A wild area was selected that was completely unsettled, one that nobody else would conceivably want, so remote that the problem of what to do with the Five Civilized Tribes would be out of sight, out of mind, and—one would suppose—out of conscience. They called it the Indian Territory.

Unfortunately, it was already occupied by a large tribe called the Osages. The American government sent a small task force to that region, and these officials got two lesser chiefs drunk on cheap whiskey and “bought” the Indian Territory from the Osages for five hundred dollars. The Osages were forced to move—with military “help”—north to a less hospitable region. Many years later, it turned out to contain one of the richest oil deposits in the world. For a brief time, the Osages had the highest per capita income in the world.

The Indian Territory of that time had no roads, no
settlements, no amenities of any kind. The land suffered blazing summers with high humidity, water moccasins, rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes, black widows, tarantulas, scorpions, mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks, very poor soil (compared to the farms back East), countless tornadoes, vicious winters with killing blizzards and ice storms, floods, droughts and poor hunting.

When the Japanese conquered the Philippine Islands during the Second World War, they made the American soldiers who had surrendered march from the peninsula of Bataan to prisoner of war camps. The march was a little over eighty miles long, and more than ten thousand American soldiers died. It is called the Bataan Death March and remembered with horror.

Some of the members of the Five Civilized Tribes had to walk two thousand miles, through wild country, crossing raging, flooded rivers, facing often hostile people and terrible weather. And it must be remembered that what was waiting for them was not the Promised Land—it was worse than the country they had traveled through.

The tribes measured the distance in blood, in bodies. Nobody can even guess how many died or how much they truly suffered. This enforced journey has forever been known by the tribes as the Trail of Tears. It is nothing short of a miracle that any of them made it at all.

It is truly amazing that when they got there they had enough energy and strength left to build camps, settle the country and make homes for themselves. Despite everything, they maintained their compassion and dignity and generosity.

The tribes held together, and their names still live on in the counties where each tribe once lived in Oklahoma.
Other peoples were allowed into the Territory, many of them Native Americans and African Americans running from persecution. Before long, there was a large mixture of cultures and populations. Unfortunately, many people who arrived were white criminals fleeing arrest: murderers, thieves, rapists and con men. The lowest of the low in any culture.

Crime soon got out of hand and the government more or less ignored the whole territory for over half a century.

The Chickasaw tribe started a Native American police force called the White Horse Policemen and tried to instill law and order. For a short time it seemed to help. But in the end the criminal element took control of the entire Territory for almost forty years. Hardened criminals looked on the Territory as their private sanctuary and flocked to the rolling hills and broken gullies that made up most of the land.

Everybody was armed, alcohol in the form of cheap, strong whiskey was everywhere, morals were nonexistent and there was absolutely no law enforcement of any kind. Life was unbelievably cheap. A man could and would be murdered for his watch. A dog or even a child might be shot just to see if a gun was accurate. A woman might be raped because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And into this territory rode seventeen-year-old Bass Reeves.

SPRING 1841
Killing Men

That first fall and winter, Bass lived like an animal. He had plenty of money, a good horse, a decent small mule, a good revolver and a good rifle. And all of those things put him in grave danger.

He was a fugitive from the law as a runaway slave, perhaps one who had even killed his master, for Bass had no way of knowing if the mister had died or not. Right or wrong, he had become a lawbreaker, and as a fugitive slave had an automatic price on his head. The amount varied from one to five hundred dollars, but either number was enough to make him a target.

Add to that the fact that he had guns and money and a horse, in a country where a man might die simply because another man wanted his hat. He might as well have worn a target on his back.

He took Flowers’s advice to heart and became adept at working below ridgelines, avoiding high places where he could be seen from a distance and staying away from welltraveled trails or tracks. When he had set out, the mules and bay had followed him a good distance, but eventually one mule and the bay headed back to the ranch. Strangely, the second mule—a little female named Bertha—kept up with him. He used Flowers’s horsehair lariat to lead her. She didn’t have a packsaddle, but Bass had nothing much to carry—Mammy had loaded his bedroll with cornmeal and a pan to cook in, and he had ammunition and powder for both the rifle and the revolver.

Days fed into weeks. He worked his way up through Comanche country without seeing any Indians except the scant few traveling along the trail.

He avoided contact with people, which meant that he rode well off to the side of the trail, and because of that, he saw more game than he would have if he’d been moving where it was better traveled. He managed to kill deer whenever he needed to, and twice in the first year he took buffalo, which stood like cows to be slaughtered. As the first winter began, he also killed some wild longhorns for meat.

The country was rough, broken with stony gullies and little bluffs. When it grew too cold to travel, he picked a short canyon with a rocky back wall and made a crude shelter with downed wood and sod pieces he cut from the dirt with his knife. He left room at the top for smoke to get out and covered the roof with deer hides, used two stiff buffalo hides for a bed, and wintered there, rationing the cornmeal and eating deer and buffalo half raw. He missed Mammy and even Flowers and would have felt sorry for himself except for the knowledge that bad as it was,
fugitive that he was, cold as he sometimes got, hungry as he sometimes became …

He was free.

Whenever he began to well up with self-pity, he said out loud, “No man owns me or will ever own me again.” Sometimes he thought about that witch dog talking to him years ago. “Things will change.”

He was living a new life now.

The winter passed without much snow and without his seeing a single other soul. This wasn’t strange to him, because he knew that in the wilderness no one traveled much in the winter.

He passed his time tending to the horse and the mule and found them good company; they listened to him make plans for hunting and keeping warm, and the sound of their breathing comforted him throughout the long, dark nights. He spent hours remembering his life back at the mister’s ranch with Mammy and Flowers, although he avoided thinking about what might have happened to the mister. He spoke to Mammy as if she could hear him and found it easy and pleasant to imagine her responses. All in all, he was not as lonely as he might have been in his solitary condition.

By spring, the horse and mule looked poorly, all winter having eaten only dry grass they managed to scuff up. But when the grass came green, they seemed to eat twenty-four hours a day, and by the time Bass was ready to leave, they looked healthy enough to ride.

That winter he had made a mental list of things he needed if he could find some kind of a store, and if he dared to head in to buy things: needles and heavy thread, canvas and wool to make clothes. A pair of boots would
be wonderful. He’d run off barefoot, and had made a pair of exceptionally crude moccasins out of deer hide and rawhide lacing, which were only slightly better than nothing. In the middle of winter there were times he thought he would lose his toes or feet, and the only thing that saved him was the firewood he found in thick stands of low brush and cottonwood around his camp.

That first spring he worked his way east and slightly north until he started to run into more heavily traveled trails. Most of them seemed to head toward the east and he followed them, until at last he came up on a rise and saw below him, about a mile ahead, what passed for a settlement.

Five small huts arranged in a row along one side of the trail.

He moved back off the rise, tied the mule and horse and watched the settlement for two and a half days. There was a fairly steady stream of travelers going by—some on horse, many on foot—and mostly Indians, although he saw a few who might be white men. It was hard to tell at that distance, though he was fairly certain he had seen some black people too.

They’d stop at the center hut. Bass moved closer and saw that they came out carrying sacks and bundles.

“A store of some kind,” he murmured. Just thinking about it made his stomach rumble.

He watched another day and decided he would have to be very careful and try not to attract any attention. He would move the horse and mule back into the brush and leave them. Then he’d take the tow sack Mammy had sent with him and go down on foot, pretending to be a servant or slave sent from a camp by his master to fetch some
supplies. He would wait until close to dark, and as soon as he got his goods he would vanish into the darkness and nobody would be able to follow him.

It was a simple plan, and to his surprise it worked perfectly.

He waited until the sun was below the hills. He left most of his money with the horse and mule and took four five-dollar gold pieces—he had learned the denominations while playing poker—and shuffled down onto the trail in what Mammy had once told him was the “darky shuffle,” which made whites ignore you. There was no traffic on the trail and he made his way easily, thinking of what he would buy.