Reeves was among the deputies who attempted to capture Christie. One account describes him burning Christie’s cabin or structure during the pursuit; Christie escaped. Christie was ultimately captured and killed in 1892 by a different team of deputies, not by Reeves.
The Ned Christie case is notable for reasons that go beyond Bass Reeves’s involvement. It illustrates the way the warrant system of the era worked: a man could be accused, could reasonably argue his innocence, and could still become the subject of a years-long federal pursuit that ended with his death. Whether Christie killed Dan Maples has been debated by historians and was debated by the Cherokee Nation at the time. The case raises questions about the federal legal system in Indian Territory and its relationship to Indigenous justice that are not answered by the pursuit or by the outcome.
Reeves, in this episode and in others, was the instrument of a legal system he had not designed and did not control. He served warrants issued by courts. The adequacy of those courts’ processes for determining guilt was a separate question.
## The Relocation to Muskogee
In the later years of his career, Bass Reeves relocated from the Fort Smith area to Muskogee, which had become an increasingly important center of federal activity in Indian Territory as the allotment process accelerated. The Western District of Arkansas’s jurisdiction over Indian Territory was gradually reduced through a series of federal court acts in the 1880s and 1890s. By 1895, Fort Smith’s last Indian Territory jurisdiction had been removed, effective 1896. Federal courts had been established within the territory itself.