Reeves had served out of Paris, Texas, during a period in the early 1890s, then moved to Muskogee as the center of federal activity shifted. He worked under the federal court structure that had been established in Indian Territory as part of the prelude to Oklahoma statehood. The nature of the work — serving warrants, transporting prisoners, maintaining the practical machinery of federal law enforcement in a territory undergoing rapid and disorienting change — remained similar, even as the institutional context shifted.
By the time his son Benjamin Reeves shot and killed Castella Brown in June 1902, Bass Reeves was in his mid-sixties and had been in federal law enforcement for nearly three decades. He was, in the context of frontier law enforcement, an elderly man with an extraordinary career. The warrant for his son’s arrest arrived in that context.
## Castella Brown
It is important, before arriving at the Benjamin Reeves case, to pause on who Castella Brown was.
She was, according to the National Archives records identified by the National Archives blog in 2021, a Creek Freedwoman — a Black woman descended from people who had been enslaved by the Creek Nation and who, after the postwar treaties, had been enrolled as Creek tribal members with certain rights, including the right to receive land allotments. She had received a 40-acre land allotment from the Creek Nation in 1899. She was born in the Muskogee area and had married Benjamin Reeves on November 20, 1900.
She was killed on June 7, 1902, at approximately 11:00 in the morning, at a friend’s house near her Muskogee home. The killing happened after a confrontation in which Benjamin Reeves, who appears to have been estranged from his wife, asked about her relationship with another man. She answered him. He shot her.