Bass Reeves served the warrant. He found Benjamin and arrested him. The details of how, exactly, the arrest was effected — where Bennie was found, whether there was resistance, what was said between father and son — are not in the documentary record that survives. The NPS bulletin does not describe a dramatic confrontation, and the National Archives materials do not include a narrative of the arrest itself. What Benjamin Reeves said in his February 1903 statement to authorities was that his father, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, had arrested him. That is the confirmation in the record.
The 1959 interview with Bass Reeves’s daughter Alice Spahn, cited in the NPS bulletin, reportedly includes a remark attributed to Bass Reeves about how he would handle a wife he believed was unfaithful. The bulletin notes that it is unclear whether he actually said this, and the interview comes from nearly sixty years after the events. It should not be treated as a contemporaneous transcript of his views, and it should certainly not be read as evidence that he approved of his son’s action or viewed Castella Brown’s death as anything other than a crime to be answered.
What Bass Reeves did was serve the warrant. What his son did in the months before is a different matter. The father’s action in making the arrest was not an endorsement of the crime that made the arrest necessary.
## The Trial, the Conviction, the Sentence
Benjamin Reeves was tried and convicted of murder. The conviction came in January 1903. His sentence was life in prison.