His first wife, Jennie, had died in 1896 of tuberculosis. He had remarried in 1900 to a woman named Winnie Sumner, whose subsequent story is not well-documented in the sources consulted. His ten children by Jennie had lives that scattered across the record in various ways; Benjamin Reeves, the most documented of them, was still at Leavenworth when his father died.
## The Legend and the Scholarship
For most of the twentieth century, Bass Reeves was not a well-known figure in American historical writing. The scholarship on frontier law enforcement focused overwhelmingly on white figures — Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Pat Garrett — and the Black men and women who had contributed to the settling of the American West were largely invisible in the popular and scholarly record.
The historian Art T. Burton began changing this. His 1991 book, Black, Red, and Deadly, addressed Black and Native American gunfighters in the frontier West. His 2006 biography Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves (University of Nebraska Press) is the most comprehensive biographical treatment of Reeves that has been published and drew on archival research that helped establish what could actually be documented about his career. Burton’s book became the foundation for most subsequent writing about Reeves.
The title’s acknowledgment — Life and Legend — is significant. Burton was aware that he was working in a space where documented biography and frontier legend overlapped, and his scholarship attempted to separate them where possible. The NPS sources draw on Burton’s work while maintaining their own careful hedging about what can and cannot be verified.