The farming and the law enforcement coexisted, which was not unusual for deputies of the era. Deputy marshals were not typically full-time salaried employees in the way modern law enforcement officers are; they were paid fees for arrests made and warrants served, and between expeditions, they returned to their home lives. For Bass Reeves, that home life included a farm that fed his family of twelve.
Ten children with Jennie, across the years of his career. Five sons, five daughters. Their names appear in family histories and later accounts: Robert, Benjamin, Edgar, George, and Bass Jr. among the sons; Sally, Lula, Alice, and others among the daughters. Their lives are documented unevenly. Some remained in the Muskogee and Fort Smith areas. Some moved. Alice Spahn, the daughter who gave an interview in 1959 to oral historians, was one of the connections to Bass Reeves’s direct memory that later researchers were able to access, though as the NPS bulletin notes, the interview’s distance from the events it described creates limitations on what can be confidently inferred from it.
Jennie Reeves died in 1896, after twenty-one years of her husband’s deputy service. She was the mother of all ten of his children and appears to have managed the household and farm through the long periods when Bass was in the field. Her death from tuberculosis, the same disease that killed an enormous proportion of the American population in the late nineteenth century, was a significant personal loss. Bass Reeves was fifty-seven or fifty-eight at the time, with perhaps a decade of active service still ahead of him.