What made Indian Territory distinctive as a law enforcement challenge was not the per-capita rate of violence — comparable settled areas of the country had their own violence — but the specific jurisdictional conditions that made arrest and adjudication difficult. A man who committed a crime in Kansas or Missouri could be pursued by state law enforcement, tried in a state court, and sentenced. A man who committed the same crime in Indian Territory faced a much more complicated federal structure that required a longer journey, a federal trial at Fort Smith, and a sentence served in federal prison. The gap between crime and consequence was larger, and the probability of getting away entirely was higher, which attracted a particular population.
The specific fugitives that Bass Reeves pursued were not, for the most part, the romantic outlaw figures of later fiction. They were men who had killed, robbed, or committed other crimes and had retreated to Indian Territory because they believed — sometimes correctly — that the law could not reach them there. They were also often men who were embedded in communities that would protect them. The work of finding them and arresting them was detective work as much as physical work — knowing who to ask, how to ask, which routes a fugitive might take, which communities would shelter whom.
Bass Reeves’s long survival in this work — thirty-two years without being killed in the line of duty — probably reflects a combination of physical capability, good judgment about when to force a confrontation and when to wait, the support of effective possemen, and the kind of institutional knowledge that accumulates over decades in a specific environment. Whether it also reflects the specific qualities attributed to him in the legendary accounts — the supernatural accuracy, the perfect cool under fire — cannot be verified from the record.