Muskogee in particular, where Bass Reeves eventually based his operations, became one of the most important towns in Indian Territory. It sat at the intersection of railroad lines and was the center of the federal court structure that eventually replaced the Fort Smith jurisdiction. By the time Bass Reeves moved there in the early 1890s, Muskogee had become a substantial town with multiple newspapers, churches, schools, and commercial establishments serving a diverse population of tribal citizens, freedpeople, and non-Indian settlers.
The railroads also changed the nature of the criminal activity that federal deputies were pursuing. Train robbery became a significant crime in Indian Territory in the 1890s, and the organized gangs that conducted these robberies — the Dalton Gang, the Cook Gang, and others — were more sophisticated and more dangerous than many of the individual fugitives of the earlier era. Bass Reeves’s career in this later period involved a different kind of threat than the earlier decades had presented.
## The Cook Gang and the Territory’s Most Wanted
In the 1890s, Indian Territory was the scene of operations by several organized criminal groups that presented a more significant threat than most of the individual fugitives Bass Reeves had pursued in earlier years. The Cook Gang, led by Bill Cook, conducted a series of robberies in 1894 that ranged across Indian Territory and drew national attention. The gang numbered as many as several dozen members at various points and was responsible for multiple robberies of stores, banks, and a train.
Bass Reeves was involved in the pursuit of Cook Gang members, though the specific extent of his involvement and the results of that involvement are, like much of his career record, imperfectly documented. What can be said is that the gang was eventually broken up through a combination of federal deputy work, tribal police action, and the eventual arrest or killing of its principal members, with Bill Cook himself captured in New Mexico in 1895.