What is documented is the direction he went: north, into Indian Territory. He crossed into the territory that would eventually become Oklahoma and spent several years living among the Seminole and Creek nations. He learned aspects of their languages and customs. He learned the land. He learned, or refined, his skill at tracking in terrain that was familiar to Indigenous people who had been removed there against their will but had made it their home.
These years — however many they were, their exact number also uncertain — were formative in ways that would matter later. His fluency in the geography and language of Indian Territory would eventually make him valuable to federal law enforcement in ways that a deputy with no such knowledge could not be.
## Freedom and a New Life
After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 formally declared enslaved people in Confederate-held territories to be free, Bass Reeves made his way to Van Buren, Arkansas, across the river from Fort Smith. He settled there. He built, by most accounts, an eight-room house himself. He married Jennie (sometimes recorded as Nellie Jennie), and they would eventually have ten children — five daughters and five sons. He farmed, raised horses, and worked as a guide and scout for local government officials who needed someone who knew the territory.
He was illiterate. He had been refused instruction as a child and never learned to read or write. This fact would remain a constant feature of his working life as a lawman: he had all warrants read aloud to him, then memorized them. Multiple accounts describe his ability to memorize the contents of multiple warrants and reproduce them accurately in sequence, days later, in the field. Whether this represented extraordinary memory or the kind of skill that develops when other information pathways are closed is hard to say from the outside. What it meant practically was that the man who could not read a document could carry a dozen of them in his head.