The court itself processed an extraordinary volume of cases. In some years, Parker presided over more than 1,000 cases. The physical and administrative demands on the court, the marshal’s office, the prosecutor’s office, and the clerk’s office were enormous. Fort Smith became, during this period, a kind of law enforcement hub for a vast and complex territory — a city that existed partly to support the machinery of federal justice for Indian Territory.
The conditions for prisoners being held at Fort Smith while awaiting trial were notoriously poor. The jail, often called Hell on the Border in contemporary accounts, was crowded, unsanitary, and dangerous. Diseases spread in the close quarters. Deaths in custody were not unusual. Bass Reeves transported prisoners to that jail as part of his regular work, which means he was also part of the system that delivered people to those conditions — conditions that were, by any measure, cruel.
This is part of the institutional context of his career that the celebratory accounts tend to omit. He was effective within a system. The system he was effective within had serious moral problems, including the conditions of its detention facilities, the quality of representation available to defendants (often minimal), and the racial and cultural biases that affected who got pursued and how seriously. Bass Reeves did his job within that system. The system’s failures are not his personal failures. But they are part of the context of his career.
## The Question of His Relationship With Indigenous Nations
The years Bass Reeves spent in Indian Territory after his escape from enslavement and before his appointment as a deputy — the years when he lived among the Seminole and Creek peoples — have been the subject of both careful historical treatment and romantic embellishment.