His subsequent treatment of Indigenous people in his law enforcement work is not comprehensively documented. What can be said is that he worked with Indigenous possemen, that he policed tribal members and non-members according to the jurisdictional rules of his commission, and that his long career without major incident in the territory suggests he was able to work within and across Indigenous communities in ways that did not generate consistent opposition from those communities. This is not the same as saying he was universally welcomed or that his work was without conflict. It is saying that the evidence of extraordinary dysfunction is absent from the record.
## Benjamin Reeves After Release
The story of Bass Reeves’s son did not end with the commutation of his life sentence in 1914. The National Archives blog post and other sources provide some information about Benjamin Reeves’s life after Leavenworth, though the record is incomplete.
His sister wrote a letter in connection with his release, which appears in the Archives materials. He was released three days after his sentence was commuted, on November 16, 1914, after serving approximately eleven and a half years at Leavenworth. He went to Muskogee, where his father had died four years earlier. He found work at a barber shop, which had been his trade before the killing.
In 1918, he registered for the World War I draft. The draft registration card — one of the millions created during the Selective Service registration of 1917-1918 — is a document that tells something about his circumstances at that point. He listed his occupation as manager of a restaurant in Muskogee. He listed a wife named Fleccia Cromartie, whom he had married after his release. He described his employer. He was approximately thirty-five or thirty-six years old, in a city that had known him before his crime and had watched him return after his imprisonment.