## Connections to the Five Civilized Tribes and Their Records
The Five Civilized Tribes — Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole — maintained extensive records throughout the period of Bass Reeves’s career. Tribal councils, courts, newspapers, and administrative bodies kept records of their deliberations and decisions. These records are preserved in collections at the Oklahoma History Center, the University of Tulsa, and other archives, and they are a potentially important source for understanding the social context in which Bass Reeves worked.
The tribal records do not appear to have been extensively mined for Bass Reeves biography, which represents a gap in the existing scholarship. A deputy marshal who worked in Indian Territory for thirty-two years would have had interactions with tribal law enforcement bodies — the Cherokee Lighthorse, the Creek police, the Choctaw and Chickasaw national police organizations. Those interactions might be documented in tribal records even where federal records are silent. Whether such documentation exists and has not been examined, or whether it exists and simply does not bear on Bass Reeves specifically, is not clear from the secondary sources available.
The Creek records in particular would be relevant to the Castella Brown case and to the allotment proceedings that surrounded her land. Creek Nation records of land allotments, tribal court proceedings, and administrative decisions from the period around 1898-1902 might provide additional context for who Castella Brown was, what her standing in the Creek community was, and how the Creek Nation experienced the killing and its aftermath. This represents a potential avenue for future scholarship that the current article cannot pursue.