The kidney disease that killed him — nephritis, or Bright’s disease, which was the same disease that had killed Isaac Parker fourteen years earlier — was a slow decline rather than a sudden event. His health deteriorated over the course of his last year or two, and he stopped active police work before his death. He died at home in Muskogee on January 12, 1910.
The funeral drew hundreds of people. The Phoenix ran an obituary. Newspapers in other cities picked up the news. He had been, by the end of his life, known enough that his death was news. The obscurity that followed — the decades in which his name was absent from the popular historical record — came afterward, as the institutional forces that had been suppressing Black history in America continued their work.
## A Note on Continuing Research
The history of Bass Reeves is not closed. The National Archives blog post from 2021 demonstrated that new documentary evidence continues to be identified and made accessible. The archives at Fort Smith, at the Oklahoma History Center, in the records of the Five Civilized Tribes, and in other federal repositories may hold additional documentation of specific episodes in his career, of his family’s history, and of the broader social context in which he worked.
Digital archiving projects have been making nineteenth-century newspapers more searchable, and systematic searches of contemporaneous newspaper records might identify coverage of Bass Reeves that has not yet been integrated into the scholarly literature. The same is true of federal court records from the Western District period, which are held at the National Archives regional facility in Fort Worth.