What we know is that one letter was written, that it was the only letter, and that Bass Reeves was dead before his son came home. Whether Benjamin Reeves attended his father’s funeral — whether he was permitted a furlough, whether he was present for any of the mourning — is not in the sources consulted. The family that remained in Muskogee would have made whatever arrangements were made, without the man who had served the warrant and who had, in that act, both upheld the law and ended the daily possibility of repair between a father and a son.
There is no tidy resolution to this part of the story. Bass Reeves served the warrant. His son served the sentence. The woman who was killed remained dead. The land she had held passed through legal proceedings and ended up paying lawyers. The graves of the principal figures in this episode are variously marked and unmarked, documented and not. The history survives in fragments and files and a few old newspaper pages and a National Archives case file with a mugshot. That is what history leaves.
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## Source Notes
**Primary sources consulted:**
National Park Service, “Bass Reeves Site Bulletin,” Fort Smith National Historic Site: https://home.nps.gov/articles/000/bass-reeves-site-bulletin.htm — The most careful freely available secondary source; contains explicit caveats about undocumented claims and arrest/kill totals.
National Archives blog, “Love and Death on the Frontier: Finding Ben Reeves at the National Archives” (August 18, 2021): https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2021/08/18/ben-reeves-at-the-national-archives/ — Based on actual archival documents including Benjamin Reeves’s inmate file, NAID 7861497, National Archives at Kansas City.