For his deputies to function in Indian Territory, they needed specific things: knowledge of the land, ability to work across cultural and linguistic lines, physical stamina for assignments that could take weeks and cover hundreds of miles, and a willingness to work in conditions where backup was distant and the court that would process prisoners was at the end of a long journey back east.
Bass Reeves had most of these qualities in abundance. In 1875, he was recruited as one of the first deputy marshals hired under the new administration.
## The Appointment
The circumstances of Bass Reeves’s appointment have attracted both careful documentation and romantic embellishment. What is clear is the basic sequence: in 1875, in the context of Marshal Fagan’s effort to recruit deputies for the Western District, Reeves was hired. He was, by most accounts, among the first Black men to serve as a deputy marshal west of the Mississippi.
The claim that he was the very first is hedged in most careful sources. The NPS bulletin and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry both note this with appropriate qualification — it is “thought by most” to be the case, not a documented certainty. The record of which deputies were hired in what order is incomplete. What can be said is that his appointment was rare, that it was real, and that it gave him the legal authority to arrest people of any race in Indian Territory — an authority that was genuinely unusual for a Black man in Reconstruction-era America, and one that was not without complications.