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Posted
I am looking for anyone who has come across anything on Bass Reeves from the Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory newspapers. Any help will be appreciated.
 
Posts: 224 | Location: Indian and Oklahoma Territories | Registered: Wed February 04 2004Reply With QuoteEdit or Delete MessageReport This Post
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How about the book written by Art Burton "The life and Legend of Frontier Marshall Bass Reeves"?
I believe there are newspaper account mentioned.
 
Posts: 13 | Location: West Texas | Registered: Thu March 27 2008Reply With QuoteEdit or Delete MessageReport This Post
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This may be of help.
Western Books in review (interview with Author)

BURTON, ART T. Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves:

“I am sorry, we didn’t keep black people’s history.” That was one of the first responses from an Oklahoma town historical society to Art Burton’s query when he began researching the life and times of Bass Reeves.

“The research on Bass Reeves has not been easy to obtain,” The story of Bass Reeves is one that needs telling, and Burton didn’t let that early response end his quest. Using everything from National Archives sources to newspaper accounts and oral stories, Burton attempts to chronicle Reeves’ life while separating fact from myth.

Born into slavery (likely in 1838 in Arkansas), Reeves was moved to North Texas, with five other slaves, when William S. Reeves took his family to Grayson County around 1846. Reeves later, allegedly, accompanied his “master” as a body servant in the Civil War, but the legend of Bass Reeves really began in 1875 when he became a deputy marshal under “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker at Fort Smith, Arkansas.

For thirty-two years, Reeves served as a lawman, earning a reputation as one of the best. “Reeves’s record as a peace officer on the Western frontier is exemplary and outstanding,” Burton writes, “although he did have a couple of bumps along the way. But what lawman during that era didn’t? ... He may have been the greatest lawman of the Wild West era. His law enforcement record will stand the test of time.

Reeves arrested one of his own sons for murder. He also arrested the minister who baptized him. At age seventy, walking with a cane from a bullet in his leg, he was still working as a lawman, on the police force in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

The Muskogee Times-Democrat called Reeves “a terror to outlaws” and a “man credited with fourteen notches on his gun” after his death in 1910. The Muskogee Democrat called him “a unique character. Absolutely fearless and knowing no master but duty.”
 
Posts: 13 | Location: West Texas | Registered: Thu March 27 2008Reply With QuoteEdit or Delete MessageReport This Post
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Thank you for your responses. But, I am Art T. Burton, writer and historian, and wanted to know if any of our researachers had found anything on Reeves in the Guthrie, O.T., newspapers.
 
Posts: 224 | Location: Indian and Oklahoma Territories | Registered: Wed February 04 2004Reply With QuoteEdit or Delete MessageReport This Post
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