In that position, he was the official custodian of over two million of acres of land whose ownership was being transferred from the tribes to individual members.
The organization he led numbered at least 500 people and occupied a large special-purpose building erected in downtown Muskogee.
Bradford Bixby died there in 1873, leaving his widow and two sons, Tams and George to run the family business.
[1] Bixby approached Doctor F. B. Fite, a leading resident of Muskogee, about obtaining funding for a new building.
The building was constructed at the corner of Second Street and Okmulgee Avenue and housed 500 clerks working on appraisals of over two million acres of land.
Decades later, Jonita Mullins, a reporter for the Muskogee Phoenix, wrote that during Bixby's 10-year tenure as head of the Dawes Commission, he was,"... arguably the most important figure in Indian Territory.
[2] They had three sons Joel, Edson, and Tams, Jr.[1] Bixby died in a Kansas City, Missouri, hospital while traveling from Muskogee to California on January 17, 1922.
According to the Phoenix, hundreds of people stood outdoors in the cold as the local American Legion post escorted the casket to the railroad depot to board a train for Minnesota, where the body was interred in the Bixby family cemetery in Red Wing.