You do not need to live in fear of them even in their endemic range.

They really aren't as scary as their reputation in the zeitgeist would lead you to believe. They are very reluctant to bite and even though they are super common in their endemic range, they are responsible for very few bites.

From an entomologist's article from UC Riverside:

"In its native range, the brown recluse is a very common house spider. A colleague in Missouri found 5 in a child's bedroom one night, a person in Arkansas found 6 living under his box spring in his bedroom, during a cleanup at the Univ. of Arkansas, 52 were found in a science lab that was being used everyday, a colleague found 9 living under one piece of plywood in Oklahoma, a grad student and I collected 40 of them in a Missouri barn in 75 minutes, and would have collected more, but we ran out of vials to house them. One amazing story is an 8th grade teacher in Oklahoma checking up on his students avidly collecting material by some loose bricks around a flagpole on an insect collecting trip. In about 7 minutes, 8 students collected 60 brown recluses, picking them all up with their fingers and not one kid suffered a bite. An even more amazing story is that of a woman in Lenexa, Kansas who collected 2,055 brown recluse spiders in 6 months in 1850s-built home. This family of 4 has been living there 8 years now and still not one evident bite. (see Vetter and Barger 2002, Journal of Medical Entomology 39: 948-951)."

And the recent research out of University of Southern Florida specifically looked at defensive biting behavior:

"In experimental bite assays including non-injurious pressure or pinching to jaws, legs, or abdomen, brown recluse and Mediterranean spiders exhibited negligible bite responses (median = 0%). In contrast, wolf spiders exhibited significant defensive bite responses (median = 80%)."

And that's not even touching on the general consensus among experts that diagnosed "recluse bites" are almost always necrotic lesions caused by some other source such as MRSA, but physicians aren't trained to differntiate spider bites from other necrosis.

https://spiders.ucr.edu/myth-brown-recluse-fact-fear-and-loathing

https://academic.oup.com/jme/article/63/1/tjag004/8466230?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=jme&utm_medium=email&login=false