Love, Nat ('Deadwood Dick')

Impact on the world

Earned the nickname 'Deadwood Dick' after winning a Fourth of July 1876 roping, riding, and shooting competition in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, then in 1907 published 'The Life and Adventures of Nat Love,' described by historian William Loren Katz as the only full-length autobiography by an African American cowhand; while some of his more dramatic claimed exploits, including drinking with Billy the Kid and surviving capture by Native warriors, are treated skeptically by historians as embellishment in the tradition of frontier dime-novel storytelling, his book remains a uniquely valuable firsthand account of Black cowboy life on the open range.

Life & background

Born into slavery on a Tennessee plantation in 1854, Love left home at 16 after emancipation to seek opportunity in the American West, finding work as a cattle driver on ranches across the Texas Panhandle and Arizona Territory and helping drive herds along trails to Wyoming and the Dakotas. He claimed his famous 1876 Deadwood Fourth of July contest victory made him the namesake inspiration for the dime-novel hero 'Deadwood Dick,' though scholars note the fictional character actually predated and may have influenced Love's own self-presentation rather than the reverse. He worked as a cowboy until 1890, then spent the next several decades as a Pullman sleeping car porter, regaling passengers with stories of his frontier years until friends and colleagues encouraged him to write them down; his 1907 autobiography, written and controlled entirely in his own words at a time when few formerly enslaved men had that opportunity, remains an invaluable, if not entirely verifiable in every detail, historical document of Black life in the post-Civil War West. He died in Los Angeles in 1921, where he had spent his final years working as a security guard.

Sources

1. Cowboys & Indians Magazine; SDPB; Documenting the American South (UNC); PushBlack; Atmos Magazine