Nat Love
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Nat Love (1854 - 1921) was an African American cowboy during the time of the Wild West. He claimed to be "Deadwood Dick," a character made famous by dime novels; he may have the strongest historical claim to that moniker. In 1907, Love wrote his autobiography, "Life and Adventures of Nat Love."
Love was born a slave in Davidson County,Tennessee, in 1854. He later went west to Dodge City, Kansas, and became a cowboy. He claimed that he entered a rodeo at Deadwood City in the Dakota Territory in 1876 and that's where he earned the nickname "Deadwood Dick."
In October 1876, he was captured by a band of Akimel O'odham (Pima) while rounding up stray cattle near the Gila River in Arizona. Love reported that his life was spared because the Indians respected his fighting ability. Thirty days after being captured, Love stole a pony and managed to escape into West Texas.
Love spent the latter part of his life working as a Pullman porter.
[edit] Autobiography
The American cowboy took on mythic proportions with the advent of the dime novel. These novels portrayed a heavily exaggerated version of life in the west. The hero of some of these novels, Deadwood Dick was created by Edward L. Wheeler in 1877. Many people claimed to be the inspiration of Deadwood Dick. In 1907, Love, an ex-slave, published his memoirs about his days as a slave, cowboy and eventually Pullman coachman. He claimed to be the real Deadwood Dick, and said that he had earned this name in a roping contest in Deadwood, South Dakota.
These memoirs, "The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" actually read like a dime novel and have little relevance to the actual experiences of black men working as cowboys in the west. In the introduction to the book, Brackette Williams, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Arizona, writes that Love “does not prove easily recognizable as an African American one (voice), if one expects is an emphasis on the African American cowboy's experience, his interaction with “black Indians,” or his struggle against legal or informal forms of racism. The voice is a western voice which, in many respects, follows the script for many of the western movies we all know so well.” Williams later says the book “provides a unique construction of an African American life lived in the shadow of the civil war. His experiences are his own constructions of what was valuable in “personal experiences,” and they defy what modern sensibilities a man of color ought to have recorded felt and reported.”
Love's preface states that everything in the novel actually happened, but that it happened years ago. Brackette also asks why Love chose to be just a cowboy rather than a cowboy of color.(xiv) But Love certainly became one of the most successful cowboy self-promoters of his day.
Nat Love claimed to have been in a "cowboy tournament" in Deadwood on July 4th 1876, but there are relatively few accounts of formalized contests. There are some accounts of tournaments such as one in Denver, Colorado in October 1887 "where both white and Negro cowboys competed before a crowd of more than eight thousand".
The town of Deadwood decided that its “Days of ‘76” celebration would be more colorful if a real Deadwood Dick were on hand to greet tourists. An old stable hand named Dick Clarke agreed to take the part and, in 1927, Clarke somehow got it into his head that he was the real thing. And from that time until his death, “he fully believed that he was the original Deadwood Dick”. Another candidate was Richard Bullock, a British man who came to the Black Hills in 1877. R.L. Hildebrand, who was living in retirement in San Marcos in 1854, was proposed by other Dakota residents.
Love's proud boasts do not automatically discredit his book, for they differ only in degree from the kind of hyperbole found in many otherwise credible books of Western reminiscence. But they also lack external verification. He seems to have known many people, but it is remarkable that none of these rather articulate men remembered Love. The cattlemen for whom Love claimed to have worked do not appear in the records and none of the cowboys he worked with seem to have ridden with other crews.
His statements tend to contradict all other accounts. Thus he attributed the near extinction of buffalo to Indian (not white) hide hunters and he told nearly incredible stories of the cowboy gun battles in roundup arguments. He describes round-up procedures that would have horrified any cattlemen’s association: “The calf was branded with the brand of the finder, no matter who it personally belonged to.” (Love 109) He attributed a kind of generosity to his bosses which seems far from the norm.
Yet his story is a good one, whatever its authenticity. At the very least, he must have talked or worked with some men who had ridden on long drives. At the best, he may have lived part of the life he described.
He died in Los Angeles at age 67 in 1921.
