Nat Love

Nat Love (1854 - 1921) was an African American cowboy during the time of the Wild West. He claimed to be the infamous "Deadwood Dick," and may have the strongest historical claim to that moniker.

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 later entered a rodeo at Deadwood City in the Dakota Territory in 1876 where he earned the nickname "Deadwood Dick."

In 1907, Love wrote an autobiography entitled "Life and Adventures of Nat Love."

Love spent the latter part of his life working as a Pullman porter.

This cowboy took mythic proportions with the advent of the dime novel. These novels many times gave a far exaggerated portrayal of the truth of life in the west. Deadwood Dick was the hero in some of these novels Edward L. Wheeler first made this character in 1877, many people claimed to be Deadwood Dick. In 1907 an ex-slave published his memoirs about his days as a slave, cowboy and then Pullman coachman. He claimed to be the real Deadwood Dick. His name was Nat Love and he had earned this name in a roping contest in Deadwood South Dakota.

Loves Novel, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" reads like a dime novel and has little references to actually being a black man working as a cowboy on the west. In the introduction to the book, Brackette Williams a Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Arizona writes “does not prove easily recognizable as an African American one (voice), if one expects is an emphasis on the African American cowboys 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.” Then is book simply a book intended for entertainment? 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.” What is this supposed to mean? Love has a preface that describes how everything in the novel is how it happened but it was years ago. Brackette also asks why Love chose to be just a cowboy then that of color.(xiv) But Love certainly became one of the most successful cowboy self-promoters of his day. But life is frequently eager to imitate art, even the art of the dime novel. Therefore there have always been a number of men who claimed to be-or were said to have been the original of “Deadwood Dick”

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 completed before a crowd of more than eight thousand.

One of these was the town of Deadwood itself, which decided that its “Days of ‘76” celebration would be 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. Dick 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 is proposed by other Dakota Residents who was living in retirement in San Marcos in 1854.

His proud boasts do not automatically discredit his book, for they differ only in degree from the kind of hyperbole to be found in many otherwise credible books of Western reminiscence. But they also lack external verification. He seems to know many people but it is remarkable that none of these rather articulate men did remember. The cattlemen for whom Nat 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 attributed a kind of generosity to his bosses which seems far from the norm.

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)

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.

External links

Nat Love's Autobiography (http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/natlove/menu.html)

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