Nat Love: A Legendary Black Cowboy
Public DomainNat Love later detailed his exploits as a cowboy in his autobiography.
Part of the allure of the Wild West was that a person could be anyone they wanted to be. And Nat Love wanted to be a cowboy.
After spending the first part of his life enslaved, Nat Love left his home in Tennessee at the age of 15 in 1869. As Love later wrote in his autobiography, Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as ‘Deadwood Dick’, by Himself, he made a beeline for Kansas because “it was in the west, and it was the great west I wanted to see.”
In Dodge City, he marveled at the town’s “saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses.” And Love watched with great interest as Black and white cowboys swaggered through the city. Determined to be a cowboy himself, Love proved himself to the others by successfully riding an unbroken horse.
Accepted into their ranks, Love leaned into cowboy life. He drove cattle across Texas and Arizona, clashed with Native Americans, and allegedly rubbed shoulders with legendary outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid.
Public DomainAs a cowboy, Nat Love often went by “Deadwood Dick” or “Red River Dick.”
Love also became a legend in his own right when he famously signed up for a contest in Deadwood, South Dakota, that challenged him to “rope, throw, tie, bridle, and saddle and mount” a horse as fast as possible.
“I roped, threw, tied, bridled, saddled, and mounted my mustang in exactly nine minutes from the crack of the gun,” he wrote. “This gave me the record and championship of the West… and my record has never been beaten.”
Though Love hung up his cowboy hat at the end of the century, he never lost his taste for adventure. He spent years working as a Pullman porter, which allowed him to travel the country. Then, Love worked as a guard for the General Securities Company until he died at age 67 in 1921.
His life, Nat Love later wrote, was “so full of action, which is but natural as the men of those days were men of action.”
