Nat Love – författare

Thousands of black cowpunchers drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War, but only Nat Love wrote about his experiences. Born to slaves in Davidson County, Tennessee, the newly freed Love struck out for Kansas after the war. He was fifteen and already endowed with a reckless and romantic readiness. In wide-open Dodge City he joined up with an outfit from the Texas Panhandle to begin a career riding the range and fighting Indians, outlaws, and the elements. Years later he would say, “I had an unusually adventurous life.” That was rare understatement. More characteristic was Love’s claim: “I carry the marks of fourteen bullet wounds on different parts of my body, most any one of which would be sufficient to kill an ordinary man, but I am not even crippled.” In 1876 a virtuoso rodeo performance in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, won him the moniker of Deadwood Dick. He became known as DD all over the West, entering into dime novels as a mysteriously dark and heroic presence. This vivid autobiography includes encounters with Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, a soon-after view of the Custer battlefield, and a successful courtship. Love left the range in 1890, the year of the official closing of the frontier. Then, as a Pullman train conductor he traveled his old trails, and those good times bring his story to a satisfying end.

Nat Love's memoir Life and Adventures of Nat Love is one of the only firsthand accounts of an African American cowhand in the western United States from this period. Love and his parents were owned by planter Robert Love, and after Emancipation, his parents remained on Love's plantation as sharecroppers while Nat left and headed west. He found work as a cowboy, first on the Duval Ranch in the Texas panhandle, then on the Gallinger Ranch in southern Arizona. Love's narrative details his many adventures and exploits, such as being captured and shot by Pima Indians, who eventually spared his life because they sympathized with his plight as a black man. In Deadwood, Dakota Territory, he entered a rodeo, winning $200 and the nickname Deadwood Dick, a reference to a literary character from a dime novel of the day. Published in 1907, the Life and Adventures of Nat Love would help to make Love a black folk hero of the Old West.