The Fearless Black Cowboy of the Wild, Wild West

Nat Love was born a slave in Tennessee in 1854. When he was 15, he left for the adventure of the West. The untamed frontier offered more freedom for a black man than anywhere in the established states. Within a few years Love became a crack shot, won rodeo titles with his cowboy skills, and earned the name Deadwood Dick. Or did he? The account of his life comes from his autobiography.

Love’s shooting skills had been honed over the course of seven long years on the cattle trails. In his 1907 autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as “Deadwood Dick,” which remains the main source of information on his life, Love writes, “In those days on the great cattle ranges there was no law but the law of might, and all disputes were settled with a forty-five Colt pistol. In such cases the man who was quickest on the draw and whose eye was the best, pretty generally got the decision.” He had become adept with firearms to defend himself and his trail mates against rustlers, Native American raiding parties, saloon brawlers and stampeding animals. The mighty buffalo were still abundant on the plains, and hunting them served as both sport and a source of food on the trail. Love relied on the mass-produced, repeating firearms that defined the era: the Winchester lever action rifle and the single-action, six-shot Colt revolver. ”It was of the greatest importance,” Love writes, “that the cow boy should understand his gun, its capabilities and its shooting qualities.”

Although there is no doubt that Love was a skilled cowboy, many of the published accounts of those days are filled with self-promotion and unlikely celebrity encounters. Ben Nadler picks apart Love’s book at Narratively against a backdrop of what we know is true about black cowboys in the American West. Even after you discount the most unlikely parts of the autobiography, what’s left of Nat Love’s life story is still utterly fascinating.