Nat Love –The Life of a Black American Cowboy
The Adventures of Deadwood Dick in the American West
May 15, 2009
Nat Love was born a slave in 1854, just seven years before the inception of the American Civil War. In the years following the war, president Abraham Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation, and Nat’s family was freed from bondage. In his autobiography, “Life and Adventures of Nat Love” (1907), which Nat himself penned in the later years of his life, he details the hardships he had to endure with his family under slavery. He compares the life he led as a child to those endured by the characters in the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an acclaimed anti-slavery novel by American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Adventures as a Cowboy
As a newly free man, Nat turned his sights to the wild American frontier to start his new life. He took a job as a cowhand in Dodge City, Kansas, and quickly grew in skill and ability. By 22, Nat had earned the nickname “Deadwood Dick” by wowing crowds with his talent in roping and herding competitions. As Nat recalls in his autobiography, "I gloried in the danger, and the wild and free life of the plains."
In 1877, Nat was captured by a tribe of Pima (Akimel O’odham) Natives while he was herding stray cattle in Arizona. Nat was shot in the leg during the encounter, and passed out from his wounds on the scene. However, rather than being harmed, Nat woke in the Pima camp to find himself cleaned and changed, with his wounds dressed and treated. He stayed on with the tribe, wearing traditional Pima clothing and participating in their daily rituals, until his wounds healed well enough for him to escape. Although he did not know for certain why he was not killed by the tribe in the initial fight, Nat believed that he was spared his life because had had shown himself to be a brave man with admirable fighting skills.
Throughout his life, Nat was friend to a number of the famous cowboys in American history. Recalling the time he spent with Billy the Kid, Nat states that “it is hard to believe he was as bad as he is pictured to be” and describes the now infamous figure as a man who possessed the traits of a good person and always remembered when someone was kind to him.
The Taming of the American Frontier
As the landscape of the American West changed, with the establishment of the railroad and the influx of large towns, cowhands like Nat found their wild and boundless landscape more and more unfamiliar. in efforts to keep up with the changing times, Nat, along with many other cowboys, quit the wild and adventurous life on the frontier and ventured into cities and towns to pursue more "civilized" paths.
Although Nat had to adapt to the changing landscape of his time and abandon his life as a cowboy, he continued to enjoy success and happiness as a Pullman for the railroad. In the closing words of his autobiography, Nat writes of his enduring longing for the western frontier, the joy of life out on the range, and most particularly, of his love for “the friends I have made and friends I have gained.”
Sources:
The Life and Adventures of Nat Love. Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick", BiblioBazaar (December 5, 2007)
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