Nat Love

Nat Love was born enslaved in Tennessee and freed as a child at the close of the Civil War, heading west as a young man to become one of the estimated one in four cowboys on the trail-drive era range who were Black — a demographic reality largely erased from popular Western mythology. He worked cattle drives out of Texas for over a decade, and in his colorful, self-published 1907 autobiography claimed the nickname "Deadwood Dick," won, he said, in a Fourth of July roping and shooting competition in Deadwood in 1876 — a claim historians treat with real skepticism since no contemporary record confirms it and the name may have been borrowed from a popular dime-novel character. Whatever the literal truth of that specific claim, Love's broader account of skilled, dangerous work on the open range offers one of the only firsthand written narratives from a Black cowboy of the era. He later worked as a Pullman porter after the railroad closed the open range to trail drives for good.