A DocSouth Books Edition, 2017
ISBN 978-1-4696-3322-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Published by
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
CB #3900 Davis Library
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890
http://library.unc.edu
Documenting the American South
http://docsouth.unc.edu
Distributed by
The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
1-800-848-6224
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This book was digitally printed.
About This Edition
This edition is made available under the imprint of DocSouth Books, a collaborative endeavor between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library and the University of North Carolina Press. Titles in DocSouth Books are drawn from the Librarys Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program, online at docsouth.unc.edu. These print and downloadable e-book editions have been prepared from the DocSouth electronic editions.
Both DocSouth and DocSouth Books present the transcribed content of historic books as they were originally published. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and typographical errors are therefore preserved from the original editions. DocSouth Books are not intended to be facsimile editions, however. Details of typography and page layout in the original works have not been preserved in the transcription.
DocSouth Books editions incorporate two pagination schemas. First, standard page numbers reflecting the pagination of this edition appear at the top of each page for easy reference. Second, page numbers in brackets within the text (e.g., [Page 9]) refer to the pagination of the original publication; online versions of the DocSouth works use this same original pagination. Page numbers shown in tables of contents and book indexes, when present, refer to the original works printed page numbers and therefore correspond to the page numbers in brackets.
Summary
Nat Love, the son of enslaved parents Sampson Love and a mother whose name is unknown, was born in June 1854, on Robert Loves plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee. After Emancipation, Nat Loves parents remained on the plantation as sharecroppers. In February 1869, Love left Tennessee 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 (1872-1890). During these years, Love traveled extensively throughout the western U.S. as he helped herd cattle to market. In 1889, he married a woman named Alice, and the couple had one child. In 1890, Love retired from cow-herding and worked on the railroads as a Pullman sleeping car porter. His last job was as security guard with the General Securities Company in Los Angeles, California, where he died in 1921.
Loves story, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, was published in 1907, and has been reprinted several times since the 1960s. Scholar William Loren Katz describes it as the only full-length autobiography by an African-American cowhand (p. 150). But while Love claims that his book is intended for those who prefer facts to fiction, several scholars express doubts about the books veracity (p. 3). Katz, for example, claims that the typical Western braggadocio with which Love recounts his abilities as an expert horseback rider, marksman, drinker, and fighter makes him appear more like a dime novel hero than a flesh-and-blood cowpuncher (p. 150). This comparison between Loves autobiography and the mass market adventure novels popular in the late nineteenth century is apt, given that Love is one of many men who claimed to be the real Deadwood Dick. According to Durham and Jones, Deadwood Dick was the literary creation of Edward L. Wheeler, a best-selling dime novelist who never traveled west of Pennsylvania. Many scholars believe that Love laid claim to Wheelers characters nickname to sensationalize the events of his own life; yet, they also argue that Loves larger-than-life feats do not automatically discredit his book, for they differ only in degree from the kind of hyperbole to be found in many otherwise credible books of Western reminiscence (p. 192).
Loves account of his unusually adventurous life begins with his birth in a slave cabin (p. 3). Although Love describes his owner, Robert Love, as a kind and indulgent Master (p. 7), he also insists that the institution of slavery is a great evil that excuses physical abuse, separates families, and exposes African American women to the licentious wishes of the men who owned them (p. 13). Love praises Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe for their efforts to end a system that he says made the status of the slave, even under a kind master, the same as that of the horse or cow (p. 13).
After Emancipation, Loves family struggles to make ends meet, and his father soon dies. The hard work from morning to night that share-cropping demands makes Love begin to think about going west because freedom is sweet, and he wants to make more of his life (p. 37). After winning a horse in a raffle, Love sells the horse back to its owner for $50. Love then wins the same horse in a second raffle and again sells it back for $50. Taking his $100 home, Love, then 15 years old, gives half of the money to his mother and leaves to go out in the world and better [his] condition (p. 39). He ends up in Dodge City, Kansas, which he describes as a typical frontier city, with a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else (p. 40). Here he is hired on with a crew of cowboys that already includes several African-Americans. Loves new coworkers give him the nickname, Red River Dick (p. 41).
Love continues to tell about the years he spent as a cowboy, describing his transformation into a veteran cow-poke who had lost all sense of fear (p. 70). The adventures that Love describes include fighting with hostile American Indians, chasing stampeding cattle, roping wild mustangs, sharing drinks with Billy the Kid, and besting all comers in riding, roping, and shooting (p. 97). The latter accomplishments result in his being given the name Deadwood Dick by the people of Deadwood, South Dakota, July 4, 1876 (p. 97). Perhaps the most sensational adventure Love describes involves his being wounded and captured by a band of American Indians led by a man named Yellow Dog. Because the tribe is composed largely of half breeds, and people of colored blood, they nurse Love back to health and ask him to join them (p. 99). They promise him 100 ponies if he marries Yellow Dogs daughter, but after about a month in captivity, he steals a pony and makes his escape, riding 100 miles in 12 hours without a saddle to return home.
Eventually, Love recognizes that the march of progress is bringing railroads to the West and that the railroad will make the cowboys job obsolete (p. 130). In response, he settles down in Denver and accepts a position as a Pullman sleeping car porter. Towards the end of his book, he declares that he loves America, the Sweet land of Liberty, home of the brave and the free (p. 147). This statement is characteristic of the patriotism and optimism that pervade Loves narrative. For while he condemns slavery, he never mentions an instance of racial inequality after he travels west. Love consistently characterizes Americas Western frontier as a place where his talents, hard work, and ingenuity were always appreciated. Indeed, in Loves telling, the West is a place that allowed him to be not just a man, but also a hero.
