author
Nat Love
1854–1921
Born into slavery in Tennessee, this legendary Black cowboy later turned his own life into one of the classic autobiographies of the American West. His story mixes cattle drives, frontier showmanship, and a sharp sense of how a former enslaved boy made himself into a folk hero.
1 Audiobook
About the author
After emancipation, he left Tennessee as a teenager and headed west, where he found work as a cowboy on the great cattle ranges. In his 1907 autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, he described bronco riding, cattle drives, and contests of skill that helped build his reputation on the frontier.
He became widely known by the nickname "Deadwood Dick," a name tied to a celebrated shooting contest in Deadwood, South Dakota, and to the larger-than-life image he created around his adventures. Whether every tale in his memoir is taken as literal fact or as part of the self-mythmaking of the era, the book made him one of the best-known Black figures in Old West writing.
Later in life, he worked as a Pullman porter, and his memoir helped preserve a perspective on western life that had often been left out of popular history. Today he is remembered both as a real working cowboy and as an important storyteller of the Black West.