Nat Love

Nat Love as a cowboy at the Deadwood tournament (1876)

Nat Love ( June 1854 in Davidson County , Tennessee , † 1921 in Los Angeles , California ) was an Afro-American cowboy in Cattle Country after the American Civil War , who also became known as Deadwood Dick . Born as a slave , Love worked as a cowboy, rodeo rider , sleeper coach (Pullman porter) and author after the civil war .

In 1907 he wrote his autobiography, in which he reported on his previous life, but also the activities of his father as a slave foreman, the colored assistant to a white overseer, and his mother, a head cook in a plantation kitchen.

Life

Nat Love was born around 1854 to the slave foreman Sampson Love and the head chef of a plantation kitchen on Robert Love's plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee. His older siblings were Sally, who was around eight years older, and Jordan, who was around five years older. Despite clear guidelines that prohibited people of color from literacy , the slave son learned to read and write with the help of his father. After the end of slavery in the United States , the father Sampson Love tried to set up a family farm, on which mainly tobacco and corn should be grown, but he died shortly after the first harvest and the cultivation of the second. To be able to support his family on the farm, Nat Love started a second job on another local farm. After years in which he always did odd jobs, he won a horse in a raffle, but he sold it in exchange for leaving the city. He then headed west to Dodge City , Kansas , where he found work as a cowboy on the Duval Ranch , originally from Texas . The other cowboys at Duval Ranch gave him the name Red River Dick because of his excellent riding skills . After some time in Dodge City, he moved with the cowboys to the aforementioned (root) ranch in the Texas Panhandle .

During his time as a cowboy, Love fought cattle thieves, endured bad weather and was considered not only an excellent rider, but an equally excellent marksman. On July 4, 1876, he took part in a rodeo in the recently founded city of Deadwood in South Dakota , where he won all six competitions and was given the name Deadwood Dick by the audience . In October 1877, Nat Love was kidnapped by a group of Pima near the Gila River in Arizona while he was rounding up stray cows. Love later reported that he was spared by the Indians because they respected his martial arts. At some point, the former slave stole a pony and rode it to west Texas. During his time in Arizona he learned the Spanish language from Mexican vaqueros , which he mastered almost as his mother tongue after a while. Nat Love spent the last decades of his life as a "Pullman porter", a mostly colored servant named after George Mortimer Pullman in sleeper cars on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad . During his time as a porter he also met George M. Pullman a few times, whom he described as a handsome, generous man who was always ready to listen to all of his employees.

In 1907 he wrote the autobiography Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick," in which he wrote all of his life, including that of his family. This autobiography, whose full title Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick," by Himself; A True History of Slavery Days, Life on the Great Cattle Ranges and on the Plains of the "Wild and Woolly" West, Based on Facts, and Personal Experiences of the Author was in Los Angeles , where Nat Love spent the last two decades spent his life published. Nat Love died in 1921 at the age of 67 in Los Angeles, where he had already settled decades before.

Web links

• Nat Love in the database of Find a Grave (English)

literature

• Nat Love: Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick," . Los Angeles 1907, ISBN.