On July 4, 1876, in the rough mining town of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, a 22-year-old Black man from Tennessee prepared to rope, throw, tie, bridle, saddle, and ride the wildest mustang the town could find. He had one chance. The clock started, and he completed the entire sequence in exactly nine minutes—a time he would later claim no other cowboy in the country ever matched. That evening, the crowd gave him a name that would stick for the rest of his life: Deadwood Dick.
What no one in that crowd could have known was that the same man would die quietly 45 years later in a rented house in Santa Monica, California, and be buried under a name almost no one remembered. Most of what we know about Nat Love comes from a book he wrote himself near the end of his life in 1907. Some of what he wrote is confirmed by outside records. Some exists only in his personal account.
Historians have argued for more than a century over which parts are plain fact and which are the kind of embellished stories old cowboys add to their memories. What is beyond dispute is that the man existed, lived that life, and wrote it down while he could still remember it clearly. He was born Nathan Love in June 1854 in a log cabin on a farm in Davidson County, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. His father, a man named Samson, worked as an overseer of enslaved people in the fields.
His mother ran the kitchen of the big house. He had an older sister named Sally and an older brother named Jordan. That is nearly the entire written record of his first eleven years, because Nat Love himself wrote it decades later in the opening pages of his autobiography. He wrote that his exact birth date was never known, because in those days no one kept records of something as trivial as the birth of an enslaved child.
His father Samson did one thing that changed everything, something that was completely against the law in Tennessee in that decade. He taught his son to read and write. He did it quietly at night inside the log cabin with a piece of chalk and a broken slate. When the war ended and the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached that farm, Nathan Love could already write his name.
Freedom was a strange thing to inherit on a Tennessee farm in 1865. There was no land waiting for the freedmen. There was no money. There was no horse.
Samson stayed in the same fields he had worked as an enslaved man, only now he paid rent for the privilege, about 20 acres. He tried growing tobacco and corn. The first crop was poor. He planted a second, and shortly after, he died.
The record does not say why, only that he was there one week and gone the next. The family he left behind had a farm they could not work and a landowner who still expected his share. Nat took odd jobs to keep food on the table. A neighbor offered him a few cents to tame horses.
He tamed them all. Then the neighbor pointed to a wild black horse the whole county had given up on, a horse nicknamed “Black Highwayman. ” Twenty-five cents to break him, paid in advance. Nat took the coin, climbed onto the horse’s back, and would later say he did not remember much of what happened in the next ten minutes.
Only that when it was over, the horse stood still and Nat was still on top. From that morning on, horses were the one thing in that harsh world that made complete sense to him. In February 1869, still very young, Nat Love left that small rented farm in Tennessee and headed west. He carried almost nothing.
He had never seen a vast plain. He had never seen a cattle drive. But he had two things no one could take from him: he could read, and he could write. He arrived in Dodge City, Kansas.
If you have any picture in your mind of what Dodge City looked like in the winter of 1869, tear it up. There was no jail. There was no sheriff worth his badge. The saloons outnumbered the houses.
Cattle herds coming up the Chisholm Trail unloaded thousands of longhorns into the pens outside town every summer. Cowboy crews arrived filthy after 90 days on the trail, with a month’s pay burning holes in their pockets and no one to stop them. Nat Love walked into that town with Tennessee dust still on his boots and simply asked for a job as a cowboy. The man who hired him worked for an outfit from the Texas Panhandle called the Duval ranch.
According to Nat’s account, the trail boss looked him over, saw a thin newcomer with dark skin and quiet hands, and offered him what was really a test. There was a horse in the barn out back, the wildest, ugliest, most humpbacked mustang in the whole string. They called him “Good Eye. ” The trail boss said: break him, and you get a job and a $100 signing bonus.
Fail, and you can walk back to Kansas. Another Black cowboy named Bronco Jim stood at the corral fence that morning. He had watched dozens of men try to ride Good Eye and seen them all hit the fence. Nat climbed the fence quietly, rode Good Eye—not a clean or pretty or painless ride, but he stayed on until the horse gave in.
The trail boss handed Nat a $100 bill, and Nat Love became a working cowboy that evening. For three years, he rode with the Duval outfit back and forth across the Texas Panhandle in the Palo Duro country. He learned the trade the hard way, the way every cowboy learned it then. He learned to sleep on a horse’s saddle.
He learned to eat cold beans from a tin cup in a thunderstorm. He learned that a herd of two thousand cattle could stampede if a horse’s hoof struck a stone the wrong way. He learned that the difference between a live cowboy and a dead one most days was no more than a few inches of horseflesh moving left instead of right. The other men began calling him “Red River Dick.
” It was a compliment. It meant when it was time to cross rivers and the cattle hesitated and the water was raging and muddy, Red River Dick was the man you wanted beside you. By 1872, he had moved south and west and gone to work on the Gallinger ranch along the Gila River in southern Arizona. Arizona in the 1870s was a different, harsher, drier country than Texas.
The Apache wars were still burning across the territory. He traveled often into Mexico to buy cattle. He learned Spanish quickly, and within a year or two he was fluent enough to bargain in Sonora and read bills of sale in Chihuahua. He would later say that some of the best cowboys he ever worked with were the vaqueros of northern Mexico, men who could throw a rope from a running horse and drop it over a single steer’s hoof from 40 feet away.
It was the vaqueros, in fact, who invented most of what American cowboys became famous for: the saddle, the rope, and all the vocabulary of the cattle trade. He would later claim in his book that during those Arizona years he met almost every famous name in the Old West: Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, and Billy the Kid. The Kid was not a legend yet. He was just a thin young outlaw with buck teeth and a fast gun who drifted through the same cattle towns.
Nat wrote that he drank with him more than once, that the Kid was polite and quiet with a strange kind of stillness. He wrote that the Kid had many qualities that make a good man, but fate and circumstances were against him, and some men feared him mortally, and Nat believed they had good reason, because the Kid always kept his word. None of the men Nat claimed to meet left a written record confirming the meetings. That is one reason historians treat those particular stories with caution.
What is beyond dispute is what happened in Deadwood on July 3, 1876. He had come up the trail from Arizona with about 3,000 longhorn steers, driven north to supply meat to the mining camps in the Black Hills, where the discovery of gold two years earlier had turned a stretch of Lakota land into a fast, ugly boomtown. Deadwood was not a city in any familiar sense. It was a gulch of tents and a potholed street lined with saloons, gambling halls, and a small newspaper office.
The population had gone from zero to nearly 10,000 in under 18 months. Nine days before Nat Love and his crew arrived with the 3,000 head, something happened 300 miles west that changed the mood of every white settlement in Dakota. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the entire Seventh Cavalry had been wiped out at Little Bighorn by an alliance of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The news arrived by rider on July 3.
The town was restless, drunk, and looking for something loud to do on the Fourth of July to shake off the fear. They organized a rodeo contest with a $200 gold prize, cash on the table, for the cowboy who could outdo everyone. It included roping, tying, riding, and marksmanship. Every working hand on the cattle trails within 100 miles who happened to be in Deadwood that week signed up.
Six of the men who signed up were Black. Nat Love was one of them. The mustang they gave him was a devil. That was the point of the contest: each cowboy drew a fresh, wild horse from a corral that had never carried a saddle.
The clock started with the crack of the starting pistol. From that moment, each cowboy had to rope his horse, throw it down, tie its legs, bridle it, saddle it, and mount it in one continuous round. Nat Love, by his own account, did it in exactly nine minutes from the sound of the pistol. His closest competitor took twelve and a half minutes.
Then came the shooting events: rifles at 100 and 250 yards, Colt revolvers at 150 yards, with 14 rifle shots and 12 pistol shots at paper targets. Nat wrote that he hit the center of the target with all 14 rifle shots, firing from hip level, and put 10 of his 12 pistol shots dead center. His closest rival hit eight with the rifle and five with the Colt. The crowd, in his words, went wild.
He was handed the prize in cash: $200 in US gold, worth roughly $4,000 today. For a working cowboy who probably earned $30 a month on the trail, it was a fortune. But it was not the money that changed his life. It was the nickname, “Deadwood Dick.
” He said the townspeople gave it to him there in the dust of that Fourth of July, and it stuck from that day forward until his death. There was already a “Deadwood Dick” in the popular imagination of the country: a fictional character. The dime novelist Edward Lytton Wheeler was writing a series of cheap paper books about a mysterious masked cowboy with that name. Some accounts say those novels appeared before Nat Love won the rodeo.
Other accounts say they came later and were inspired by him. What is certain is that in the years that followed, the real and the paper Deadwood Dick blurred together in the American mind, and that blur never came apart. There is another story from his Arizona and Dakota years that Nat Love told in his book. Whether it is true, half-true, or exaggerated by twenty years of campfire retelling, it is worth telling because it is exactly the kind of story men told about themselves in that country in that decade.
In October 1877, he wrote, he was riding alone across a wide stretch of country when a band of about 100 warriors attacked him. He was hit by gunfire, more than once. He said he was wounded and captured, that his horse was shot out from under him, and that the band’s leader was a man he called “Yellow Dog. ” They took him to their camp expecting him to die of his wounds, but he did not die.
Slowly, over nearly a month, they nursed him back to health. The reason, as he wrote it, is the part no historian has ever been able to prove or disprove. Yellow Dog’s band, according to Nat, was not a single tribe but a mixture of people, some of them “colored,” meaning of African and Indigenous descent. They saw in Nat Love, the dark-skinned cowboy wounded on the plains, something of themselves.
Nat wrote that Yellow Dog offered him a place in the band, a hundred ponies to marry the chief’s daughter, and a permanent home beyond the reach of any white lawman. Nat wrote that he thought about it, and that in another life he might have accepted, but he did not. After about a month of captivity, in the middle of a dark night, he stole a pony and fled. He claimed he rode 100 miles before stopping, without a saddle, without water, and without stopping to sleep.
He reached a ranch half dead, and while he was still being treated for the bullet wounds he said would leave scars on his body for the rest of his life, he went back to work the very next week. He would say near the end of his book that when he finally hung up his ropes, pistols, and saddle in 1890, his body carried the marks of 14 bullet wounds. Fourteen, from knife fights, gunfights, ambushes, brawls, and running fights across a dozen states and territories. He named some of them.
He did not describe most of the damage. That was not his way. He was not writing a book about wounds. He was writing a book about a homeland and a life.
But those fourteen small, round, quiet scars on the skin of an old man 40 years later were, by his own testimony, the record. The open range died in the mid-1880s. It did not die overnight. It died the way a great old animal dies: slowly, then suddenly and completely.
Two things killed it. The first was the railroads. Every year the tracks pushed a little farther west, deeper into cattle country. Every mile of track meant a rancher no longer had to drive his cattle a thousand miles to a market in Missouri or Kansas.
The second was barbed wire, invented in the 1870s and spread across the plains in the 1880s. A small, twisted, quiet strand of steel ended the era of the open range in about seven years. Once you could fence a piece of land cheaply for hundreds of miles, the idea of driving cattle long distances across public range lost its meaning. Nat Love saw it happen.
There was bitterness in the profession in those last years. The old hands knew what was coming. The old ways were finished. Then, in the middle of it all, he met Alice.
Her full name was Alice Owens, born into slavery in 1845 in Missouri. She was about nine years older than Nat, which was not unusual or commented upon in that era on the frontier. They married on August 2, 1888, in Denver, Colorado. She was 43.
He was 34. Alice does not speak in his book. She barely appears in it, but she was present through the last thirty years of his life, standing quietly behind the man everyone called Deadwood Dick. In 1890, at age 36, Nat Love ended his career as a cowboy.
He put his guns aside. He sold most of his horses. He took the one job in America that a Black man of his standing could get at the turn of the century if he wanted to keep moving and see the country: a Pullman porter. The Pullman Palace Car Company built the sleeping cars that ran on nearly every major American railroad line.
They were the finest passenger cars in the world: carved wood, brass lamps, velvet seats, and wine at dinner. To serve the white passengers who rode those cars, George Pullman hired almost exclusively Black men, mostly freedmen and their sons. He paid them low wages and worked them hard, and required them to answer to whatever name a white passenger chose, including simply “George. ” Nat Love was assigned to the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad in 1890.
He and Alice first made their home in Denver, then moved to Wyoming, then Utah, then Nevada as the rail routes changed. For seventeen years he made beds in narrow wooden compartments, polished the brass fixtures at four in the morning, and carried the luggage of businessmen, honeymooners, and mining barons from Salt Lake to Sacramento. By all accounts, he was a good porter. Passengers loved him.
He was talkative, and above all, he was a natural storyteller. On those long, slow, swaying rides through the mountains and deserts of the West, when the passengers were bored and the sun was down and the wine cart appeared, Nat Love would sit for a while and tell them what he used to do before he made their beds. He would quietly tell them that he had been a cowboy, that he had known Billy the Kid, that he had won $200 in a cowboy contest in Deadwood in ’76, that he had been shot 14 times, and that once he had ridden 100 miles in a single night without a saddle. And the passengers, who had never met a real cowboy in their lives, let alone a Black one, would listen and ask him to tell the story again.
At some point during those years of telling and retelling on slow trains climbing mountain passes, enough passengers said: “You should write this down. ” He retired from the Pullman Company in 1906 in Salt Lake City. He was 52. He had been on the road, more or less, for 37 years.
He and Alice moved to Santa Monica, California, and rented a small house on a quiet street. In 1907, at 53, Nat Love sat down at a small writing desk and wrote his book. He gave it a long title: “The 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 Ranches and on the Plains of the Wild West, Based on Facts and Personal Experiences of the Author.
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He paid part of the printing costs himself and sold copies from his own bag. It was the only autobiography ever published by a Black American cowboy from the open-range era, and more than 118 years later, it still is. That is why we know his name at all. It sold acceptably.
Passengers on the Denver and Rio Grande line bought it. Some Western enthusiasts bought it. Newspapers reviewed it politely, but it was not a smash success. It did not make him rich.
Within a few years of publication, it went out of print and its copies became hard to find. Nat Love needed steady work. So in his late fifties, in 1910, he took a job in the streets of Los Angeles as an insurance messenger for the General Securities Company. In plain terms, he carried valuables, cash, documents, and bank papers from office to office on foot and by streetcar across the city.
He wore a suit. He carried a firearm. To any passerby, he looked like just another tired man in his sixties making his way through the last stretch of a long life. Almost no one in that city knew who he was.
He was just Mr. Love, the quiet security man from the office downstairs. On February 11, 1921, in a small rented house at 1748 22nd Street in Santa Monica, Nat Love died. He was 66.
Alice was beside him. There was no great funeral, no telegram from Washington, no honor guard. Three days later, on February 14, they buried him in Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. Section 2, Lot 56, Grave B.
It is a small plot in a small working-class corner of that cemetery, near a long row of similar graves belonging to porters, laundresses, mechanics, and other quiet Americans who did the country’s work in that era and are now largely forgotten. And here is the thing, the single thing that gives this whole story its strange, sad, quiet ending. They did not bury him under the name Deadwood Dick. They did not bury him under the name Red River Dick.
No stone mentioned his fourteen bullet wounds, or the nine-minute mustang, or the $200 in gold, or the 3,000 head of cattle, or Billy the Kid, or Yellow Dog, or the 100-mile ride, or the Fourth of July, ’76. They officially buried him under the name Nat Love—the name given to him by those who enslaved him in a log cabin in Tennessee in 1854, the name almost no one had called him for most of the last fifty years. Why? Part of the answer is simple.
He was a Black man who died in 1921 in a country that still wrote Jim Crow laws into its statutes. In the American West of 1921, a Black cowboy, no matter how famous in his prime, was not expected to receive a state monument, a town plaque, or a mention in the textbooks. Those who wrote the history of the frontier in those years simply ignored him, and ignored most Black cowboys. Census records examined by historians suggest that roughly one in four cowboys in the open-range era was a Black man.
You would never guess it from the movies, the books, or the way Nat Love was buried on that quiet February day. Part of the answer is that Nat and Alice were, by that time, private people. They had spent most of their lives together on the move. They had settled in Santa Monica because it was warm, quiet, and inexpensive.
Alice was 75 on the day she buried her husband. She lived another 25 years and died in 1946 at the age of 101. She was buried beside him in the same modest plot. Neither of them apparently wanted more than a simple headstone, and their family gave them what they wanted.
Part of the answer, and perhaps the largest part, is that America simply forgot. His book went out of print. His name faded. The generation of men who had written the history of the open plains with their own lives died off one by one in the 1920s and 1930s.
No one remained at his grave or anywhere else to say who Deadwood Dick really was. It stayed that way for a very long time. It was not until the 1960s, when historians began to look seriously at the missing pieces of Western American history, that Nat Love’s book was rediscovered in a few libraries. It was reprinted.
It was studied. Slowly, the story of the Black cowboys—Bass Reeves, Bill Pickett, Bose Ikard, Isom Dart, Stagecoach Mary Fields, and dozens of others—began to return to the country’s memory. Museums began to collect their photographs. Universities began to teach their names.
In 2021, a film called “The Harder They Fall” presented a heavily fictionalized version of his life. Most of the plot was pure invention. What was not invention was that the character at the center of that Western epic, that Black cowboy, was a real man. He really lived.
He really rode. And he really was buried quietly in a small plot in Santa Monica. If you ever find yourself in Santa Monica, you can visit Woodlawn Cemetery, behind a low wall on 14th Street. It is not on any tourist map.
There are no signs pointing to Nat Love. If you ask at the office, they will look up his name in the records. Section 2, Lot 56, Grave B. You will walk through the old section, past rows of weathered stones, and find it there.
His headstone is small. It reads simply: “Nathan Love, 1921. ” Alice is beside him as “Alice Love, 1946. ” No mention of Deadwood.
No mention of the mustang. No mention of the fourteen scars. Just two quiet names in a quiet corner of a quiet cemetery in a country that spent most of the twentieth century forgetting them. The American cowboy legend—the lone rider, the sunset behind him, the quiet dignity, the Colt on the hip—was built in large part on men like Nat Love.
It was built by Black cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, Indigenous horsemen, and freedmen who left the plantations after the Civil War and went west looking for work nobody else would give them. It was built by men whose names never made it into the novels of the era, the ones with small graves and silent stones. There is nothing romantic about the way Nat Love died, or about a stone that carries only the name “Nathan Love” and nothing else. That is the true ending.
That is what most real endings look like. But if you consider it long enough, there is something else there too. He got what almost no man of his generation and color got: he wrote his own story, printed it on paper, and ensured its survival. Historians can argue forever over which parts are entirely true and which are cowboy exaggerations.
That argument will never end. What cannot be argued is that a man born on a Tennessee farm, who was not even allowed to know his own birth date, immortalized himself in the historical record of the American West. He named himself, he named his horses, he named his scars, and he named the country he crossed. And 118 years after he put down that book, we are still saying his name.
Nat Love, Deadwood Dick, Red River Dick. A man who lived one of the great cowboy lives this country ever produced, and who died, in the end, a quiet man in a rented house in Santa Monica, buried under his real name in a small plot on a Monday afternoon in the winter of 1921.