Audiobook · read by volunteers
Life and Adventures of Nat Love
Nat Love (1854–1921)
Read by Lee Elliott · 22 chapters · 4 h 22
About the book
Nat Love was born into slavery in Tennessee, and by the time he wrote his autobiography he had been a cowboy, a rider on the open ranges, a Pullman porter on the railroads and, as he tells it, one of the most famous hands in the West. His book is full of stampedes, gunfights, hard winters, long trail drives and narrow escapes, and he tells them with the swagger of a man who knows he has a story worth hearing. He rode alongside famous figures, took part in roundups and rodeos, and earned the nickname Deadwood Dick. Underneath the bravado lies a deeper tale of a life that began in bondage and reached across a changing America. Love writes plainly and with obvious pride. Lee Elliott reads the twenty-two chapters. This is a lively, sometimes startling memoir that adds a vital perspective to the story of the American West.
Introduction
Nat Love was born in 1854 and died in 1921. According to his own account, he was born into slavery in Tennessee, was freed after the Civil War, and set out for the West, where he spent years as a working cowboy before taking a job as a Pullman porter on the railroads.
The Life and Adventures of Nat Love was published in 1907. It is an autobiography, and, as with many memoirs of its time, it mixes plain recollection with a showman’s love of a tall tale. Historians have debated how closely all of its episodes can be checked against other evidence, so it is best read as Love’s own telling of his life, and as a lively document of how he wished to be remembered. Even so, it is one of the few first-person accounts of a Black cowboy of the era and provides a rich picture of ranch work, trail life and travel across a changing country.
The book is divided into twenty-two chapters, which move from his childhood through his years on the range and his later work on the railroad. Some language and attitudes belong to the period and may feel jarring; others offer rare glimpses of a world that standard histories of the West often overlooked.
This LibriVox recording lasts about four and a half hours and is read by volunteer Lee Elliott. It will interest anyone curious about the American West, African American history or the art of the personal memoir, and anyone who enjoys a good yarn from a confident narrator. In the book he explains how he came to be called Deadwood Dick.
Public domain
Nat Love died in 1921: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text