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February 18, 2021 36 mins

In this episode we meet Nat Love, the toughest Black Cowboy. But Nat Love’s life was more than just wild horses and gunfights. This is the story of an enslaved man who found freedom in the West. A man who roamed America, just like they did in the westerns. He did it for real.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, Pop, do you remember when we drove across country? Yeah,
he wrote, with me in the truck, it was a
beautiful ride. We went from here to Nashville, then to Columbia, Missouri,
then overthrew Kansas, and I remember when we saw the
Rockies for the first time, when you first see them
on the horizon and he's still two states away, and

(00:23):
you started to stee the tip of the Rockies, and
then the closer you get, the bigger again, and he's
got damn these things ever gonna stop growing. When I
was about nine, my family and I left my boyhood
home in Atlanta and we moved west. It was the
first time I really saw America. The thing about America
is it it's not a country anybody can give you.
If you were born in America, you are an American.

(00:46):
That's my pops, And yeah, America means something to him.
When I was a kid, he took time to make
sure it meant something to me too. Most nights when
I was young, he tell us stories, tales of open
skies and hard labor opportunities harvested from the land. And
he told us real American stories, stories of black cowboys.
Did you know that one and four cowboys were black.

(01:08):
It's true, even though you rarely ever see it on
TV or in the movies. When I was a kid,
movies about black people in the past were always stories
about slavery. You knew there'd be a scene where a
black man or black woman was whipped. It's difficult to
grow up in America knowing that your people were slaves,
or rather they were enslaved, born with the same rights
to life as livestock property. It fox with you like

(01:32):
real hard, especially when you're young and you're just building
a sense of yourself. My father wanted to protect his
black son, protect me from such a devastating blow to
my confidence in esteem, so he told me stories about
free black cowboys like Not Love. When I first read
Not Love story, it has sounded like all the men

(01:53):
in my family. The stories that we had in our
family were but nervous stories of being victor him. But
there were stories of being successful, free people trying to
live their lives against whatever odds they were. That's the
lesson that my family passed to me, and that's the
lesson I passed to you. And that's where he told

(02:15):
his story. He told his story as a free man
going through the world. Not Love story captivated me as
a kid. We know all the details because my pop
got me a book, a tattered old thing called The
Life and Adventures of Not Love. Not Love wrote it himself.
He dedicates the book to quote that noble but ever
decreasing band of men, under whose blue and buckskin shirts

(02:36):
there lives a soul as great and beats the heart
as true as ever human breast. Contained to the cowboys, rangers, scouts,
hunters and trappers and cattlemen of the Great Western Plains,
Not Loves life story isn't just a cowboys story packed
with gunfights, saloon fights, cattle wrestlers, and show girls, although

(02:58):
his life story has plenty of that. His life is
also the story of an enslaved man who found freedom
in the open and wild frontier of the West. A
black man who called the four Winds his walls and
the saddle his home. A man who roamed America just
like they did in the Westerns. He did it for real.
He was one of many black men who did. This

(03:18):
is his story, it's their story. It's an American story. Yeah,
this is a home. It's been a long road for us.
We take an ownership over everything else to us, realty,
we surrounded by our heritage are pisted up because we
tried to be American. I'm Zerin Burnett, Welcome to Black Cowboys,

(03:41):
and I heard original podcast. Hey itself was really in
the name. Sitting on a Mustang right in through the place,
but below soldid the King Little Range? We in love
with the cowboy way Chap or one Not Love the

(04:01):
toughest Black Cowboy. No one knows exactly what day Not
Love was born, as Love puts it in his autobiography quote,
no count was kept of such trivial matters as the
birth of a slave baby. That's how it goes when
you're born as someone's property. We do know Nat Love
was born in a log cabin in Tennessee in eighteen

(04:23):
fifty four. I asked my pop to read NAT's voice.
That's how I first heard it. When I was a boy.
My earliest recollections are of pushing a chair in front
of me and toppling from one to the other of
my master's family to get a mouthful to eat, like
a pet dog. Nat Love was almost seven when the

(04:45):
Civil War started. His master left the plantation to fight
for the Confederacy, and he took nat Love's father with
him to labor for the Confederate army. But even with
that extra advantage of slave labor, it wasn't enough for
the South to win. After Release surrendered, not Loves Master
and his father returned to the plantation. The war was over.

(05:06):
The enslaved were now free, but often the only thing
the newly freed now owned were their bodies. Like we
had property we owned in North Carolina in eighteen sixty six,
you know, so it wasn't like we weren't looking for anything.
So at the end of the Civil War, when everybody
else had to run do what they could do, we

(05:28):
had land that we already owned that nobody could put
us off of. So we were free people even in
the midst of all that. Then, as the reconstruction trade
went through, Grandpa ever and when and found everybody of
his siblings who have been sold, he brought all them
back to the property five acres of land, and then
we built a homestead, so everybody had a place to live.

(05:51):
We had a feeling that we were controlling our own
destiny as long as we were on our own property.
Not Love's family rented a cabin and some acred of
farmland from their former master. They planted corn and tobacco.
When they were done working in the fields, they constructed
straw mats and brooms. On Sunday there, one day off,
they sold their wares in the town market. Their fate

(06:13):
was finally being shaped by their own hands, motivated by
their own choices, directed by their will. This was the
start of their American story, and that Love caught a feeling.
He fell in love with the confidence that comes from
self reliance. He was smitten with independence. The fact that
I was now free gave me the newborn courage to

(06:35):
face the world and what the future might hold. But
before Nat could step into his own freedom, his father
fell sick and died. Soon after. His father had only
ever felt freedom for one whole year of his life.
The family was thrown into chaos. Not Love became the
man of the house at the age of twelve. That

(07:00):
Love's neighbor, Mr. Williams, had a horse ranch. He also
had two sons, roughly not Love's age. On Sundays, when
Mr Williams was away from the ranch, Not Love would
sneak out there. He and the Williams boys would get
up to serious mischief, and nat soon found a way
to turn that mischief into money. The deal was for
ten cents per colt, and not Love would break any

(07:21):
wild horse picked out by the Williams Boys. The coat
would run, jump, kick, and pitch around the barnyard, and
his efforts to throw me off, but he might as
well have tried to jump out of his skin, because
I held on to his mane and struck to him
black a leech. The coat would usually keep us bucking
until he could buck no more, and then I would

(07:42):
get my ten cents. Not Love took to horses instantly.
He seemed to understand them anticipate them. He broke a
dozen wild horses for the Williams Boys, earning a dime
each time. That's a dollar twenty in eighteen sixty five money.
One day, the Williams Boys brought an ill tempered stallion
for Not Love to break, an enormous beast the boys

(08:02):
had named black Highwaymen. The door was opened and the
pole removed out of the barn. We shot like a
black cloud around the yard. We flew, then over the
garden fence. The unbroken stallion freed himself from the horse
ranch and tore away at full gallop. Not Love hung on,

(08:23):
hoped his luck outlasted the horse's anger. There was no saddle,
no bridle, and rein that Love just gripped the horse
by its mane. Over the fields we went, the horse
clearing the highest fences and other obstacles in his way
with the greatest ease. The huge black stallion, with the
slender black boy clinging to its back, caught the attention
of hound dogs, and the pack of dogs charged after them.

(08:46):
After running about two miles, we cleared the fence into
a pasture where there was a large number of other
horses and young coats, who promptly stampeded as we joined.
Their happyman taking the lead with me on his back,
and all the dogs in the country strung out in
the rear. We went over everything, through everything, until finally

(09:08):
the killing pace told and black highwaymen fell a thoroughly
exhausted and completely conquered and well broken horse. Not Love
had survived. More than survived. He found a talent. He
knew it was valuable. It was also the moment when
that Love started to imagine his own freedom. It was
about this time that I commenced thinking about going west. Hey, Bob,

(09:50):
what happened to our family right after the Civil War?
The people in our family who wanted to stay on
the farms, they stayed in North Carolina. Then they were
others who did not want this day on the farm,
who had no interest in being anywhere near where slavery was.
Then that they headed it out for Kansas and Oklahoma
because they were all good horse people. So they went

(10:12):
out there and they became cowboys. Mm hmm. On the
tenth day of February in eighteen sixty nine, Not Love
walked his way out of the Old Confederacy. He put
his back to the plantation he was born on and
walked away from the land his family had rented from

(10:33):
his former master. His brother in law had come to
take his place. He was free now. His plan was simple.
He'd walked to the edge of America. He wanted to
go where his talents with horses were most valuable. He
dreamed of Dodged City, but he didn't have a horse
to call his own, so he walked. In eighteen sixty nine,

(10:53):
America was stitching itself together. The country nearly torn asunder
limb from limb by years of war. Are in centuries
of slavery was now warily setting itself for right. The
young nation was imagining a new way forward, a bigger
vision for America, but one shadowed by the uncertainty of
a lasting piece. The nation set to building the foundation

(11:14):
upon which the subsequent centuries would be constructed. Not Love
walked on that same year in New York, the investment
firm that would become Goldman Sachs struck their first deals.
In May at West Leland, Stanford's long dreamed of transcontinental
railroad finally connected, celebrated by driving a golden spike just

(11:36):
outside Promontory, Utah. Not Love walked on. That month. In Cincinnati,
the Red Stockings would field a fully professional baseball team,
the first in the country. In December of that same year,
Jesse James bust into a bank in Gatlin, Missouri, and
robs it, the first one of his long career. The
young and bruised country was taking adolescent shape. Not Love

(11:59):
walked on. Black Americans, newly freed, longed for a place
to call their own, to build a community. Out west.
In that wide open sea of grass, countless black towns
were being formed a fresh start and safe community. There
was Nicodemus, Kansas billed as quote an asylum for the
freedmen of the South. It was named after an enslaved man,

(12:21):
an African prince who purchased his own freedom. Nat Love
was fifteen years old. A thousand miles later, Nat Love
finally walked his happy ass into Dodge City. It was
a poppin frontier boomtown, a bustling, dusty city. Its muddy,
rutted streets lined with saloons, dance halls, gambling houses, and,

(12:46):
as nat Love notes, not much else except cowboys, Western cowboys,
and here was this black cowboy from Tennessee. The Southern
boy discovered that the Western cowboys were a wild and
often unfriendly to strangers. Nat Love bided his time, he
read the scene. He laid back. One day he saw

(13:08):
a bunch of cowboys eating breakfast, a few of them black.
This wasn't strange, though, since as you recall, one in
four cowboys were black. So a boomtown like Dodge City
was home to many. They invited Nat to eat with them.
He asked the trail boss for a job. Any job
offer depended on one question. Could Nat Love ride a

(13:29):
wild horse? He knew he could ride any wild horse calm.
The trail boss called over to a black cowboy and
told him to saddle a horse called good Eye. He'd
be the test for the wannabe cowboy. Good Eye was
an ornerary horse, a real son of a bitch. The
trail boss and the other cowboys sat back, ready to
be amused by the tough, talking tenderfoot. But what the

(13:51):
cowboys didn't know was that Nat Love was no stranger
to an ornery horse. Good Eye bucked like a piston.
He lifted Nat Love up off the back of that
bucking bronco. Then it curved its body and twisted in
the air. Soon as the broncho landed back on the earth,
it leapt again. It kept pitching and lurching, but Nat
Love didn't let go. He held on tight until that

(14:13):
horse stopped sucking, and he'd stilled the beast in the
heart of that horse. The trail boss hired him as
soon as he hopped off. The pay was thirty dollars
a month. The trail boss decided that Love needed a
more cowboy name. How about Red River Dick for the
Red River that marks the border of Texas and Oklahoma.

(14:34):
One imagines that Love might have taken pride in the
new name he'd earned, no longer answering to the name
of his former master. The Trail Boss bought him a
new saddle, spurs, bridle and reins chaps, a few blankets.
For the time being, he could ride the outfits spare
saddle horse. The trail Boss also boughta Love, a brand
new colt, not Love a k A red River. Dick

(14:58):
was now a professional black cout life bred River Dick
took the cowboy life without hesitation. It was a hand
and glove fit. For the first time in his life,
he had a real job that meant real freedom, real independence.

(15:20):
He was so far away from where he had started.
His new life was hard work, there was no doubt
of that, but it was labor he freely endured, satisfied
by the fact he was his own man, without a master,
laboring for himself and his own future. Oh. I always
wanted to be a cowboy. I've always had a strong,
strong desire to, uh, you know, to spend time on

(15:42):
on a farm, on a ranch. And I love I
love the I love the environment. I love I love
I love the smell of manure on a farm. You know,
when you've been driving down the highway and when you
get close to the farm you see manure. Most people
put the wind up. I put my window down. I
can attest to this. Cattle ranches let their massive herds

(16:11):
loose to graze on the grassy plains during the winter.
Starting in the spring, they'd round up the loose cattle,
sometimes spread over hundreds of miles of range. After the
cattle were rounded up, they'd have to be sorted by
their brands. The cowboys would drive the cattle north to
a cowtown like Dodge City, where the cattle would be
shipped by train to the slaughterhouses of Chicago. That's where

(16:31):
they be butchered into beef and then shipped east, where
this beef would wind up on the plates of five
star restaurants and the platters of family tables. The cowboys
fed America, not Love. Had walked into Dodge City, Red
River Dick rode out, and on his very first ride
he ran into trouble. The cowboys encountered a band of Indians,

(16:54):
whom Red River Dick called the Old Victoria Tribe. They
were the first Native Americans he'd ever seen before that
they've been only stories. They were about a hundred painted bucks,
all well mounted. When we saw the Indians. They were
coming after us, yelling like demons. One of the boys
was shot off his horse and killed near me. The

(17:15):
Indians got his horse, bridle and saddle, as bullets sung
passed his head, and war whoops filled the air with
shrieks and screams. That Love remained frozen. When I saw
them coming after us, and heard their blood curved and yale,
I lost all courage and thought my time had come
to die. He had his brand new but he had

(17:38):
never fired a gun before. You see, back in the South,
slaves weren't ever given guns and talked to shoot for
all the obvious reasons. Somehow the fifteen year old not
Love found his courage. Some of the boys told me
to use my gun and shoot for all I was worth.
Their words brought me back to earth. After the first shot,

(18:03):
I lost all fear and fought lack. A veteran, Not
Love got lucky and survived his first gunfight. But while
he kept his life, the cowboys lost nearly everything else,

(18:24):
Like every damn thing. During this fight. We lost all
but six of our horses, our entire packing outfit, and
our extra saddle horses, which the Indian stampeded, then rounded
them up after the fight and drove them off. The
cattle trails that not Love rode were the big and
famous ones Loving Trail, Chisholm Trail, and He rode many

(18:48):
of the less famous, the Old Dog and Sun City trails.
Almost all of the cattle trails crossed Indian territory. It
was a lawless land, a land where might and bullets
made right. The boys enjoyed a rare equality among men,
uncommon at that time in America. Of course, this was
before the more so called civilized people from the East,

(19:09):
you know, white people from places like Boston, Richmond, and Philadelphia,
who arrived with their racism and with their law books
that made their racism the new custom. But before they arrived,
for a little more than two decades, black men and
white men rode across the prairies, as the founding fathers
had once said, but never really meant living as quote,

(19:30):
men created equal. While the life was hard and in
some way with exacting, yet it was free and wild
and contained the elements of danger which my nature craved,
our gloried into danger and the wild and free life
of the plains the New Country. I was continually traversing

(19:50):
in the life of a rough rider. These were men
who lived right at the edge of life and death.
Many were formerly enslaved. Many were veterans of the Civil
War suffering PTSD or whatever they called it back then.
Many were second and third sons of Eastern cities and towns,
pushed west by ambition and opportunity. They were men who

(20:14):
didn't walk the safe path in life, and they lived
like it, never knowing which ride or which dance with
a show girl would be their last. As a young kid,
these stories stuck with me because they were so vivid,
so alive, and sometimes so gruesome. It would never occur
to me to try to soften the information, to make

(20:35):
it acceptable and impalatable, because then then you haven't delivered
the message, because the thing is some stuff is not
acceptable and it's not palatable ship because you know it
once you once you understand that people die, you understand it.
It didn't take a second lesson every time that love
kills somebody, it was somebody who was in the act

(20:56):
of trying to kill him. That self defense. It's just
the wages of war. A frontier is a war zone.
All the different tribes and the first nations that are
out there trying to defend the land that they've been
living on, find that their choices to violently defended. The
people who are trying to take it for no reason

(21:17):
other than they wanted are doing it in a violent
way because that's the only way you can do that.
So as a result, this was just like a genocide. Once,
when that Love followed the Dodge City Trail, riding back
to a ranch in Arizona, his outfit was ambushed by
a war party of natives. We don't know what band

(21:40):
they were from, Not Love never says. Instead, he prefers
to record their gunfight with sharp detail. When I saw
them coming, I shouted to my companions, we will battle
them to hell soon. We heard their yells as they
charged us at full speed. We met them with a
hot from my winchestice, but as they were in such

(22:02):
large numbers, we saw that we could not stop them
that way, and it soon developed into a hand to
hand fight. That Love scrambled to grab his partner's horse
and continue to fight from horseback. My saddle horse was
shot out from underneath me, and by the same time
my partner, James Holly, was killed, shot through the heart.

(22:23):
Desperate not to join his partner, Holly, not Loving, the
rest of the outfit fled the scene. Nearly every one
of us were wounded in this fight, but Holly was
the only man killed on our side, though a few
Indians were made better at the result of it. We
heard afterwards that Holly was scalped and his body filled

(22:44):
with the arrows by the Red devils. Red devils. There
is an ugliness in that Love's words. Whenever he talks
about the Indians. It's unmistakable, it's inexcusable, and it's impossible
to ignore these aspects of his character. To even attempt
to ignore them would be to perpetuate the attitudes he held.
His attitude of cultural supremacy seeps into every page of

(23:07):
his book. He often said Indians were made better by death.
Truth be told. Not Love was yet another interloper making
his way on Native lands. Now in freedom, he was
being used to deprive land in liberty to others. Black
cowboys like Not Love never seemed to consider that they
were acting as the spear point of manifest destiny. It

(23:31):
was the interior of the continent that had to be
won over after the Civil War. That's where the cowboys
roamed and why they had to battle against Indians desperate
to keep something, some land of their own. It was
a divide and conquer strategy. Each population was turned against
the other. Long before all this, Natives had been paid
by the US government to become slave catchers. This too,

(23:54):
had been an intentional effort to divide the two peoples
who had every reason to band together, a created lasting divides.
Some Natives did become slave masters and slave catchers, but
far more often it was Native communities who accepted runaway
enslave people. Not Love. Like so many black people, seeking

(24:16):
to find a better world and way of life, was
also advancing the agenda of a nation that had once
legally enslaved him and his people. That Love is not
a hero, not in the sense that he is to
be emulated. His triumphs of bravery and daring must always
be considered alongside his cruelty to natives. Sadly, this too
makes him very American. July four, seventy six, the young

(24:50):
nation of America celebrated its centennial anniversary, one years old.
The nation that few in the old world believed would
make it that upstart nation aid of the people, by
the people, and for the people, had survived its civil war.
America was feeling confident and cocky as a cowboy. Nat
Low was in the Dakota Territory at the time. We

(25:12):
arrived in Deadwood in good condition, without having any trouble
with the Indians on the way up. We turned our
cattle over to their new owners at once, then proceeded
to take into town. Imagine the smell of streets made
of mud and horseship, the noise emanating from saloons busy
selling sins to all comers, the jangly piano, the snatches

(25:35):
of laughter, the occasional gunshot. Deadwood was a camp masquerading
as a boomtown, a place populated with soiled optimism, a
very American scene. The next morning, July fourth, the gamblers
and mining men made up a purse of two hundred
dollars for a roping contest between the cowboys that were

(25:55):
in town. A trail boss picked out twelve of the
most vicious, mean tempered mustangs he could locate on the range.
I roped through tide bridle, saddled, and mounted my mustang
in exactly nine minutes from the crack of the guns.
The time of the nearest competitor was twelve minutes and

(26:15):
thirty seconds. This gave me the record and the championship
of the West. After the roping contest, the cowboys, still
hungry for competition, arranged a shooting contest. Not Love won
the two perse. He also won a new name, the
name of Deadwood. Dick was given to me by the
people of Deadwood, sop Dakota to July four, eighteen and

(26:38):
seventy six, after I had proven myself worthy to carry it,
and after I had defeated all comers and riding, roping
and shooting, and I have always carried the name with
honor since that time. It was just a few months
later in October of that same year, Not Love a
k A. Red River Dick a k A. Deadwood, the

(27:00):
toughest black cowboy ever, nearly met his end. Not Love
was riding the range, rounding up strays. The closest cowboy
from his outfit was miles away. He heard the familiar
war whoops, and then he saw them, the warriors in
full war paint. So I head for yellow Horse Canyon

(27:21):
and gave my horse the rein but as I had
considerable objection to being chased by a lot of painted
savages without some remonstrance, I turned in my saddle every
once in a while and gave them a shot by
way of reading. And I had the satisfaction of seeing
a painted brave tumble from his horse and go rolling
in the dust every time my rifle spoke. I had

(27:45):
about decided to stop and make a stand when one
of the bullets caught me in the leg, passing clear
through it and then through my horse, killing him. The
horse fell to the earth. It formed an awkward pile
which not Love used his cover, quickly falling behind him.
I used his dead body for a breastwood, and the

(28:05):
Indians off for a long time. Everything changed when that
Love ran out of Ammo. The war party drew in closer.
It encircled him, much like if he were a mustang
to be corralled, and then once he was overcome by
his attackers, he was knocked cold. Darkness followed. When I

(28:26):
came to my senses, I was in the Indians camp.
Who had caused them to spare my life? I cannot tell,
but it was, I think, probably because I had proved
myself a brave man. Another reason why he might have
been saved Deadwood Dick was black. He'd been captured by
the tribe of the chief named Yellow Dog. It was
a mixed band of natives. As he put it, there

(28:48):
was a large percentage of colored blood and the tribe,
and as I was a colored man, they thought I
was too good a man to die, so the tribe
took him in. Three days after my capture, my ears
were pierced, and I was adopted into the tribe. As
soon as he could walk, nat Love threw himself into
the war dances and medicine dances of the tribe. He

(29:09):
also learned to communicate with his captors, first by hand signs.
Soon he could speak with them and broken phrases and words.
He was given a new name. The tribe dubbed him
Buffalo Papoose. Days passed, then weeks. His attitude against the
natives softened a little. He lost his freedom. He was

(29:30):
a captive, but he was no slave. He had been
made his captors equal. That difference was vital. One month
after he'd been captured, and that Love picked his moment
to flee, he just hoped his luck and keep up
with him It was a dark, cloudy night, and the
Indians grown careless and their fantasty. The security had relaxed

(29:50):
their watchfulness after the quiet of the camp proclaimed them
all asleep. I crawled about two hundred and fifty yards
to where the horses are picketed, and going to the
Indian pony I had already picked out, made for the
open prairie in the direction of the Home Range in Texas,
one hundred miles away. All night he rode through darkness

(30:13):
and cold until he arrived back at the ranch. It
seems to me that if ever a man boyd charmed,
I am the man. As I have had five horses
shot off from under me and killed, had fought Indians
and Mexicans in all sorts of situations, and have been
in more tight places than I can number. Yet I

(30:33):
have managed to escape, but only the mark of a
bullet or knife as a reminder, the fight with the
Yellow Dog Dribe is probably the closest car I ever had,
and it's supposed to call as I ever want. With
the stretch of barbed wire, the span of the railroad,

(30:55):
and the criss crossing lines of the telegraph, the West
was losing its wildness. The law was no longer escapable.
Civilization had reached its grasping fingers into the last untouched
parts of America's interior. With the march of progress came
the railroad, and no longer where we called upon to

(31:16):
follow the long harange teers or must things on the trail,
while the immense cattle ranges stretching away in the distance
as far as I could see, now began to be
dotted with cities and towns. And cattle industry, which once
had a monopoly in the West, now had to give
way to the industry of the farming mill. To us

(31:38):
wild cowboys of the range, used to the wild and
army stricted life of the boundless plains, the new order
of things did not appeal, and many of us became
disgusted and quit the wildlife for the pursuits of our
more civilized brother I was among that number, and in
eighteen ninety I bid farewell to the life which I

(32:01):
have followed for over twenty years. Not love, red River, dick, deadwood, dick,
buffalo papoos. Back to that love again. Nat took a
job as a pullman porter, a trained man, and that
same land read once gotten into gunfights with cattle wrestlers
and outlaws and marauding bands of Indians. He carried passengers

(32:23):
to and fro from Chicago to Denver, cargo to sometimes
cattle cars. Nat Love's new outfit, the Pullman Porters, made
some history of their own. For more than two months
in the Pullman Porters went on strike. It was a
major event in American history, black men standing up for
themselves in a united unionized effort. The strike had to

(32:44):
be ended by President Grover Cleveland. The federal holiday of
Labor Day was one result. Another result, their example of
collective action became a seed for the Civil rights movement
more than fifty years later. From the Civil War to
Civil Rights not Love's life story stretched from one America
into the dawn of another. The Life and Adventures of

(33:06):
That Love was published in nineteen o seven. I still
have the tattered copy my dad used to read to me.
In the preface that writes, I have tried to record
events simply as they are, without attempting to varnish over
the bad spots or drawing my imagination to fill out
a chapter at the cost of the truth. It has
been my aim to record things just as they happened,
believing they will prove of greater interest thereby, And if

(33:29):
I am able to add to the interest and enjoyment
of a single reader, I will consider myself well repaid
for the time and labor that Love's book. I think true. Yeah,
Having been something of an adventurer myself, I recognize when
people are not lying. And the one thing he never
did was embellished. It never tried to make himself look good.

(33:51):
He described what happened in a way that I recognize.
That's what that was. Pop. Where did you get that
Love's book anyway? Uh? I got it at a bookstore
in Princeton. Uh, there's a Uh, it's another another whole story.

(34:12):
But I was at a bookstore in Princeton in nineteen
seventy and they had two copies of it, so I
stole one of them. I found that would have liked that.
I no, I did. Towards the end of that Love's life,

(34:34):
because he was still riding the rails, galloping across the plains,
propelled by the steel horses that had replaced him as
the locomotives steamed into the future, and that Love gazed
out at that sea of grass, that rolling and rollicking
green prairie. I wonder did he ever think of all
the men he'd sent to their graves and regret any
of it? Did he ever long for the solid earth,

(34:55):
a piece of America to call his own? If he
did not love never wrote about it, He seemed to
find his home out there on the range. But I
also wonder did he recall with pride that many times
his horse was shot out from under him, all those
stampedes and ambushes he somehow scraped through. Did he ever
feel just how far he had come? He'd walked off

(35:16):
the plantation of his birth, from Tennessee to Kansas and
found an American life of high plains, freedom, as cowboy
as they come, a black survivor in the heart of America.
I'm Zarin Burnett. Thanks for listening. Coming up on the
next episode of Black Cowboys, Cherokee Bill, the Greatest outlaw

(35:37):
You've Never heard of. Black Cowboys is written by me
Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by Ryan Murdoch and Michelle Land.
Our theme song is written and performed by Demeanor. Sound
design and music by Jeremy Thall, Additional music by Alvin
young Blood. Heart research in fact checking by Austin Thompson,
Marissa Brown, Jocelyn Sears, and Aaron Blakemore show logo by

(36:00):
Sequent India. Executive producers are Jason English and man Gesh
A Ticketer Special thanks to my pop for the voice
of that love for all the stories. Yeah, this's a home.
It's been a long road for us. We taken ownership
over everything else to us, realty. We surrounded by our heritage,
are frisked up because we're proud to be American. Caboia

(36:29):
cow ask yourself was really in the name, sitting on
a mus stand right in through the plains. But Willow Soldi,
the King little Range were in love with the cowboy way.
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