Nat Love — born into slavery in a Tennessee log cabin, gone west at fifteen, remembered across the cattle country as Deadwood Dick: the most famous Black cowboy the American West ever produced. He wrote himself into legend before America could write him out of it.
The clouded eyes belong to a man already passed into myth. The red thread spilling from his throat reads as blood, as lineage, as a line running back to his mother's loom. The gold is the dust he rose from — and the dust he becomes again.
The frontier was never as white as the films pretended. Here is the proof, made permanent.