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THURSDAY
His nickname sounds like a porn star’s—as does his given name, for that matter—but Nat Love became “Deadwood Dick” on July 4, 1876, in Deadwood, S.D., after winning a contest roping, tying, saddling, and mounting a wild mustang “in exactly nine minutes from the crack of the gun.” Immediately afterward, he won a shooting contest, as well. One of the numerically significant but historically overlooked African-American cowboys, Love was renowned enough to pen an autobiography in 1907, 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 Ranges, and on the Plains of the “Wild and Woolly” West, Based on Facts and Personal Experiences of the Author. The book’s entertaining text backs up its grandiloquent title and cements Love’s legend. The Discovery Theater presents Nat Love of the Wild, Wild West, a musical play based on Love’s adventures as well as those of other frontier fabulists, at 10 and 11:30 a.m. at the Smithsonian Associates’ Discovery Theater, Round House Theater, 8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. $5. For reservations, call (202) 357-1500. (Dave Nuttycombe)