Fifty years before the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion  made postal history, a six-foot tall, powerfully built formerly enslaved woman named “Stagecoach Mary” Fields delivered the mail in rural Montana as a Star Route Carrier for the United States Post Office.*

When Mary was emancipated, she left West Virginia, where she had been enslaved, and worked her way up the Mississippi on the steam boats.  She eventually ended up ending up in Toledo, Ohio.**  She worked for a time at the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart in Toledo, where she did the laundry,*** ran the kitchen, maintained the garden and grounds—and made friends with the convent’s Mother Superior, Mother Amadeus Dunne.*** *That friendship may have helped her keep her job: her gun-toting, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, bad-tempered ways were not a good fit for the quiet of the convent

Mother Amadeus moved west to Montana, where she founded another convent. When she fell ill, Mary followed. She worked for a time at Mother Amadeus’s new convent,  St. Peter’s Mission, near Cascade Montana.. Mary’s rough manners and bad-temper ways got her in trouble with the bishop. The final straw came when she and a male employee of the mission got into a fight, in which they both pulled their guns. Neither fired, but the Bishop demanded that the nuns fire Mary. (Was the man she fought with also fired? My sources don’t say.)

Mary moved to Cascade, where she tried a number of ways to make a living. She took in laundry and opened several restaurants that failed—perhaps due to her habit of feeding people for free if they didn’t have the money to pay. Mostly she did odd jobs, including work for the Ursuline mission. (Evidently the nuns found ways to get around the Bishop’s orders.)

In 1895, now in her mid-sixties, Mary got a contract with the Post Office to be a Star Route Carrier, apparently with the help of the Ursuline nuns. She was the second woman to get such a contract since the Star Route service was established in 1845. Rural Montana was a wild place. Driving a stagecoach provided by the Ursulines, Mary delivered the mail in spite of bandits, wolves, and the weather. (A broader, more dangerous variant of “neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night.”*****) In bad weather, when the coach couldn’t get through, she picked up the mail bags and walked. She carried both a rifle and a revolver and built a reputation of being fearless and ferocious.

She retired after delivering the mail for eight years and settled down in Cascade, where she became a beloved town character, who drank in the town saloons and ate in the towns restaurants for free. She celebrated two birthdays a year because she didn’t know when she was born, wore men’s trousers under her skirts, and supported the local baseball team with flowers from her garden and a punch in the face for anyone who bad-mouthed the team.

She died on December 5, 1914. The town raised money to have her buried in a cemetery on the road that linked Cascade to the Ursuline mission, a route she had driven frequently with the mail. Her funeral was one of the largest the town had seen.

Montana-born actor Gary Cooper, who met Fields on a visit to Cascade when he was nine, summed up her life in an interview about Mary with Ebony magazine “Mary lived to become one of the freest souls ever to draw breath or a .38.”

*The purpose of the Star Route service was to reduce the cost of getting the mail from one remote rural post office to another. Previously, local stage coach companaies had carried the mail, often charging the government for the use of the horses, the wagon and a driver. Independent contractors, who provided their own transportation, which sometimes was no more than a horse or a canoe, bid for the four-year contracts to deliver the mail with “celerity, certainty, and security.”

**Which is not on the Mississippi.  Some details are missing in Mary’s story.

***Not a small job in the mid-nineteenth century.

****Some sources claim the friendship dated back to the days when Mary was enslaved in West Virginia, but this has not been substantiated.

*****The first version of this was written by the Greek historian Herodotus, referring to the couriers of the ancient Persian empire: “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these courageous carriers from the swift completion of their appointed course.”

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