“Stagecoach Mary” Fields Carries the Mail
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.”
https://www.sendoso.com/resources/blog/direct-mail-legend-stagecoach-mary
Hazel Ah Ying Lee: Chinese-American WASP
Hazel Ah Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children.
Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson. She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her job as an elevator operator in a Portland department store.
A few years earlier, it might have been hard for her to find a flight school that would take a Chinese-American teenage girl as a student. But the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society had recently opened the Chinese Flying Club of Portland in response to the Japanese invasion of China. Benevolent associations across the country had opened similar schools in cities with large Chinese populations with the goal of training pilots for the Chinese military.
Lee earned her pilot’s license in 1932, one of the first Chinese-American women to do so. In October of that year, she left for China with a squadron of her fellow classmates. When she arrived, she found that she was not allowed to fly with the Chinese Air Force. (Why this would have surprised her is not clear.) The air force offered her an administrative job, but she chose instead to relocate to Guanzhou,* where she worked as a commercial pilot. (Could she have done this in the United States in the 1930s? I’m not sure, but my impression is no.) She lived through the devastating bombing of that city by the Japanese in 1937—part of the Canton Operation, which was designed to blockade China and isolate the British port of Hong Kong. She spent a year in Hong Kong as a refugee, then returned to the United States where she worked for an organization in New York that sent armaments to China.
The creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program by the Army Air Force in 1942 gave Lee a chance to get back in the air. ** The purpose of the program was to train women to fly military airplanes. Trained WASP (not WASPs) flew non-combat missions and acted as test pilots in the United States, thereby freeing up male pilots for deployment overseas. Lee immediately applied. Lee was the first of only two Chinese-American women accepted into the program.*** At 30, she was older than most of her fellow pilots and soon became a leader in her training class. She was playful as well as a good pilot. For instance, she would write her classmates names in Chinese characters in lipstick on the tails of planes their planes.
Women pilots put up with grief because of their gender, but Lee faced special challenges because she was obviously Asian. On one flight, she was forced to land in a field. The farmer ran out to the field to investigate, armed with a pitchfork. He assumed she was part of a Japanese invasion force. Hazel had to talk fast to convince him that she was Chinese, and more importantly, American, before he would allow her to call for assistance. Back at the base, she reduced the entire chow line to tears of laughter with the story, but they all knew it could have ended badly.
After Hazel graduated from the training course in Sweetwater Texas, she was stationed at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan, where she flew large transport aircraft as part of the 3rd Ferrying Group. In September, 1944, she was sent to Pursuit School, in Brownsville Texas, where she was trained to fly fighters like the P-51 Mustang and the P-63 Kingcobra.
In November, 1944, Lee picked up a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell aircraft factory in Niagara Falls and flew it to Great Falls, Montana, which was a major staging area for planes being sent to the Soviet Union. (Male pilots flew the planes from Montana to Alaska, where Soviet pilots waited to fly them on the final leg to Russia.)
On November 23, Lee was making an approach to land. Another group of P-63s was arriving in at the same time. The radio on one of the planes in that group had failed several days before. The pilot, Jeff Russell, had relied on the other fliers in his group to inform the control tower at each stop that he did not have a radio.
As Lee began her approach to the runway, Russell was above her. Unfortunately, the personnel in the control tower lost track of who didn’t have a radio. When someone in the tower realized they were too close and yelled “pull up,” Lee heard the order instead of Russell. Responding to the order, she ran into Russell’s plane. Both planes crashed at the end of the runway and burst into flames. Both pilots were rescued from the planes, but Lee was too badly burned to survive. She died on November 25, 1944—the last WASP to die in the line of duty.
Because the WASP were officially civilian pilots, even though they flew under military command, the military did not pay for her funeral expenses, as they did for her mail counterparts.**** Lee’s family had to pay for the costs of transporting her home and burying her. When they tried to buy plots for Hazel and her brother, a soldier who had died in France three days after Hazel, the family was told that they could not be buried in the cemetery because they were Asian. The Lees fought back, and won.
The WASP program was disbanded on December 22. In 1977, Congress retroactively granted military status to the women who served in it.
*You may know it as Canton.
**The fact that the P is WASP is plural means that describing the women who served as WASPs is incorrect. But working around it is a pain.
***The other Chinese-American WASP was Margaret Gee, who went on to work as a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
****Women in the WASP program also received less pay than their male counterparts, had to pay for their own room and board, and bought their own uniforms.
Wanda Gág, Printmaker with a”Grimm” Aesthetic
Until a few weeks ago, the name Wanda Gág meant nothing to me, but it turns I was very familiar with her most famous work.
I discovered Gág while I was happily reading a book about professional women artists in the first half of the twentieth century who had all been students of a single male teacher. (Just because.) One of his students was a printmaker named Wanda Gág. I found her work, as portrayed in the book, very appealing and slightly familiar.
Grandma’s Kitchen. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And then I hit a surprise. The author mentioned in passing that Gág was the author and illustrator of an iconic children’s book, Millions of Cats. Published in 1928, it is considered the first modern picture book and is the oldest picture book still in print. And I had read it many times as a child.
Rabbit hole time!
Wanda Hazel Gag* was born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota. Her parents and grandparents had emigrated from the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in a German-speaking, art-centric household, the eldest of eleven children.
Wanda later wrote that her childhood was steeped “in the serene belief that drawing and painting, like eating and sleeping, belonged to the universal order of things.” Her father was a painter who supported his large familydecorating houses and churches. On Sundays he painted for himself, and he encouraged Wanda to draw, too. Her father, who was self-taught, dreamed that she would get formal art training. By the time she was twelve, she knew she wanted to become an artist.
Her father died of tuberculosis in 1908, when Wanda was fifteen. The family was impoverished. Their savings had been eaten up by her father’s illness. Her mother took in washing to earn money, but soon collapsed from exhaustion. Neighbors urged Wanda to quit school and get a job to support her family. Instead she found ways to use her art to support her family and to ensure that she and all of her siblings finished school. For three years, she took care of her family. She was finally able to give up her role as the family’s sole provider, when two of her sisters became school teachers and were able to help.
In 1913, at the age of twenty, she won a scholarship to attend the Minneapolis School of Art. Four years later, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York–which was a really big deal.** In New York, she cut her hair in a stylish bob, added the accent to her name, and flung herself into the art world. In addition to attending classes, she spent a lot of time visiting New York’s art museums, where she marveled at Old Masters that she had previously seen only in books, and small galleries, where she was inspired by modern artists from Europe. (Van Gogh and Cezanne were particular favorites.)
Wanda Gág preparing a lithography stone, ca 1930
The scholarship was a really big deal, but it wasn’t enough to live on. She was forced to spend much of her time on commercial work, including fashion illustrations*** and painting lampshades, plus occasional stints as a model. At the same time, she was developing a distinctive style of drawing and lithographic print making. She focused on interior spaces, rural landscapes, and architectural structures, using strong tonal contrasts and twisting contours. The result was modernist in style, with fairy tale overtones. In 1925, she began to enjoy success in the art world with the first of several solo exhibitions. (Her work sold out.)
Wanda finally found financial security in the world of children’s illustrated books. In addition to writing and illustrating her own books—of which Millions of Cats remains the best known—she also illustrated books written by others. In the 1930s, she returned to the stories she had read in her childhood, translating and illustrating the German fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers. She never strayed from the “grim” in those tales, or her own. Alice Gregory describes her children’s books as “fairy-tale familiar.” Certainly that is true of Millions of Cats, which I re-read a few days ago. I had remembered the premise, but not the plot. The word “macabre” came to mind. Also weird. And yet visually enchanting. No wonder I loved it as a child.
*She added the accent mark later. I am sure she had her reasons. I just have no idea what they were.
**The Art Students League was founded by a group of students who wanted more varied and flexible art instruction than that offered at the venerable (i.e. stuffy) National Academy of Design. One of the ways in which the Art Students League was more flexible was the number of women it accepted as students. The school became a center of American modernism. Thomas Eakins, of the Ash Can School, was one of the first board members. Some of the school’s most well known students included Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson.
***She preferred working on “stylish stouts” rather than the idealized waif-like flappers, whom she described as “fashionable ghostlings.”