Mary Fields: Frontier Pioneer by Linda Harris Sittig

Mary Fields may just be the strongest of the Strong Women I have researched.

Literally.

Even from her early years, she did the unexpected. Born into slavery sometime in 1832 on a plantation in Hickman County, Tennessee, she became friends with a white girl named Sarah Dunne.

The two were an oddly matched pair. Sarah was a blue-eyed blonde from a family of means. Mary was a dark-skinned slave girl with brown eyes, and hair she wore up in a headscarf. Weighing in at 200 pounds and standing 6 feet tall, Mary towered over the more delicate Sarah. Yet, in spite of their differing circumstances, the two women stayed friends.

When Mary was granted her freedom at the end of the Civil War, Sarah took her vows as a Ursuline nun and moved to a convent in Toledo, Ohio. For the next several years Mary worked local odd jobs, like being a chambermaid aboard the steamboat, the Robert E. Lee.

In her thirties, with freedom under her belt, but no family to live with, Mary took it upon herself to move to Toledo, where she could at least be near Sarah. She procured a job at the convent, working alongside the nuns.

In 1884, Sarah (now known as Mother Amadeus) traveled to Cascade, Montana, to help establish a boarding school for Indian girls at the struggling St. Peter’s Mission. Mary stayed behind in Toledo.

Within one year, though, Mother Amadeus became ill with pneumonia and asked for Mary to be sent to Montana, to be with her.

Mary traveled 1,600 miles alone to reach the mission and then devoted all her energy to nursing Mother Amadeus. When her friend recovered, Mary decided to stay in Montana. She started raising chickens and cultivating a large vegetable and flower garden at the mission school.

Mary and The West were made for each other. She took it upon herself to make the needed repairs at the school and drive the wagon to haul supplies or visitors from the rail station in town. Wearing men’s trousers under her voluminous skirt, sturdy leather boots on her feet, and an apron over the skirt, Mary looked formidable… and she was. She also wore a revolver under her apron, just in case she needed it.

Although devoted to the nuns, Mary also frequented the saloon in town and taught herself to become a crack shot with a rifle—the Winchester ‘76 being her favorite. Baseball was her favorite spectator hobby and she would bring flowers from her garden and hand one to each ballplayer as a gesture of good luck.

After ten years, the Bishop of Great Falls, Montana, decided that Mary was not a suitable woman to be living with the nuns, so he banned her from the mission in 1894. All the nuns pleaded for Mary’s cause, but he would not relent.

Mary’s only choice was to move into the town of Cascade. She took all her savings and opened a restaurant, which only lasted a few months because Mary refused to charge anyone down on their luck, and fed any hungry person who came to eat.

When Mother Amadeus heard that the U.S. Postal Service needed a star route carrier, she encouraged Mary to apply. A star route carrier was a private carrier who would carry the mail or freight in a contract with the Postal Service. Mary earned the job when she hitched up a team of six horses faster than any other contestant.

At the approximate age of sixty, Mary carried the mail. She harnessed her horses and her mule, Moses, and made the fifteen-mile trek throughout rural Montana for the next 8 to 9 years. Because she was never robbed and never failed to make a mail delivery, folks started calling her, Stagecoach Mary.

She was, in fact, the first African-American woman to be a U.S. Mail Carrier.

While Mary was a rough and tumble woman, she did slow down a bit with age. But, she still ended the day with a drink and cigar at the local saloon, and even though Montana had a law forbidding women to frequent saloons, the Mayor of Cascade made an exception for Mary.

In her seventies, she gave up the mail route and opened a laundry in Cascade. One afternoon, at the end of the day in the saloon, a man entered. Mary recognized him as a customer who had not paid his laundry bill. She walked up to him, knocked him to the ground and placed her foot on his chest until he procured the coins he owed her. After that incident, all her customers paid on time.

Mary Fields forged her own life and proved that some women were just as capable as a man to carve out a life on the frontier. She served as a role model for a life lived with integrity, fairness, and hard work.

When she died in 1914, at the approximate age of 82, the schools in Cascade, Montana, shut down for the day and the entire community turned out for her funeral.

As I said, one strong woman.

Thank you to Carol Dumas and Ann Livotti for suggesting I research Mary Fields.

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linda