The first African American woman Star Route mail carrier in the United States.
The problem with the nickname “Stagecoach Mary” is that the Black woman to whom the tag is attached, Mary Fields, never drove a stagecoach. The innocent-sounding misnomer is not so innocent.
Scant and fictional are the supposed details about her life before she traveled west and into history.
Mary was born into slavery in the spring of 1832 in Hickman County, Tennessee, where she lived for approximately 33 years. Post-emancipation, she began a new life that eventually led her to Ohio. We take up her story in her 53rd year, when the Montana chapter of Mary Fields’ life began as she boarded a train in Toledo on a dark winter’s night in 1885.
Her departure was unplanned — a telegram had alerted her that last rites were being arranged for her friend Mary Amadeus, who was fighting the clutches of pneumonia. Three days later, Fields disembarked from the Great Northern in Helena, Montana, facing two more days of travel. Wagons drawn by two-horse teams, and finally, a single-harnessed sleigh delivered her across deep layers of snowpack marking entry into a wilderness known as The Birdtail, named after the monolithic rock that towered 1,000 feet above prairie hills and valleys, its peak geologically etched into the appearance of a feather headdress or a bird’s tail.
Miles of pristine splendor waned as her destination came into view. Entering a small lone cabin, dilapidated and isolated, Mary saw Native American girls cowering in a corner, hardened patches of ice clinging to walls, Ursuline nuns coaxing her into the dark interior, eyes glancing to and from Mary Amadeus placed in the center, on the floor, supine, lids closed, and most distressing, sounds of rattled breath convulsing, and lapsing into silence. The severity stifled customary greetings; whispers slid across the chill.
Mary attended to the charismatic leader while the four women wearing black busied themselves with religious and educational duties. Fields understood the purpose of
