Mary Fields was born
as a slave in Tennessee. She smoked rather bad homemade cigars. Mary was six
feet tall; heavy; tough; short-tempered; two-fisted; powerful; and packed a
pair of six-shooters and an eight or ten-gauge shotgun. She was known as
STAGECOACH MARY.
Inn
1884 she made her way to Cascade County (west central Montana) in search of
improved provisions and adventure and took a job with the Ursuline Nuns at
their mission in the city of Cascade. She joined the St. Peter Mission. The
nuns' frontier facility was relatively well funded, and the nuns did a
thriving business converting the “heathens of the day” to the true path of
salvation—White men excluded.
Mary Fields in her seventies, drove a stagecoach
and delivered the US mail in Cascade, Montana. In Central City,
Colorado, Clara Brown sponsored Black wagon trains to the state and started
a church. In 1874 Black women in Nevada organized a Dumas Society and
Literary Club in Virginia City with 22 "ladies and gentlemen."
