COWGIRL Iconic: Mary Fields

A well-traveled trail rests peacefully between the rich forested hillsides around the town of Cascade, Montana, and snakes seventeen miles west to St. Peter’s Mission.  The road, as well as the mission itself, was the hub of activity in 1895. Back and forth along the route, Mary Fields, a former slave from Tennessee, drove a stagecoach carrying mail for people in the central area of the state.  Mary was the first Black American to deliver the mail and the oldest woman to ever take on such a job.

Fields was born in 1832 and lived with her parents on the Dunne Plantation in Hickman County, Tennessee.  Shortly after the Civil War ended, Mary became a free woman.  At the urging of her good friend, Dolly Dunne, Mary headed west to Montana.  Dolly had become a nun and founded a boarding school there for Native Americans called St. Peter’s Mission.  She invited Mary to visit and consider staying on if she liked.

Once the tough, six-foot-tall Fields arrived, she discovered the mission to be in a state of disrepair.  She organized a team of men to work on the school and make repairs and improvements.  One of the workers resented a black woman telling him what to do, and in a fit of rage backhanded her across the mouth.  Just as he was going for his gun, Mary pulled her own six-shooter first and shot and killed him.  The altercation led to her being asked to leave the mission.

Mary then applied for work as a mail carrier on a new route opening into the Cascade Mountains.  After proving she could defend herself and her cargo from highwaymen, and demonstrating her talent with horses and driving a stage, she was offered a job.  She was sixty years old.

Stagecoach Mary, as she would come to be known, transported letters and packages to and from pioneers for five years.  She left the United States Mail Service in 1900 and opened a laundry business in Cascade.  The business was a huge success.

Mary Fields is recognized by the United States Postal Service as being the second woman in history to drive the mail across the Western frontier.  She and her mule, Moses, delivered important correspondence that helped advance the land-claim process and bring about the development of a considerable portion of central Montana.

Referred to by the Native Americans in the region as “White Crow,” Fields proved a woman could do anything a man could do in the untamed territory beyond the Rockies.  Among her many admirers were actor Gary Cooper, who knew her when he was a little boy growing up in her neighborhood in Cascade, and sculptor, illustrator, and painter, Charles M.  Russell.  Russell made a pen-and-ink drawing of the pioneer in 1897.  The image entitled, A Quiet Day in Cascade, features Mary being knocked down by a hog and spilling a basket of eggs.

Mary Fields was a proud, independent woman who never wanted to be an inconvenience to her friends and neighbors.  When she became seriously ill in late 1914, she snuck off to a quiet spot outside her home and laid down to die.  Children playing in the area found her and she was taken to the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls where she died of liver failure shortly after being admitted.  The numerous townspeople she had befriended over time escorted her casket to the Hillside Cemetery near Cascade.  

She was eighty-two years old when she passed away on December 5, 1914.