In the article below, writer Leslie Budewitz works to separate fact from fiction in the story of Mary Fields, one of the most famous Black women in the 19th Century West. Leslie’s short story collection, All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, is a finalist for the 2025 High Plains International Book Awards; the title story won the Agatha Award for Short Story. Building on stories of Fields’ big heart and her connection to her community, the collection demonstrates that good historical fiction gives readers the emotional truth of an era.
The story of the American West is punctuated by larger-than-life figures, many now standing at the junction of history and myth. Dissecting one from the other is tricky, but the real stories, and the questions they force us to ask, are often more fascinating and inspiring than the tales told.
One example is Mary Fields, sometimes called “Stagecoach Mary,” believed to be the first Black woman in the country awarded a U.S. postal route, in central Montana in 1895. Though literate, Fields left no written record, and the known facts are sparse. She was born in slavery in Tennessee, around 1832. She never knew the date of her birthday and chose to celebrate it on March 15. She was likely the daughter of a field hand and a house slave, a lineage her surname may confirm.
Nothing more is known of Fields’ life until 1870, when she worked as a chambermaid on the steamboat Robert E. Lee, on the Mississippi River. She often described the excitement on board during a famous 3-day race between the Leeand the Natchez, in which the Lee set a speed record.
By the early 1870s, Fields had begun working as a household servant for Circuit Judge Edmund Dunne and his family in Akron, Ohio. How she met the judge is unknown. There, she met the judge’s sister, Sister (later Mother Superior) Amadeus Dunne of the Ursuline Sisters of Toledo. In 1875, after the judge’s wife died, Fields took his children to the convent in Toledo. She remained there, working for the nuns and had her own room at the convent.
The identity of Fields’ enslavers is not known. Articles circulating online suggest that Fields had been enslaved by a Dunn family in Tennessee or the Wagner family in West Virginia; a Wagner was an Ursuline in Toledo and a cousin of Judge Dunne’s wife. (Note the difference in spelling.) Mary herself reported to census takers that she was born in Tennessee, and there is no evidence placing her in West Virginia. The Ursulines deny the claims that Fields had been enslaved by a family connected to the sisters.
Fields may have learned to read and write at the convent. If so, she was past forty, making the accomplishment even more remarkable. According to census data, in 1870, 20% of the overall population and nearly 80% of the Black population were unable to read or write in any language.
In January 1884, Mother Amadeus and five other Ursulines traveled to Miles City, Montana, to begin opening schools for Native girls at the Jesuit missions across the territory. Late that year, Amadeus and a small group of nuns arrived at St. Peter’s Mission, in the sage brush prairie and rocky hills ten miles west of Cascade and roughly 40 miles from Great Falls. There, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, they opened schools for both Native and white girls. The next spring, in March 1885, Amadeus became deathly ill with pneumonia. Three nuns and Fields immediately left Toledo, traveling by train, steamship, and wagon, to St. Peter’s Mission nurse her. Amadeus recovered, and Mary Fields stayed.
When she arrived, Mary discovered the mission consisted of a white clapboard church, several wooden buildings and cabins, and a three-story stone seminary. The Jesuits had given the Ursulines three log buildings for their school and convent. Fields is thought to have lived in a small cabin on the mission grounds. Conditions were rough, and the nuns had no cook or help other than Fields, who grew a large garden and raised chickens. She likely also hunted, trapped, and fished. “Mary did everything we couldn’t,” the Ursulines’ annals note. That included hauling supplies by wagon. One of the earliest photos of the mission shows a group of nuns and children in front of the church, and Fields driving a one-horse, two-wheeled cart. Later, she drove a larger, sturdier wagon, hauling people and freight to and from the railroad and stage stops in Cascade. Amadeus and the nuns were ambitious, and by 1892, had turned the mission into a bustling settlement with a three-story stone school and convent, an opera house, and other buildings. Fields and her wagon were essential to the Ursulines’ work.
In July, 1894, in response to reports of trouble, the bishop in Helena, Montana’s capital city, told Amadeus that Fields needed to leave the mission, and that the nuns should have no more contact with her. The Ursulines’ annals report that:
“The bishop has ordered that [Mary] be dismissed from the Mission but the community has determined to support her wherever she goes. … [The bishop] has heard aspersions of the poor woman’s character which no one has ever yet been able to prove. She was overbearing and troublesome and yet it was our firm intention to keep her till death.”
(Quoted by Mahoney in Lady Blackrobes; brackets and ellipses original.)
Sources suggest that the last straw was an argument between Fields and a neighboring ranch foreman, possibly over a harness, while others say it was a dispute with a white hired hand who claimed she was unfairly paid more than he was. Regardless, the quote reveals the depth of the bond between Fields and the Ursulines, particularly Mother Amadeus. That bond may have been the reason Fields chose to move to Cascade, rather than to Great Falls or Helena, where there were established Black communities. In Cascade, a small farm and ranch community on the Missouri River, she ran a restaurant for a year.
In 1895, Mother Amadeus helped Fields get the mail route between Cascade and St. Peter’s, giving her steady work and subverting the bishop’s intent that the sisters have no more contact with her. Fields is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country awarded a Star Route, as mail delivery routes were called. The nickname “Stagecoach Mary” probably dates to this period in her life, when some mail was carried in closed coaches. Local historians are adamant, however, that she never actually drove a stagecoach. Fields retired from the US Postal Service in 1903. She ran a laundry service from her home and babysat local children. In 1912, a fire destroyed part of her house. Townspeople helped her rebuild.
Fields is not known to have married or have children. In December 1914, two boys found her lying in the blowing snow in a field at the edge of town. She was later taken to Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, where she died on December 5, 1914. Her funeral service was held at the new Pastime Theatre, the largest building in Cascade. Mary Fields is buried in Hillside Cemetery, Cascade, Montana.
Mary Fields came to Montana at a time when the Black population was growing steadily, though the numbers remained small. The 1870 census reported 183 Black residents in a territorial population of 20,000. By 1880, the number had nearly doubled, to 346, with 2/3 of the Black children born in Montana, indicating family settlement. By 1890, the year after statehood, the figure had grown to 1,490. The 1910 census, the last to include Fields, reported 2,000 Black residents in a statewide population of 376,000. She was likely the only Black resident in or around Cascade, although she would certainly have been aware of the 10th Cavalry, aka the Buffalo soldiers, stationed roughly 30 miles away at Fort Shaw (named for Robert Gould Shaw) from 1888 to 1891, and may have encountered them.
It may have been that isolation, and Fields’ unusual position as a Black woman on her own, that gave rise to some of the myths surrounding her. Historians note that myth often reveals more about the speakers—and their admiration or distrust—than about their subject. Legends arose during her lifetime, amplified after her death, and in many ways mirror the myth-making of the West, which emphasized masculinity, individualism, and violence, as well as the dehumanizing, racist imagery that emerged as the promise of Reconstruction ended.
As an example, it’s often said that Fields was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and wore men’s clothing. Photographs show a broad woman, perhaps taller than many women of the era. Yet photos of her with the Cascade baseball team shows she was taller than some men, shorter than others, in an era when the average man was about 5 feet, 7 inches. Mary registered to vote in local elections in 1912, as women were allowed to do, and listed her height as 5 feet, 9 inches. The photos all show her wearing a skirt, although she occasionally wears a jacket or coat that could easily have been made for a man. Given her size, her work, and the weather she faced, that was a wise choice.
Other tales claim she regularly got in fights with men, punched one who didn’t pay for his meal, and shot a man, resulting in her eviction from the mission. There are no known first-hand or contemporaneous accounts of a shooting or other physical confrontations. The Ursulines’ records disprove the claims that violence was ever established or was the reason she left the mission. Two of the roughly dozen photographs of Fields show her carrying a long gun, and she is known to have carried a pistol in her skirt pocket. Rumors of her willingness to use it may have helped keep her safe.
In 1897, cowboy artist Charles M. Russell, who lived and worked in Cascade for several years, created a pen and ink drawing called “A Quiet Day in Cascade,” portraying townspeople coming and going. Fields is shown sitting on the ground after being knocked over by a hog, her basket of eggs upended. According to historian Ellen Baumler, Fields was not amused and insisted the episode never happened. Russell claimed the drawing was a composite of events that occurred at different times. Both Russell and Fields were large-than-life figures, so who knows?
Mary Fields remains intriguing, despite the limited factual record, because her story brings together three compelling aspects of the nineteenth-century American West: the formerly enslaved who migrated West after the Civil War, the missionary era, and the woman on her own. As scholarship changes and new records are found, it’s possible that new information will surface to help future researchers fill in some of the gaps. Despite those gaps, all accounts agree that when Fields came to Montana Territory in 1885, she was propelled by her concern for Mother Amadeus. That she stayed until her death in 1914 suggests that the life she found—the life she created in Montana—offered her a sense of freedom and independence, along with a community, that she had not found elsewhere.
