I suppose being six feet tall, packing a .38, a shotgun, and a jug of whiskey, and sporting a bad temper didn’t hurt matters any. Put it all together, I would say I was more than enough woman to earn my reputation as the terror of the countryside. However, I would say my absolute best quality, the quality that stood above all others, was my speed and accuracy with the .38 I packed beneath my apron. In Montana, without the .38 and the skill to use it, all of the other qualities meant absolutely nothing.
The locals boasted that I was a deadly shot anywhere inside of fifty paces, and that I could both snap the hind leg off a fly that lit upon a horse’s ear with the business end of a whip and shoot the fly in the eye with a pistol at the same time. Rumors like that about me weren’t exactly true. It was far worse.
The folks of Cascade hurt me into finding ways to make them accept me, and they ended up doing just that, accepting me. There was still something that wasn’t quite right across the rest of the country. There was something missing. There was something about respecting the rights of others that hadn’t quite evolved. I never fully grasped why it was taking so long for folks to respect what Mr. Lincoln started. They were hanging on to the past.
I never forgot slavery. How could I? But I let the bitterness go before I arrived in Montana. I wasn’t sure why everyone else couldn’t do the same, and if they couldn’t let go, I also wondered why they weren’t made to let go. It was simple. The men around Cascade figured out it wasn’t a good idea to talk to me wrong whether they had let go of the idea or not. I’d take the cigar out of mouth, size them up, curse them out, and invite them to trade punches. And if punching didn’t work, the .38 would do the trick. It was Montana. It was the 1800s. It was wild.
I heard the mayor was expecting a huge crowd—hundreds of people—to watch the ceremony to hang my portrait, like the ceremony was a prize fight, a presidential debate, a lynching, or a horse race. I reckoned they were coming from everywhere to watch the end of my story, the story of the notorious “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, pioneer.
The sound of the telegraph printing out the news over the wire in the Cascade Courier’s newsroom cut through my daydream. I reckoned the reporter would be back soon. Then, I spotted the reporter. He ran hurriedly down the hallway wearing a black coat with wide lapels, a fine coat similar to the one Captain Cannon wore aboard the Robert E. Lee. The reporter seemed like he was under pressure to meet a deadline.
He had a chubby face, soft, clever hands, and clipped fingernails. The color beneath his fingernails was a fading pink, which was the same color as his face. His silver-rimmed spectacles left dents at the tops of his cheeks. The lenses were thick, and they magnified his eyes to sheer enormity.
He looked nervous, out of breath, as though he himself owned a life story that one day would be celebrated, and those huge eyes were unforgettable. His spectacles rose and fell on his nose with the tumult of his breathing. I was mesmerized by the way the lenses caught and reflected the light, almost like I could escape it all if only I had the will to stare at the shiny lenses long enough.
At first, he whispered. “Do you feel you were treated fairly here in Cascade back in the 1880s?” His chest was still heaving.
“No,” I replied.
I wondered why he was still so nervous, so out of breath. If talking to an 81-year-old colored woman made him this nervous, he should have tried his luck at standing in my place as a slave in Hickman County, Tennessee, I thought.
“No?” the reporter hissed.
“How would you feel if you were once a slave and was asked a question like that? How would you feel if you were excluded from a saloon, a stagecoach, or anything else in your lifetime?”
“Not good, I suppose,” he conceded. “Is there anything else you’d like to add about it?”
“Yes,” I said. I spat at the floor.
“And what might that be?”
“I’d like to add a cigar and a shot of whiskey if you got any handy. That is my way of reminiscing. Hold the talk. Pour the whiskey.”
The reporter laughed.
“By the way, I wasn’t joking.”
“Seriously, I heard even now, you are not welcome everywhere in town—like the Ladies Aid, the auxiliaries, the societies, and the guilds.”
“Technically not true. You see, I never bothered to apply for membership, so you can’t say I was excluded. But the reason I didn’t apply is because I knew, like everybody knows, colored people are not welcome, so we need not apply. It is still a white town. For example, once they got to know you, they might do anything for you on the street, let you go to the saloon, let you deliver the mail and run supplies, babysit their children for $1.50 a day, even hang your picture up somewhere, but they weren’t likely to invite you to stay in their homes or even sit down at their table to eat a meal. Do you get the picture?”
“I see. You never got married or had children either, did you?”
“I hope you’re not going to hold that one against me, are you?” I laughed.
“No, I’m just making a record.”
“I was the only colored woman in Cascade, and I was bigger and uglier than any man here, so who was I going to marry? In the beginning, I got called a wild beast because I drank whiskey, I swore, and I was a Republican—the political party of Mr. Lincoln. Well, I must have been a wild beast then, because I pled guilty to being all three.”
“I heard you got fired by Bishop Brondel for dueling with the janitor out at the Mission, cursing, smoking cigars, fighting men, hanging out in the saloon, drinking whiskey? Is any of that true?”
“Where ever did you hear such a thing? Lies… No, actually, most of it is true, but I got fired alright, but not for the reasons you mentioned. Truth is, I shouldn’t have been fired at all, and Sister Amadeus didn’t want me to go. How was it fair for the bishop to fire me without a hearing? He didn’t witness the incident. It was all hearsay. He didn’t know what happened.
“I was denied my day in court. I told the bishop I wanted a hearing. He wouldn’t give me one. I wanted him to see if there were any witnesses to testify that they saw me duel the janitor, because it didn’t happen. That white man was jealous that a woman was getting more pay than he was. And I was getting more pay than he was because I was doing more work than he was, okay? Fair is fair.
“And I never had a duel. It never came to that. Sure, I drew my pistol. That’s what you did in Montana in the 1890s. If you didn’t draw, you wouldn’t necessarily live to regret it. He was ready to draw on me. I was just quicker and drew first is all.
“Now, the rest of it was true, the part about the fighting, cussing, drinking, and carrying on, but that wasn’t nothing new. It hadn’t been a reason to fire me for the eight years I was there. I know for a fact the priests and bishops were up to far worse than fighting, cussing, drinking, and carrying on.” I ended the point with a wink of my right eye.
I didn’t plan to let the conversation end there, not that you’d necessarily consider the exchange much of a conversation. In my book, there was plenty more to explain than what the mayor and newspaper reporter talked about.
The mayor was a gracious man. He complimented me as one of only a handful of women in Montana who were willing to admit to anything. Unlike most of the local citizens—people who blame slippery politicians, incompetent lawyers, a bad mother, an unfaithful wife, an unfair world, anybody and everybody for their bigotry, everybody, of course, except themselves—I had already owned up to what I had done, all of it. Contrary to what was printed in the newspapers, most of the myths about me were untrue.
The newspapers fed everyone’s imagination with news of the colored woman bigger than a man who dressed like a man, cursed like a man, drank whiskey like a man, and looked like a man, claiming this and that about me and the territories and the West. If what they were saying about me was so damned important to the history of the West, you would have thought the reporters could have at least bothered to get the facts right, and the same for the mayor. Did
they get the facts straight? Not a prayer.
Sure, everyone agreed I was among the West’s legends, a pioneer, a colored woman larger than life who insisted on respect, but where do we go from there? Mysteriously, nobody bothered to ask. So, I was ready to tell the reporter everything, to confess, to set the record straight.
I continued thinking back on my life, not merely to remember what happened, but to understand, really understand, how it all happened and why. I wasn’t certain how long it would take to figure out the exact point in life when my soul drove me to challenge what society expected of a colored woman, when I began to match crass behavior with crass behavior. Maybe I remembered some of it wrong, but I wanted to share enough of the story with reporter so he could help me figure it out. It would be the first time my story got told right. I started off by mentioning how I helped Sister Amadeus at the Mission, including curing her of pneumonia.
Chapter Five
Montana Territory, November 1885
The Mission wasn’t in Cascade. It was a ten-minute ride north of Cascade by two horse carriage. It took most men longer to hitch the team than it took for me to hitch the team and complete the entire trip.
I wouldn’t call the land out there anything but wild. I could see the Cascade Mountains looming against the horizon in all directions, and during daylight hours, the sky seemed to sit down on the land and say howdy. The prairie was covered by brush, mangled trees, rocks, sand, and no sign of human habitation. The condition of the Mission was just as wild. It really wasn’t a Mission at all.
There was no chapel or dormitories for the Blackfoot girls to gain a white woman’s version of an education. Speaking bluntly, this is the reason the bishop felt it was so important for Sister Amadeus to blaze the trail to Montana. If the Blackfoot girls were given a white woman’s education, they, at least in theory, would become mothers who would enforce the white man’s concept of civilization on their children. This was part of Washington’s grand design to make the Blackfeet less hostile to the Western expansion. However, it was clear that if the Blackfoot girls were going to receive a white woman’s education, they would have to receive it at a tiny cluster of Godforsaken cabins. There was no traditional Mission here to speak of. Apparently, the resolve to build such a Mission, at least temporarily, exceeded the Ursuline Convent’s capacity for missionary zeal.
The flaw in the theory that the Blackfeet could be tamed by indoctrination was the tiny group of cabins where the indoctrination was supposedly to have taken place. Three cabins with mud roofs were no match for forty below zero winter wind, blizzards, and drifting snow. The chapel, stone schoolhouse, and dormitories would not be built until much later.
Sister Amadeus, an asthmatic, was a petite woman. The combination of the bitter cold, the flimsy cabins, and her fragile constitution proved disastrous. She was deathly ill with pneumonia.
When I threw open her cabin door, she did not possess the strength to rise from her cot to greet me. She was near death.
The patchwork quilt over her tiny body resembled a funeral shroud. The flickering light in the gas lanterns made faint shadows dance against the logs on the one room cabin’s walls. The rapidly dying fire in the field stone fireplace seemed literally to gasp for air. There were iron pots and pans, a table surrounded by several chairs with straw seats on a dirt floor.
The affairs of cooking, reading, writing, and sleeping that were once conducted in this room had been abandoned long ago. Sister Amadeus appeared only to be waiting for the inevitability of death. The normally rosy color of her face was gone. It was replaced by an ashen mask nearly as white as snow. The gold-edged pages of an open oversized Bible were on display over the fireplace.
The wind screamed outside, unimpressed by the coming of the darkness that is death. The cabin walls offered little resistance. The wind sounded nearly as loud inside the cabin as it sounded outside. It is not an overstatement to say death was waiting somewhere in that room, had blown straight into the place like the wind.
The nearest doctor was over sixty miles away in Helena. Instead of a doctor, an elderly nun wearing a black habit sat on a straw seat at Sister Amadeus’s bedside. The nun attended to Sister Amadeus’s body merely by working rosary beads. There was no medicine.
All that was left was Sister Amadeus’s faith in the Risen Savior. I respected that same faith, the whiskey, the .38, the cursing, the brawling, and the rest of it aside. However, unlike the elderly nun at her bedside, I hadn’t given up on the idea of boiling water and steam.
The elderly nun staked Sister Amadeus’s health to the promise of faith and the power of prayer. Sister Amadeus, the picture of piety, seemed at peace with these methods, waiting. I wasn’t.
“What in the living hell are you penguins doing?” I barked, slamming the door.
Startled by the intrusion, the nun at bedside cowered and shook. She stopped working the rosary beads.
“Who is this colored man?” the nun asked Sister Amadeus, defensively.
“Mary!” Sister Amadeus said, wheezing, coughing, gasping. Not bothering to correct the elderly nun’s mistake, Sister Amadeus tried to sit upright, but failed.
This robbed her of what little air she had left in her lungs. She began to cough uncontrollably. She leaned over the edge of the bed. She spat at the floor.
The nun waited for an explanation.
“Mary?” asked the elderly nun, curiously.
“Yes, it is my Mary,” Sister Amadeus said, coughing and gasping. “She has come all the way from Ohio to save me. I do need saving, don’t I?”
“Damn right you do. Now you, sister, step aside. Captain Death has visited this cabin, and I am here to send him back from whence he came.”
I took the jar of whiskey I had hidden under my coat, unscrewed the lid, and took a belt of whiskey right there in front of the nuns. Then, I reached under my dress, produced the .38, and dropped it on the table. It wasn’t fully loaded, but it got the nun’s attention. I dropped a handful of bullets, too.
The nun stared at the spectacle in disbelief, but didn’t dare speak. After I pulled off my coat, I realized how cold it was in the room.
“Damn, girls. It’s too cold in here.”
“We don’t have much firewood left. We are saving it, nursing the fire,” the elderly nun explained.
“What the hell are you saving the wood for? A funeral? Forget that! Bad idea. You go over to that fire and use as much wood as you have to get the fire roaring hotter than the blazing fires of Hell, understand?”
The nun didn’t move.
“Now, dammit!” I barked.
The nun followed the command.
“Sister is dying,” I whispered.
I slung my coat over the patchwork quilt on the bed, grabbed an axe and shotgun, and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” asked the elderly nun, as she tossed wood on the gasping fire.
“I’m going to get firewood, where the hell do you think?”
“With no coat? You’ll freeze to death. Besides, Father Damiani and Mother Stanislaus were already here days ago with the military doctor from Ft. Shaw. The doctor already treated Mother Amadeus. We have our instructions.”
“I’m here to tell you those instructions are dead wrong. Keep that fire blazing. Make her sweat. I’ll be back.”
“Do you know how to treat pneumonia without a doctor?” the elderly nun asked.
“Does anyone?” I turned up the jar of whiskey, let the liquid burn as it reached my belly, and then I ventured to offer an explanation. “Do the doctors know how to treat pneumonia? I don’t think so. Does anyone? The mortality rate for pneumonia is over sixty percent. If I have a sixty percent chance of dying by going to get a doc, well, hell, I can do that bad all by myself. Now, listen up, sister. I survived slavery in Tennessee, not because I was dumb or weak or stupid or anything of the sort, and not because I got put down by pneumonia, croup, dysentery, or alcohol. How many doctor’s visits do you think you get on a slave plantati
on? Hmmm? You learn how to fight dysentery, croup, alcoholism, and pneumonia on your own. If you don’t learn how to cheat death on your own, just who do you think will come along to help you? I’ll be back.” There was no answer.
I forced open the cabin door and met the howling wind and blinding snow.
I wasn’t really sure I’d be back. However, I was sure that if I didn’t make it back, I would die trying. The nun’s words that I’d freeze to death were stuck in my mind.
I was new to these parts. I might not know where to find firewood in the middle of the sunshine on the finest summer day. The blinding snows of Montana at night would make it next to impossible. I didn’t have a choice. Sister Amadeus was dying.
I was knee-deep in snow drifts. I couldn’t see, and I wasn’t wearing snow shoes. These weren’t good odds. Nevertheless, I kept going.
I tried to keep my sense of direction. If I got a good distance from the cabin, I would need to figure out how to get back, an unlikely proposition when you were caught in a blizzard. Those were the challenges—firewood, and the way back to the cabin. I soon would learn of a third challenge, a pack of wolves.
The wolves had taken an interest in my situation. I heard the yelping in the darkness. The yelping was closing in on me fast. I could hear it through the noise of the wind.
“Hey! Get!” I yelled at the darkness.
I kept looking into the darkness, until I could see the pack for the first time. It was on the move. The wolves must have smelled something on me, maybe it was the liquor or the scent of pork from the cabin.
The wolves leered, tongues lolling. They barked excitedly, jumping, turning themselves inside and out, but steadily approaching. When they arrived, the wolves eagerly stepped over each other, waiting to attack.
“I said, get! Get! Get going!”
There must have been a lead dog calling the shots, because the pack did not charge. It waited, tactically. The wolves didn’t take a single, threatening step in my direction, not yet anyway.
The wolves merely watched, waited. The dogs cocked their heads as if to puzzle over the situation. They seemed to read the situation, watching, waiting to attack. They knew death was near. One wolf barked.
Stagecoach Justice Page 4