The bishop acted impulsively. Instead of holding a hearing, he fired me without learning any of the facts and circumstances.
Nevertheless, I insisted on a hearing, on the ability to defend myself, and save my job. I pled with the bishop to call witnesses. I assured him not a single eye-witness would come forward to substantiate the claim that I had acted inappropriately. Sure, the incident should not have happened on Mission grounds. I would concede that point. However, I would never concede the point that I did not have the right to defend myself.
More to the point, I would never concede the point that I was less than Igor, or anyone else, simply because Igor was a white man. Instead, I would appeal to reason. If witnesses were called at a hearing, I argued, the facts would speak for themselves. They wouldn’t support the conclusion that I was wrong. If it came down to a case of my word against Igor’s, I was sure I would be able to shake Igor’s story through the wonders of cross examination, if indeed he lied about me being the aggressor.
The bishop didn’t bother with reason. He already had his mind made up about me, the liquor, the cursing, the fighting, the cigar smoking, the men’s clothing, and now this, the threat of gunplay on Mission grounds. I was finished.
Sister Amadeus, the Mother Superior of the Mission, was powerless to reverse his decision. She was outranked by the bishop. My days at the Mission had come to an abrupt, and unceremonious, end.
Chapter Fifteen
Cascade, Montana, May 1913
The thought of a termination—my own—cut into the daydream. It brought me back to the here and now. That’s when I saw the reporter’s face again. He had listened to the whole story. There were tears in his eyes. He didn’t offer words of encouragement. He didn’t offer solace. He didn’t talk to me of the endless justice of an evolving nation. He didn’t talk at all. He just sat there, stunned.
I heard the telegraph spitting out news across the cable from all around the globe. The nation was catching up to the idea of justice, finally. Mr. Lincoln had done his part. There was a tomb in Springfield, Illinois that proved the point.
I wasn’t wearing men’s clothing. I was wearing trousers under a full-length grey dress with white lace collar. The collar looked similar to the crocheted lace doilies that were popular in fine households. I dreamed of seeing a fine household again, like the Dunne household I left behind in Toledo.
I was nervous. I didn’t know what to say or even what to do with my hands. The reporter had stopped asking questions. He was staring off toward the horizon, and the horizon wasn’t even in view from the news room. I felt worse for the reporter than I did for myself.
I could control my feelings. I was born a slave. I knew injustice firsthand. However, I never would have guessed that the triumph over injustice that I enjoyed in Cascade would be cut short by bad luck and a poor decision by the Catholic Church.
I looked good in grey, and I wore the lace collar proudly. White is the color of the clouds. I realized the getup didn’t make me look beautiful, but at least I wasn’t wearing men’s clothing and a bowler on top of a wool hat. Furthermore, I didn’t bother bringing a Winchester to the interview. That was quite an improvement. I still packed the .38, but I was probably getting a little soft in my old age.
I wondered how many souls would attend the ceremony to hang my portrait in Cascade. The Montana Express settled the wilderness of Montana all the way to the Pacific, populating Great Falls and Butte along the way. That railroad had helped transform this part of the world into a mighty empire. I wondered if the railroad would bring a crowd to witness the portrait hanging today, my final hoorah. I hoped our history would not be lost. Instead, I hoped the memory of what we accomplished here would last forever.
That’s why I spoke to the reporter, and that’s why I hoped the portrait hanging would draw a crowd. I wanted everyone to see the portrait of “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, pioneer.
I wanted everyone to know that at the end of the day I had succeeded in capturing the respect of the folks of Cascade.
The mayor hadn’t managed to arrive yet. He was many hours behind schedule. I knew the protocol of what happened when folks finally decided to honor you. There was always lateness and complications and disorganization—chaos, really. I had seen it happen so often to others that I knew it by heart. I had played it over and over in my mind across days and weeks leading up to the ceremony.
But I remained calm and wanted to talk to the reporter about the old days, and we started talking again. He asked me what happened after the bishop fired me. That got things going.
I told him that Sister Amadeus, the Mother Superior of the Mission, a woman intensely faithful to the teachings of the Risen Christ, recognized the bishop was wrong. She made it her business to right the wrong in a clever way.
A couple of reporters joined in, surrounding me to hang on my every word. They asked for my autograph. I guessed my autograph was worth something. So, I obliged. I signed a few newspapers.
One of the reporters passed me a flask of whiskey. That got things going in earnest from that point on, joking and walking and sitting down and standing back up again and walking around. The reporters laughed each time I threw up the flask and took a belt. You could almost forget I was even capable of drawing a .38 in a schoolhouse at that moment.
I told the reporter about Sister Amadeus’s plan. She didn’t have the power to overrule a bishop. That was against Church protocol. However, she had the wherewithal to work around Church policy.
She didn’t have the authority to pay my salary or restore me to my rightful job as foreman, but she could give me money to buy a restaurant. If I opened a restaurant, I could feed the folks of Cascade and make money doing it. This was a perfect plan. With Sister Amadeus’s artful thought process, I was on to the next stage of my life, the stage when I ventured out on my own as a business woman.
Chapter Sixteen
Montana Territory, January 1893
If Sister Amadeus’s plan to slip me the money to start a restaurant was perfect in theory, it quickly proved to be a disaster in practice. The reason was simple. While I might have been good with a .38, I was terrible at business.
I didn’t have the heart to turn down folks who were hungry, even if they were broke. It was Cascade. It was Montana. It was before the railroad succeeded in turning many of the towns in the Pacific Northwest into boom towns. It seemed like nearly every ranch hand, copper miner, farmer, and drunken cowboy who passed the restaurant was hungry and broke. This meant I was destined to be hungry and broke, too.
The restaurant, like Cascade itself, admittedly wasn’t much to look at. It wasn’t fancy. It was an unpainted clapboard house with a tin roof and a narrow boardwalk in front that kept folks from walking through the mud when it rained. No hand painted sign. The rain and harsh winters had their way with the clapboards long before I bought the place. The good thing about the restaurant is it was close to the saloon in town, and the bad thing about the restaurant is it was close to the saloon in town.
In the saloon, I swiftly acquired the reputation as a cook who couldn’t refuse a customer, even when the customer had no money. I cooked. I stocked the restaurant with plenty of food and supplies. I was rapidly running out of both. This sent me to the saloon where I was allowed to drink whiskey for free. This only made matters worse. A saloon, whiskey, and a business failure weren’t part of a formula for success.
“Mary, why in the devil don’t you make your customers pay before you serve them?” the bartender at the local saloon asked, looking up from his work. He had just set me up with a shot of whiskey on the house. The saloon was empty. The ranch hands still hadn’t come in from the prairie.
“Why in the devil don’t you mind your own business?”
“Mary, I am not trying to tell you what to do. I am just trying to look out for you.”
“I know the advice comes from a good place, but I have my ways.”
“You could take your restaurant to Helena or Great Fall
s or Butte and make a fortune, but you have it in Cascade. There ain’t no fortune to be had here in little Cascade. We are poor folk in the middle of nowhere out here.”
“Nobody tells me what to do. Nobody tells me where to go. These is my folks out here, and if they are hungry, and I got the food to feed them, they are going to get fed.”
“That’s fine, Mary. You have a big heart. You’ve proven that. Everybody loves you for that…”
“Everybody, that is, except the bishop of the Montana diocese,” I said.
“Okay, you got a point there, but do you see there is a problem with what you’re saying?”
“What’s the problem?”
“It is called arithmetic. If you spend more than you earn, you eventually go broke.”
Unlike the Montana Territory as a whole, I didn’t evolve any after the conversation with the bartender. I couldn’t. Cascade had accepted me, a former slave, as a full citizen exactly as I was.
I was invited to drink whiskey in her saloons, babysit her children, and feed her hungry. She forgave me when I got into gunfights. If I argued with a paying customer in the saloon, she didn’t take offense. If she got word that I had behaved poorly or cursed out a Catholic nun, she took it in stride. She didn’t condemn me. She never criticized me for wearing men’s clothing or scandalized my name for not taking a man’s hand in marriage. If I knocked out a ranch hand or a copper miner along the way, she didn’t think anything of it. That’s why, if I eventually went broke feeding her hungry ranch hands, farmers, copper miners, and cowboys, I would just have to accept that outcome as my destiny.
I didn’t give in to failure. Sure, I kept feeding everyone who asked for help. I gave the local children candy whenever they came calling, and they came calling often. I did laundry and babysat and did practically any odd job I could get to save the restaurant. It didn’t work. The restaurant closed. I was broke.
I was already sixty years old at the time, and broke. I had nowhere to turn, and the Montana Territory is brutally cold in winter, and oppressively hot in summer, especially when you have nowhere to turn.
I couldn’t return to the Mission. The bishop had made sure of that. I really didn’t have anywhere to turn.
Some folks acquire bad luck at birth. I was one of them. I was no stranger to bad luck or hard times. I had suffered more than my share of both back on the plantation in Tennessee.
It wasn’t only the audacity to say and do whatever I pleased in Cascade that made me a pioneer of the Old West. It wasn’t only the insistence that folks respect my rights. It was also the courage to survive bad luck, to persevere the adversity of slavery, poverty, challenging terrain, cruel summers and harsh winters, and the sting of bigotry, to overcome the growing pains of the Pacific Northwest, even as black codes sponsored by Copperheads and others terrorized colored folks. Looking back, given what I had seen in life, the ignominy of a failed business scarcely mattered.
Still, I had no way out of my troubles, and the bitter cold of winter in Montana was unforgiving. If I figured out how to avoid freezing to death, I’d have a fairly good chance to see spring, for death frequently visited Montana. Sure, the locals didn’t turn their backs on me in my time of need.
They offered me food, lodging at the local hotel, and free whiskey at the saloon. However, I needed much more. Charity aside, something historic was on the way. I needed a miracle. Soon, I would get one.
Chapter Seventeen
The miracle came in the form of a wanted poster. The posters were tacked up everywhere. The wind that blows through the Cascades, the same wind that has the reputation for disrespecting the cluster of weather-beaten clapboard buildings along the town’s dusky main street, was the wind that sent the posters flapping.
The wanted posters were actually United States Postal Service announcements. Those announcements gave all comers the opportunity to bid on a contract to deliver mail. The route covered by the contract was known as the Star Route, a stage run from Cascade to railroad stations located in Helena, Great Falls, Billings, Butte, and Miles City. Those stations were where the mail drops were located. The successful bidder would be asked to meet the mail train, pick up the mail, secure the bundles on a stagecoach, and safely return the bundles to Cascade, and to do so faithfully, on time, and in the regular course of business.
The proposition sounded a lot better on paper than it was in reality. In reality, the work proposed was nearly impossible to perform, to perform on time, or at all. The reason is the route was across the unbroken wilds of Montana, and the unbroken wilds of Montana were no ordinary wilds.
The wilds of Montana included dangerous, nearly impassable terrain across rocky breaks and crevices, razor-sharp mountain ridges and passes, and the like. If this was not enough, the stagecoach would face the additional challenge of ambitious, and armed, bandits, hungry winter wolves, tribal warriors looking to exact revenge against interlopers, sub-zero temperatures, blizzards, and drifting snow. Nevertheless, young men, and only young men, lined up to apply for the job. For the men, the Star Route represented steady pay and a way out of their troubles. For the folks of Cascade, the Star Route represented a tenuous link to the civilized world. I didn’t see any connection whatsoever between me and that link.
First, it was 1895. There had only been one woman in history who had won a contract to deliver mail on a stagecoach run, and she wasn’t a colored woman. Second, I was over sixty years old at the time. The competitors for the job would be young men half my age. Third, the run was onerous. It was a job for two men, not a single colored woman.
The reason was the silhouettes of two figures atop the stagecoach, including a driver, who was also called a Charlie, brother whip, or simply a whip, and a shotgun messenger, who was called a problem, served as a deterrent to stagecoach robbers. The shotgun messenger sat alongside the driver with a shotgun in plain view to announce bad intentions to whoever dared to interfere with the run. In this respect, the shotgun messenger was the key ingredient.
Conversely, the silhouette of only one figure, even if the figure was a colored woman with a reputation for being tougher than any two men, wasn’t likely to have quite the same effect.
Fourth, I didn’t even own a stagecoach, so how on earth was I going to run a stagecoach to deliver mail or do anything else, really? Finally, I didn’t own a team of six horses. The only beast I owned on four legs was a mule named Moses, and Moses wasn’t likely to pull even one wheel of a stagecoach, no less the entire load. This logic seemed impeccable. Sister Amadeus thought otherwise.
Sister Amadeus saw the Star Route as a way out of my troubles. She believed in miracles. Why else would she think to go the Godforsaken corners of the territories to spread the Gospel? In this spirit, she believed I could become the first colored woman in history to own a United States Postal Service contract to deliver mail on a stage run. Sister Amadeus was ambitious, but she wasn’t unwise. She possessed direct evidence that I was up to the task of running an overland stagecoach. She had seen me in action. She had seen me perform miracles. She had faith.
However, in Montana, and probably everywhere else, there is more to a miracle than faith. In this case, a miracle would also require a team of six horses and a stagecoach. I had neither. You could have all the faith in the world, and you weren’t likely to run a stagecoach without the stagecoach, now were you? Sister Amadeus had the answer to this riddle as well, and the answer didn’t involve prayer.
Unknown to the Catholic Church, Sister Amadeus had the facility to loan me six horses to form a team and the stagecoach, which would leave only one remaining obstacle. I would have to earn the contract by winning a contest.
The United States Postal Service organized a competition to see which bidder could hitch a team of six horses the fastest. The fastest man, or woman, would win the contract. This seemed fair.
The stage was set. The nuns, ranchers, farm hands, bartenders, and literally everyone around town, except the bishop, crowded along the street to watch
the competition. The leather straps, brass chains and rings, yokes, lines, and the rest of the equipment forming the harnesses were tangled and piled in the dust. The horses were waiting. The other competitors, ranch hands, farmers, livery hands, and copper miners, all stood at the ready. The first to hitch a team to a stagecoach would win the contract.
The postal inspector judging the contest held a red handkerchief aloft. We all waited for the signal. The second the red handkerchief dropped to the ground, the race was on. All eyes were on that handkerchief.
Chapter Eighteen
The red handkerchief fell. The race was on!
A roar went up in the crowd of onlookers that matched the intensity of a theatre full of spectators witnessing boxers trade punches at the center of the ring in the last round of a prize fight. There was cursing, whistling, and taunting. The spectators didn’t seem to mind that the Ursuline nuns, the women of God, were present to hear the noise. The nuns didn’t seem to mind, either.
The nuns screamed lustily. They jumped and swung their fists through the air. The wind caught the hem of their garments and filled their black habits, like sails. They didn’t care. They wanted me to win.
“Are you Ursulines? Yes, you are! Are you Ursulines? Yes, you are!” the nuns chanted, waving their fists.
The rest of the spectators chanted, too. The crowd screamed, pleaded with the competitors, urged the competitors they backed to go faster, as if urging could help a single contestant solve the riddle of the harnesses.
I had hitched many teams. I knew how to solve the riddle. I knew the pleas from the audience would not affect the outcome. I didn’t need a miracle. I knew I was faster than any of the men, and I was faster by a lot.
Stagecoach Justice Page 9