Stagecoach To Hell
Peter's Mission in Cascade, where she made nine bucks a week to do hard-as-fuck menial labor shit like chopping wood, digging holes, and building a schoolhouse and a chapel with little more than her bare hands, a pocket full of nails, and a carpenter's level. When she wasn't tending the chickens, maintaining the convent's garden, or swearing and headbutting people unconscious for even the slightest offenses one nun famously remarked, "May God help anyone who walks on the lawn after Mary has cut it" , the 52 year-old badass made weekly mile supply runs out to Helena to pick up food and medical gear for the convent.
Visit Lovely Cascade, Montana! On more than one occasion thick snow drifts blocked off Mary's route, piling up so high the horses couldn't move through it, and since there was no shelter anywhere for miles she would survive the night not by taking shelter, but by hopping out of the cart and pacing back and forth on foot next to the stagecoach in an effort to keep warm. One of the more famous tales of Stagecoach Mary's badassitude came one evening when was charging through the countryside on one of her runs to deliver food and medicine to underprivileged nuns when suddenly out of nowhere a pack of psychotic fucking wolves charged in and attacked her horses, freaking them out, ripping them up, and flipping the entire cart on its side.
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Mary jumped out, used the overturned cart as cover to keep her from being mauled from the back when she wasn't looking, and then, with only a small lamp as her light source, she fought off several attacks from this pack of ferocious beasts throughout the night, first by blasting them with a shotgun at close range, and then switching to her revolver when she ran out of buckshot. These are the sort of stagecoach folk Mary rolled with.
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When Stagecoach Mary wasn't cracking rabid wolves in the fucking face with the stock of her ten-gauge or single-handedly building schoolhouses for poor Native American girls, you could find her in the saloons of Cascade drinking men under the table like the chick from Raiders of the Lost Ark and chomping on homemade cigars so potent that hardly any gunslinger in town had the stomach to handle them.
You'd think maybe some folks would have tried to fuck with her, considering that she was, you know, a black woman in a society that at the time wasn't particularly well-known for its attitudes towards racial and gender equality, but Stagecoach Mary wasn't the sort of badass chick that was going to let people tell her what the fuck she was going to do or how she was going to do it. At a time when non-prostitute women weren't allowed to drink at saloons, she received special permission from the Mayor to be served at any bar in the city any time she wanted, for life.
Any time some asshole messed with her, she fucked him up. Like, one time a guy called her a rude name outside a saloon, so she looked at him for a second, said nothing, then grabbed a big fucking rock out of the street and clubbed him in the skull with it repeatedly until other cowboys finally restrained her. This chick gained such a reputation for being the shit out of uppity gunslingers that didn't show her the proper respect that the Great Falls Examiner newspaper once cited this hard-drinking, quick-tempered asskicker as having "broken more noses than any other person in Montana," and nobody ever debated the claim.
Well, as you might imagine, you can only be a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Convent employee for so long before your endless profanity-laced diatribes start to rub the saintly-types the wrong way, but for Mary, it wasn't her mouth but her unquenchable thirst for vengeance that eventually got her in trouble. Apparently one day the convent handyman got all butt-hurt that Mary made more money than him, so he went around town passive-aggressively bitching and whining and sobbing hysterically to anyone who would listen about how a black woman shouldn't make more money than him because oh boo hoo woe is me I'm so fucking emo it's a tragedy and I'm totally posting about it on MySpace when I get home.
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Naturally, this got her fired. But it was totally worth it.
Seriously, fuck that guy. And fuck the Bishop for firing her, even though discharging a firearm with malicious intent on the grounds of a Roman Catholic convent is probably about as worthy a cause for dismissal as you can probably ever hope for. Which is also appropriate. Now out of work, Mary opened two restaurants in Cascade, but they both failed because she gave out too many free meals to needy people and also because she kind of sucked at cooking.
So in , she applied for a job with the United States Postal Service delivering mail throughout the Montana Territory. For her job interview, she and a dozen hardened Old West cowboys half her age were asked to hitch a team of six horses to a stagecoach as quickly as possible.
Mary Fields
The year old Mary Fields blew them all away, hitching the horses and then having time left over to run to the saloon, grab a shot, come back, and smoke a cigar while laughing at the other cowpokes. Now, being a postal employee might not trigger images of ultimate gunslinging badassitude, but running a postal route in s Montana was basically the Old West version of driving a mail truck through Boyz in da Hood -era Los Angeles on check day.
Braving blizzards, heat waves, driving rain and screaming winds, Mary never missed a day of work, never failed to deliver a single letter, and was never late once. One schoolgirl wrote an essay saying, "She drinks whiskey, and she swears, and she is a republican, which makes her a low, foul creature. In , after several complaints and an incident with a disgruntled male subordinate that involved gunplay, [2] the bishop ordered her to leave the convent. Mother Amadeus helped her open a restaurant in nearby Cascade.
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Fields would serve food to anyone, whether they could pay or not, and the restaurant went broke in about 10 months. In , although approximately 60 years old, Fields was hired as a mail carrier because she was the fastest applicant to hitch a team of six horses. She drove the route with horses and a mule named Moses. She never missed a day, and her reliability earned her the nickname "Stagecoach".
She was a respected public figure in Cascade, and the town closed its schools to celebrate her birthday each year. In , at age 71, Fields retired from star route mail carrier service. She continued to babysit many Cascade children and owned and operated a laundry service from her home.
Wells Fargo's Stagecoach to Hell | Harper's Magazine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Hickman County, Tennessee , U. Great Falls, Montana , U. Remarkable Montana Women 2nd ed. University of Oklahoma Press. Cascade Montana Community Website. Archived from the original on July 29, Retrieved January 25,