She lived in Montana, in a town called Cascade. There she was a celebrated member of the community. All schools would close on her birthday, and though women were not allowed entry into saloons, she was given special permission to come in.

In 1895, at the age of 60, Mary Fields, or "Stagecoach Mary" as she was sometimes called because she never missed a day of work, became the second woman and first African American woman to work as a mail carrier in the U.S. She got the job because she was the fastest applicant to hitch six horses.

She looks like she could handle herself

A woman that helped win the west. Note she had proper trigger finger postition !

thanks for posting cool read

…… about time someone broke through that glass ceiling.

nice picture and i like that gun

Looks like a 1873 Winchester musket, 44-40

My good buddy is from Cascade ,I will see if he heard of Mary ! Great story

Also known as: Stagecoach Mary
Born: 1832?, Hickman county, Tennessee, U.S.
Died: December 5, 1914, Cascade county, Montana
Fields was born into slavery. Little is known of her early life or what she did in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War and her emancipation. In the late 1870s, she became a housekeeper at the Ursuline Convent in Toledo, Ohio, where she had a close relationship with Mother Amadeus. Various accounts posit that Mother Amadeus was a member of a family that owned Fields when she was a child and that this early acquaintanceship accounted both for their close relationship and for Fields’s presence at the convent. It is known that Fields was about 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall and weighed about 200 pounds (91 kg) and was capable of doing what was then regarded as men’s work as well as more-standard housekeeping chores. When Mother Amadeus was sent to St. Peter’s Mission outside Cascade, Montana, Fields initially remained in Toledo, but about 1885 Mother Amadeus sent for her (most accounts say that Mother Amadeus was near death with pneumonia and asked for Mary to take care of her), and Fields relocated to Montana.

Fields, Mary