Early life and career Fields was born into
slavery in
Hickman County, Tennessee, . After the
American Civil War ended in 1865, she was emancipated and found work as a chambermaid on board the
Robert E. Lee, a Mississippi River
steamboat. There, she encountered Judge
Edmund Dunne and ultimately worked in his household as a servant. After Dunne's wife died, he sent Fields and his late wife's five children to live with his sister
Mother Mary Amadeus in Toledo, Ohio where she was
Mother Superior of an
Ursuline convent. In 1884, Mother Amadeus was sent to
Montana Territory to establish a school for
Native American girls at
St. Peter's Mission, west of
Cascade. Learning that Amadeus was stricken with pneumonia, Fields hurried to Montana to nurse her back to health. Amadeus recovered, and Fields stayed at St. Peter's. Fields took on multiple roles regarded as "men's work" at the time such as maintenance, repairs, fetching supplies, laundry, gardening, hauling freight, growing vegetables, tending chickens, and repairing buildings, and eventually became the forewoman. Native Americans called Fields "White Crow", because "she acts like a white person but has black skin". Life in a convent was placid, but Fields' hearty temperament and habitual profanity made the religious community uncomfortable. In 1894, after several complaints and an incident with a disgruntled male subordinate that involved gunplay,
Postal service By 1895, at sixty years old, Fields secured a job as a Star Route Carrier which used a stagecoach to deliver mail in the unforgiving weather and rocky terrain of Montana, with the help of nearby
Ursuline nuns, who relied on Mary for help at their mission. This made her the first African-American woman to work for the U.S. Postal Service. She carried multiple firearms, most notably a .38 Smith & Wesson under her apron to protect herself and the mail from wolves, thieves and bandits, driving the route with horses and a mule named Moses. She never missed a day, and her reliability earned her the nickname "Stagecoach Mary" due to her preferred mode of transportation. If the snow was too deep for her horses, Fields delivered the mail on
snowshoes, carrying the sacks on her shoulders. She was not an employee of the
United States Post Office Department, which did not hire or employ mail carriers for star routes, but rather awarded star route contracts to persons who proposed the lowest qualified bids. These people, in accordance with the department's application process, posted bonds and sureties to substantiate their ability to finance the route. Once a contract was awarded, the contractor could then drive the route themselves, sublet the route, or hire an experienced driver. Some individuals obtained multiple star route contracts and conducted the operations as a business. == Personal life ==