Fields, Mary (1832?-1914), was an American frontierswoman. She was the first Black American woman to deliver mail. Fields’s storied life has been subject to many myths and exaggerations. 
Mary Fields was born in the early 1830’s, perhaps 1832. She may have been born into slavery in Tennessee. Before the American Civil War, Fields was enslaved by the Warner family in what is now West Virginia. In the 1860’s, Fields gained her freedom. She worked on a paddle steamer on the Mississippi River before returning to work as a domestic servant for the Warner family.
In 1870, Fields moved to Toledo, Ohio to work as a groundskeeper for the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart. In 1884, nuns from this convent established a girl’s school at a mission, St. Peter’s, south of Great Falls, Montana. The next year, Fields traveled to Montana to help with the mission, as the head nun had grown sick. Fields performed a variety of tasks at the mission, including growing vegetables, tending to chickens, doing laundry, and hunting. She lived and ate at the mission but refused to take a salary. Instead, she earned an income through transporting goods across the region.
In 1892, Fields and a white worker at the mission got into a confrontation, pointing rifles at each other. As rumors spread about Fields, church authorities forced the mission to evict her. So, in 1895, Fields moved to nearby Cascade, Montana, and attempted to start businesses of her own. After these efforts failed, Fields secured a contract from the United States Post Office Department to deliver mail between Cascade and the St. Peter’s mission. This made Fields the first Black postwoman.
Fields worked as a postwoman for eight years, traveling between Cascade and St. Peter’s to deliver mail and occasionally transport passengers. She gained the nickname Stagecoach Mary, as she drove a horse-drawn mail wagon. Fields retired from the mail route in 1903. She performed a variety of work in Cascade until her death on Dec. 5, 1914.
