Deliverance Mary Fields ― First African American Woman Star Route Mail Carrier in the United States; a Montana History

1885 - 1914. Mary Fields, a fifty-three-year old second-generation slave, emancipated and residing in Toledo, Ohio, receives news of her friend’s impending death. Remedies packed in her satchel, Mary rushes to board the Northern Pacific. Days later, she arrives in the Montana wilderness and finds Mother Mary Amadeus lying on frozen earth in a broken-down cabin. Certain that the cloister of frostbit Ursuline nuns and their students, Indian girls rescued from nearby reservations, will not survive without assistance, Mary decides to stay.She builds a hennery, repairs living quarters, cares for stock, and treks into the mountains to provide food. Brushes with death do not deter her. Mary drives a horse and wagon through perilous terrain and blizzards and sub zero blizzards to improve the lives of missionaries, homesteaders and Indians and, in the process, her own.After weathering wolf attacks, wagon crashes and treacherous conspiracies by scoundrels, local politicians and the state’s first Catholic bishop, Mary signs on to rein an official route—local freight and mail delivery, thirty-four miles daily, by horse and wagon—or by foot when snow drifts are too high.Years later, she devises another daring plan. An avid patriot, she is determined to register for the vote. The price is high. Will she manifest this personal vision of independence? MCCONNELL’S RESEARCH This book is based upon ten years of research and provides new historical discoveries. Documents found by the author enabled USPS to verify Mary Fields as the first African American woman star route mail carrier in the United States. Mary Fields achieved other firsts that are documented in the historical biography, Deliverance Mary Fields.Mary Fields was born into slavery in 1832, Tennessee. This book chronicles the last twenty-nine years of her life and includes events that affected Montana pioneers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries: women rights, bootleg politics, Montana’s turn-of-the-century transition from territory to state, and its scandalous 1914 woman suffrage election. Also included are accounts of native peoples and ethnic histories of Métis generations.

Miantae Metcalf McConnell, a native Californian, spent childhood summers in Montana on her grandparent's farm. It was there her heart remained, in the wild open where she rode horseback, fished for trout and spent endless hours exploring diverse natural landscapes. Years later she returned to claim Montana as her home of residence (not unlike her Montana homesteader ancestors) and continues to live there today.When McConnell first learned of Mary Fields, described in western articles as a cigar smoking sharp-shooter mascot, she wondered how such an independent black woman had survived when she could easily have been murdered. Believing that Mary’s true life story would prove to be extraordinary, she began a ten-year search for facts in archives across the United States, and was well rewarded.