SYMHC Classics: Original Six Impossible Episodes

So first up, we're gonna talk about Mary Fields, who is also known as Stagecoach Mary, and this is a person who a lot of people hear about for the first time through a post on Badass of the Week, which if you're not familiar with that site, the language is a bit blue, so maybe do not Google it after this episode and read it aloud to an elementary school class or other small children, et cetera.

Here's what we do know about Stagecoach Mary.

She was born a slave in Tennessee in 1832 and was owned by a family called the Dunns.

She and one of the Dunns' daughters, Dolly, basically grew up together, and Mary learned to read and write while she was still a slave.

After slavery was abolished, she moved to Toledo, Ohio with Dolly Dunn, who was going there to become a nun.

Dolly Dunn became known as Mother Amadeus, and she eventually moved to Cascade, Montana to teach at a school for Native American children.

For a while, Mary stayed behind in Ohio, but when Mother Amadeus became extremely ill, they sent for her.

Mother Amadeus eventually got better, and Mary stayed in Cascade.

She did odd jobs around St. Peter's Mission, and she basically acted as a protector for the nuns.

She also got a job delivering the mail by stagecoach, which made her the first African American woman to work delivering US mail.

And we talk in our Charlie Parkhurst episode about what a demanding and dangerous job stagecoach driving was, and Mary apparently took to it tremendously.

She was extremely reliable as a driver, and she developed a reputation for fighting, brawling, and taking guff from absolutely no one.

Uh, there are a number of stories of her knocking men out with one blow under a variety of circumstances, and this is also why she wound up not working for the convent anymore.

Uh, it was the combination of her personality and her work that earned her that nickname, Stagecoach Mary.

Eventually, she retired from stagecoach driving and opened a laundry, and she became a really beloved figure in Cascade, which actually made her birthday a holiday.

And Stagecoach Mary died in 1914.

She was 82 at the time, and she is buried just outside Cascade, Montana.

In terms of information about her, there's a children's book about her, as well as a documentary called Discovering Mary, and that's by a woman named Joyce Fitzpatrick.

I haven't seen the film itself, but she talks about picking up tidbits of information for years before making the film, and the film itself actually started out more as a documentary of her recording her own process of looking for more information about Mary Fields.

So when fir- people first started asking us to do an episode about Stagecoach Mary, there was actually a, a crowdfunding project in the works somewhere about a documentary.

I'm not sure if it was this documentary or a different one, uh, but now, almost two years later, when I went looking for it again, all traces of that have vanished into the ether.

So at the time, I was like, "Hey, when this documentary comes out, maybe we will be able to get, uh, enough to do a whole episode on this person," and it va- it evaporated.

I don't, I don't know what happens to it.

So if it does come out, there's always still the possibility.

We'll see.