Author Miantae Metcalf McConnell provided documentation discovered during her research about Mary Fields to the United States Postal Service Archives Historian in 2006. This enabled the USPS to establish Fields' contribution as the first African-American female star route mail carrier in the USA.
Fields was born into slavery in Hickman County, Tennessee, c. 1832. 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 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, the bishop barred her from the convent. Fields moved to Cascade where she opened a tavern, but profits waned due to allowing the cash-poor to dine free.
It closed due to bankruptcy about 10 months later.