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  STAGECOACH

  JUSTICE

  One Stagecoach, One Shotgun and Two Hundred Pounds of Bad Attitude

  The Adventures Of “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, Pioneer for Women’s Rights in the Montana Territory

  A Novel By

  JAMES CICCONE

  Stagecoach Justice

  Copyright © 2021 by James Ciccone

  Cover Design Livia Reasoner

  Sundown Press

  www.sundownpress.com

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For Cynthia, Vincenzo, and Chloe Ciccone

  This is the first book I’ve dedicated to them, but really,

  everything I write is for them.

  Also, for my sister, Diane Ciccone

  I dedicated a poem to her in my teenage years, but I am afraid that poem has been lost forever.

  History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

  MAYA ANGELOU

  Chapter One

  Montana Territory, November 1885

  The whole idea of justice got going good in my head the instant I hopped out of the passenger compartment of a finely upholstered Concord overland stagecoach with 10-gauge shotgun in hand.

  Thinking back, Cascade, Montana wasn’t exactly the kind of town where the idea of justice was likely to take root. It was a rancher’s town cut out of blue mountains at an elevation that flirted with the clouds. Other than that, there wasn’t much to it. There was really only sky, dust, wind, and the stagecoach.

  The rest of what passed as the town was a cluster of clapboard shacks with mud roofs, a rickety boardwalk, two gas lamps, and a handful of hitching posts along the town’s dusky main street. The cluster looked like a blemish on a prairie that was otherwise made perfectly majestic by a sky that was high and deep and all around.

  We were a good two-day ride by stagecoach away from Helena. In other words, we were off in the middle of nowhere, a place so unfit for human habitation even the Crow elders had the good sense to reject it long ago to follow herds of buffaloes that roamed the prairie. The wind seemed to know of the place’s shortcomings, too.

  The wind disrespected Cascade whenever it pleased as it ran straight through clear to the other end of town and off to the prairie again without bothering to stop. And when the wind became jealous, it was free to grab at everything, the bunting attached to the buildings that lined the street, the unfurled curtains dancing in open windows, the red bandana around my neck, the apron over my dress, everything.

  At the time, folks in this part of the Territories were quite unaccustomed to seeing the likes of me. The truth is, few places were. The country as a whole was isolated back then. The railroad hadn’t even made its way out here yet.

  Isolated or not, the sudden arrival of a negro woman standing six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, a woman with the conspicuously oversized frame of a man, a very black woman puffing a black homemade cigar, wielding a shotgun, and brandishing a nasty disposition, the absolute spectacle of it, probably had a way of sending a chill, a sense of stunned curiosity really, through the bones of even the toughest ranchers, cattlemen, and farmers in these parts.

  I was the first stranger to show up in these parts in years—and a colored woman, at that. I suppose that is the reason I inherited so many nicknames along the way, Stagecoach Mary, Black Mary, Nigger Mary, White Crow, and practically anything else folks set their minds on.

  “I knew they was bound to have a saloon somewhere in this poor excuse for a town.” I snapped, not bothering to look at the fellow still up on the coach’s box. There was luggage to unload.

  The six horses in the team dumbly raised and lowered their heads, waiting for the next command. Each time they moved, even slightly, the brass rings and chains on their leather harnesses began to sing.

  I hoisted my dress and apron above the knee and stomped off toward the saloon. I aimed to diffuse the notion that I was the type of retiring soul who would accept racial insult or any other form of disrespect from the folks of this town well before the idea got going in anyone’s head.

  Even in a rowdy place like a saloon, the sight of a shotgun had a way of convincing even the most recalcitrant soul that caution and decorum, if not outright respect, were mandatory at all times. Could I have handled things differently? Yes, I suppose, but, as a colored woman, or really anyone, if you didn’t have the facility on your own to convince folks on the prairie they needed to respect your rights, there wasn’t likely to be a lawman, politician, preacher, or anyone else for that matter who was likely to do it for you.

  So, using every inch of my six-foot frame, I punched open the doors of the Silver Dollar saloon, tossed my shotgun against the wall, and surveyed the room.

  It was a tough-looking and tough-smelling room. The men who crowded at the bar wore chaps, boots, spurs, and sombreros, and looked and smelled like they hadn’t bothered in months to take a break from driving cattle, farming, or mining copper long enough to re-acquaint themselves with a straight razor, a bucket of warm water, and a bar of soap. There was a map of the Territories hanging in a frame on the wall behind the bar. Light from gas lamps danced everywhere. There was sawdust on the floor.

  I picked out the toughest-looking rancher at the bar, a tall, wiry sort typical of the Montana Territory of the time, a no-nonsense individual wearing a leather vest and chaps who had been made tough and lean and confident by the rigors of long cattle drives, cruel winters, and disappointing springs, a man whose confidence showed in the way he leaned into the bar with most of his weight shifted casually to one hip.

  I stood at the center of the saloon, hulking frame and all, a bona fide Republican, wearing a fancy dress.

  Squinting with one eye, I lined up the rancher. The gentleman had no idea what was about to hit him.

  “Shit,” the rancher mumbled, looking away from the bar.

  It was already too late.

  Instead of simply sticking out my hand and offering to make his acquaintance, I launched a left-hand lead to the right side of his head. The punch exploded against his jaw. It spun his face away from the bar. He dropped to the floor. He was out cold.

  The fight was over before it ever had a chance to begin. The punch that did the trick was a roundhouse hook, not a polite jab. It was the clean, measured, powerful, professional blow of a prize fighter, not the wild and wide swing of an amateur.

  The punch triggered chaos in the crowd, even outrage. But not a single one of the men in the saloon, outrage aside, dared to intervene. Instead of taking me on, all six feet of me, the men exercised sound judgment, dismissed the incident, and attended to their fallen comrade. That was the safer course.

  The rancher’s limp body was prodded and consoled. The crowd urged him to get up, come to, do anything. His pride was at stake. But there would be neither pride nor revenge that day. Instead, there was only the rancher’s deep moan. And with this single achievement, I had announced my arrival to Montana Territory.

  Looking back, the thing I can tell you about rights is they are not real unless they are respected. There must be a constant demand for respect, and that demand must be taken seriously. If not, rights can be made to vanish. However, with the promise of a brawl or gunplay hanging in the balance, folks came to realize it was far easier to respect me than to suffer the consequences. By the time I punched the rancher, I was already good at
showing folks the consequences.

  I could brawl, smoke, curse, drink whiskey, hitch a team of horses, fend off wolves, bandits and robbers, shoot a shotgun, draw a pistol, tend to the sick and needy, and do a whole host of other things better than any man, white or colored. Why should anyone be allowed to pretend otherwise? The rancher was only the latest man to see things my way. The nasty disposition had everything to do with the trouble I had come through in life.

  I respected Mr. Lincoln, and I had a habit of cursing and insisting on equal treatment for women in public. I wondered if any of the ranchers in Cascade were Republicans and felt the same way. I doubted it. They were probably Copperheads. Either way, I was sure they would have no problem respecting a punch in the nose.

  By the age of thirty-two, I was no longer regarded as mere inventory on a slave master’s ledger in Hickman County, Tennessee. Mr. Lincoln had seen to that. Having been born into slavery at or near 1832, 1833 or 1834, there was no clear record of my birth other than a journal entry listing me as estate property. So, I could not have said that bad luck began for me at birth, because I had no idea when I was born. And there were no records to help me figure it out either, no photographs, no certificates, no writings of any kind, nothing. My suspicion, though, was that bad luck had begun for me on the day I was born into slavery.

  I had no experience with any other institution or lifestyle other than the one that had given me bad luck from the start, but I was determined to try to change. Thanks to Mr. Lincoln, I was finally free, free and flat broke.

  I refused to go backward in life after the Emancipation. I was definitely not the type to linger on a plantation as a sharecropper. I needed to make my way out of the cruel institution on my own. So, I struggled to reach the glory and promise of the North and the household of Sister Mary Amadeus in Toledo, Ohio. There, I found work as a servant at the Ursuline Convent.

  Sister Mary Amadeus’s brother, Judge Dunne, had five children to raise alone following his wife Kate’s untimely, and unfortunate, demise. So, Sister Amadeus and I took over. Judge Dunne, who made a fortune in the Philadelphia money market, had the foresight to hire help. I was the help he was looking for.

  My relationship with Sister Amadeus, a relationship that actually started back on the plantation, quickly blossomed beyond the boundaries of the traditional master-slave relationship: We became fast friends. I gladly worked by her side for nearly five years, until Bishop Gilmore of Ohio called her to join Bishop Brondel of Helena to open a school to educate Blackfoot girls in the wilds of the Montana Territory. That’s when everything changed.

  The school was called St. Peter’s Catholic Mission. While hunkering down in three cabins with mud roofs, and braving the cruel Montana winters, Sister Amadeus, a frail asthmatic, fell deathly ill with pneumonia. That’s why I was dispatched to her side to work a miracle and nurse her back to health. That’s also why I knew I had to insist on respect the instant I arrived in Cascade.

  If it could be said the nation as a whole hadn’t yet fully accepted the ideal of equality for a colored woman, or really any woman, and the federal government was obviously unprepared to do anything about it, the folks in Cascade weren’t likely to do any better. Actually, they were likely to do far worse. However, this part of the Territories would quickly learn that I would not accept far worse or anything short of equality, and that I was both colored and a woman would not get in the way of it. My resolve, salty disposition, and fiery tongue would soon grow into legend.

  In 1895, stories about me started hitting newspapers from as far away as the Oregonian in Portland, Oregon and as close as the Weekly Gazette in Billings, Montana. Of course, the reporters didn’t get the stories straight or put real facts out there. Instead, they mentioned that I had a foul mouth, looked like a man, dressed like a man, drank whiskey like a man, and cursed like a man, stuff like that. However, none of that was exactly true. It was far worse. The truth was, I was a young woman who had survived the scourge of slavery, and my ‘crass behavior’, as they put it, and taste for stiff whiskey and a fight, were just getting started.

  If there was any doubt about the truth of the stories about the things ‘crass behavior’ could achieve, my comically enlarged hands that had once been perfect for slavery, the .38 concealed beneath my apron, and my ability to fight like a man would provide more than sufficient corroboration.

  The challenge I issued to the rancher and all comers in the saloon that day was my way of proving I was more than enough woman to do whatever I pleased in Montana, which included drinking whiskey at that saloon, despite the prohibition against women other than soiled doves setting foot in a saloon, moving wherever and whenever I pleased, and doing and saying whatever crossed my mind, and the whole of Montana would just have to learn to like it, regardless of local laws prohibiting women from doing any of the things on the long list of items I planned to do. And I planned to do plenty. Sure, complaints about my behavior began to bombard Bishop Brondel in Helena and ultimately threatened my welcome at the Mission, but that is getting way ahead of the story.

  Chapter Two

  When it came to avoiding a good fight or a stiff drink, I was probably not good at either. Actually, I was among the worse people at it in the entire Pacific Northwest. Take my first night in Cascade as an example. It was precisely the sort of thing that ultimately got me into trouble with the Catholic bishop in charge of the Mission. Instead of simply going straight to the Mission and minding my own business, I packed away my fancy dress, threw on a pair of men’s trousers, and returned to the saloon.

  I didn’t care that there were bound to be more than a few fellows there who were still a little sore at me for knocking out the rancher earlier in the day.

  The saloon was even rowdier at night than it was during the day. It seemed like it was pay day or something. There were bursts of laughter over the din of conversation. The sound of the solid glass bottoms of whiskey shot glasses hitting the bar cracked like gunfire. There was a fancy negro smiling and playing jumpy tunes on a standup piano.

  There were card games going and smoking and cursing. Like the saloon in Miles City, the Silver Dollar doubled as a bawdy house, so there was a half-dozen or so fancy ladies working the room who wore lace dresses without backs, plunging necklines that showed more cleavage than the law allowed, and costume jewelry that sparkled. The men, on the other hand, smelled like chewing tobacco, the sweet smell of whiskey, and the stale air of livery stables. There was also the smell of armpits and crotches.

  Outside, the night air from the prairie was crisp and clean. The ranchers had looped the reins of their horses over the wooden hitching rails in front of the saloon. The horses were busy at the water troughs, lifting their heads dumbly when the saloon racket became tumultuous. Teams of horses pulled wagons along the dusky street, moving in and out of shadows left everywhere by gas lanterns.

  “You looking at me funny?” I asked one of the ranchers at the bar. His sardonic smile exposed missing teeth and a cocky attitude. I didn’t like either.

  “What? I got eyes, and the right to use them,” the rancher said, stepping away from the bar. “You got a problem with that?”

  “You heard me. Are you looking at me funny?” I spread my feet apart to hold my ground. I was at the center of the room approximately five paces away from the bar where the rancher stood.

  “Suppose so.”

  “Suppose so?” I threatened, as the music stopped playing.

  “Yeah, suppose so. I also reckon I suppose the likes of you ain’t even supposed to be in no saloon in the first place, supposing that’s what you actually is, is a woman. But by the looks of things, probably nobody is exactly sure what you is, except possibly you.”

  There was a blast of laughter.

  “Oh, would you like to find out exactly what it is that I is and exactly what it is that I ain’t?”

  “Well, I got eyeballs to see exactly what you is,” the rancher said, careful to emphasize the mangled grammar.


  “Nah, you can’t see what I is or you wouldn’t dare say nothing like that at all. For example, you apparently can’t tell that I ain’t in no good spirits, can you? I just come off staging and ain’t had a proper shot of whiskey in days. I had to jump out of that fine, red Concord coach I paid to ride in, scatter with the rest of the passengers, take cover, and open fire on bandits in order to run them off, and then open fire on the Sioux to run them off, too, just to get out here, and that was only the second day of the stage run.

  “We had to push the coach out of the ruts you got everywhere in this Godforsaken excuse of a place called Montana more times than I could count. There were packs of Sioux and packs of wolves along the way seems like every damned mile. We lost exactly one wheel and one horse. The cliffs out here are so high it makes you dizzy to look down over the edge. When you do, you see silver clouds instead of brown earth.

  “I had to listen to the passengers talk politics for over twenty days, and I did over thirty-two years of slavery before Mr. Lincoln had the good sense to sign the Emancipation, and to tell you the truth, I am not sure which was worse, thirty-two years of slavery or twenty days of listening to politics on a coach. If I had a choice, maybe I’d pick slavery.”

  “Slavery can be arranged again for you, if you like,” cracked one of the ranchers at the far end of the bar.

  This ignited still another burst of laughter.

  “So whatever Mr. Lincoln said about the situation don’t count out here for nothing, is that what you’re telling me? So, what counts for out here, partner?”

  “Slavery, stagecoach rides, your Mr. Lincoln, who also happens to be dead, or whatever else you got on your mind may or may not count, depending on who does the counting, but you still ain’t allowed in no saloon in Montana, lady. That’s what counts out here,” the bartender interjected, looking up from the white cloth he was using to rub the bar. “That’s the law out here, lady. No women allowed in the saloon by law, unless you happen to be a working lady. And by the looks of things, you ain’t fit to be no working lady, not the type of saloon work we got out here for ladies anyway, if you get what I mean.”