Deliverance Mary Fields First African American Woman Star Route Mail Carrier in the United States: A Montana History (Pearson English Graded Readers)

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.