Winter, 1895. Cascade, Montana. A nearly sixty-year-old Black woman who was born enslaved leans into a blizzard, driving a U.S. mail wagon through drifts that have turned men around. Her name is Mary Fields, and she will become a legend. But before we meet Stagecoach Mary, we need to understand the system she bent to her will. In Episode 2, Aileen and Maia trace how the Post Office expanded westward, not just following the frontier, but actively creating it. From the 1845 postal reforms that slashed rates and made long-distance communication affordable, to star routes that stitched remote cabins into the national fabric, to the mythologized Pony Express (which lasted only eighteen months and probably never employed Buffalo Bill), this episode reveals how mail delivery became the infrastructure that justified federal expansion into Indigenous territories. We meet railway mail clerks who memorized ten thousand post offices and sorted at breakneck speed in wooden cars that killed them in wrecks. We meet Owney, the beloved terrier who rode the rails and never saw a single train accident in nine years. And finally, we meet Mary Fields: cigar-smoking, gun-carrying, gender-nonconforming postal contractor who won a federal star route, walked through wolf packs to deliver the mail, and forced an entire Montana town to rewrite its rules to make room for her. This is a story about who gets to represent America at someone's front door, and what it takes to change that answer.
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Ready to explore how ordinary people built extraordinary public institutions? Subscribe to People of Agency wherever you listen to podcasts. Find us on social media @Peopleof_Agency. Have stories about how the mail shaped your community, or thoughts on protecting public services? We'd love to hear from you! [email protected]
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People of Agency is created and written by Aileen Day, with additional writing by Maia Warner-Langenbahn. It is hosted by Aileen Day and Maia Warner-Langenbahn. This episode was edited by the amazing Kelsi Rupersburg-Day. Our beautiful cover art is by Sam Woodring.
Here are some of our other sources (use the tab function to review different episodes). How the Post Office Created America, by Winifred Gallagher, served as a significant guiding light for this project. Many of our sources were pulled from online Smithsonian resources and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Thank you to our anonymous Historian fact checker who reviewed many of our scripts and provided invaluable feedback.
