Mary Fields adopted the Cascade baseball team as her own. For each game she prepared buttonhole bouquets of flowers for each player from her own garden, with larger bouquets reserved for home-run hitters. Any man speaking ill of the local team in her presence could expect a bouquet of knuckles in his face.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Fields baby-sat most of the children in the area for $1.50 an hour and then spent most of the money she earned buying treats for the children. It was during this time that a small boy visiting from nearby Dearborn, Mont., noticed her. The young boy, a Montana native named Gary Cooper, would later remember her fondly in a story he wrote about her in 1959 for Ebony magazine, toward the end of his acting career and his life. Cooper died in 1961.

Charlie Russell, the cowboy artist, lived in Cascade for a brief time, and he featured Mary Fields in an 1897 pen-and-ink drawing he composed called A Quiet Day in Cascade, which shows her being knocked down by a hog and spilling a basket of chicken eggs.

Sensing that she was close to death in 1914, and not wanting to become a burden on her friends, Fields tried to steal away quietly with some blankets to die in the tall weeds near her small, two-room house. Lester Munroe and his three brothers were playing nearby, and they found Fields, who had baby-sat all of them, lying there in the weeds. She was taken to the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls.

When she died a few days later, there was no shortage of pallbearers for the tough but kind black woman who had befriended generations of local children. She was buried in a small cemetery alongside the road between Cascade and St. Peter’s Mission that she had traveled so many times during her life.

This article was written by George Everett and originally published in Wild West Magazine in February 1996.

For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Wild West magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to