Stagecoach Mary: groundbreaking badass gunslinger.
When Stagecoach Mary wasn’t cracking rabid wolves in the fucking face with the stock of her ten-gauge or single-handedly building schoolhouses for poor Native American girls, you could find her in the saloons of Cascade drinking men under the table like the chick from Raiders of the Lost Ark and chomping on homemade cigars so potent that hardly any gunslinger in town had the stomach to handle them. You’d think maybe some folks would have tried to fuck with her, considering that she was, you know, a black woman in a society that at the time wasn’t particularly well-known for its attitudes towards racial and gender equality, but Stagecoach Mary wasn’t the sort of badass chick that was going to let people tell her what the fuck she was going to do or how she was going to do it. At a time when non-prostitute women weren’t allowed to drink at saloons, she received special permission from the Mayor to be served at any bar in the city any time she wanted, for life. Any time some asshole messed with her, she fucked him up. Like, one time a guy called her a rude name outside a saloon, so she looked at him for a second, said nothing, then grabbed a big fucking rock out of the street and clubbed him in the skull with it repeatedly until other cowboys finally restrained her. This chick gained such a reputation for being the shit out of uppity gunslingers that didn’t show her the proper respect that the Great Falls Examiner newspaper once cited this hard-drinking, quick-tempered asskicker as having “broken more noses than any other person in Montana,” and nobody ever debated the claim.
People, this woman was so incredible that the fact that she had a pet eagle rolling around the Old West with her wasn’t even the coolest thing about her.
Someone write a graphic novel about this lady already.
