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People of Agency
People of Agency Podcast
5 episodes
5 days ago
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History
Comedy,
News,
Politics
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Show more...
History
Comedy,
News,
Politics
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Ep. 2 - Westward Bound
People of Agency
59 minutes
3 weeks ago
Ep. 2 - Westward Bound
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.
People of Agency