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Black History Month – Stagecoach Mary
Basically, Stagecoach Mary ruled! Six-foot-tall, 200-pound Mary Fields smoked cigars, packed a pistol, kept a jug of whiskey at her side, and made certain the mail got delivered. She was the first African American woman to be employed as a mail carrier in the United States, and only the second woman to work for the United States Postal Service–a job she took on at the age of sixty.
Fields was born a slave and grew up as an orphan. After emancipation, she was taken under the wing of an Ohio nun named Mother Amadeus. When Mother Amadeus suddenly got sick, Fields nursed her back to health. She also took it upon herself to protect all the nuns in the convent–with a gun strapped under her apron.
Of course, this sort of toughness, while it may have been appreciated, doesn’t necessarily fit in a nunnery. Fields was ultimately dismissed from her duties. The nuns felt bad, so they provided her with enough money to start her own business. Mary opened a café, but because she was so kind and generous, she gave food to everyone who stepped in the door (whether or not they had money) and her business was run into the ground several times. Eventually, she closed down the café and began working a mail delivery job. She and her mule, Moses, never missed a day of work. Even if it was snowing and the wagon was frozen in its tracks, Mary would make the deliveries on foot, carrying the sacks of mail on her shoulders.
In 1895 she applied for a job with the United States Postal Service delivering mail throughout the Montana Territory. For her job interview, she and a dozen hardened Old West cowboys half her age were asked to hitch a team of six horses to a stagecoach as quickly as possible. The 60-year old Mary Fields blew them all away, hitching the horses and then having time left over to run to the saloon, grab a shot, come back, and smoke a cigar while laughing at the other cowpokes. She became the second woman – and the first black person of any gender – to work for the U.S. Post Office.
For the next six years, 60+ year old Mary Fields rode a stagecoach packed with money and expensive parcels through the Montana territories delivering mail anywhere, any time, through any terrain and weather and all manner of danger. Braving blizzards, heat waves, driving rain and screaming winds, Mary never missed a day of work, never failed to deliver a single letter, and was never late once. If the snow got so high that the horses couldn’t keep going, Mary would tie them to a tree, throw her mail bag over her shoulder, and walk ten miles through waist deep snow and twenty mph headwinds to deliver a letter to some random person on a farm in the middle of nowhere Montana. When the weather wasn’t completely soul-suckingly frigid she had to worry about outlaws and Indian attacks, although she does mention that the latter wasn’t very common – for most Sioux, she was the first black person they’d ever seen, and since they didn’t know what the deal was they usually just left her alone. If anyone got a little too close for comfort she of course also carried that trusty ten-gauge shotgun that, according to her personal experience, was capable of “cutting a man in half at closer range.” It was doing this job where Stagecoach Mary earned her nickname. Any time someone needed something delivered on time Mary would roll up with a boomstick, a pet eagle (!) and a mule named Moses and, I must say, that was a hell of a lot more reliable than any overnight delivery service you could ever ask for.
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One of the more famous tales of Stagecoach Mary’s came one evening when was charging through the countryside on one of her runs to deliver food and medicine to underprivileged nuns when suddenly out of nowhere a pack of psychotic wolves charged in and attacked her horses, freaking them out, ripping them up, and flipping the entire cart on its side. Mary jumped out, used the overturned cart as cover to keep her from being mauled from the back when she wasn’t looking, and then, with only a small lamp as her light source, she fought off several attacks from this pack of ferocious beasts throughout the night, first by blasting them with a shotgun at close range, and then switching to her revolver when she ran out of buckshot. The next morning she muscled the cart back upright, got everything back in place, tracked down some of the horses, made the rest of the trip back, and brought everything to the convent intact – except for a keg of molasses that had cracked during the battle, which the ungrateful Bishop made her pay for out of pocket.
After ten years of delivering the mail, Mary decided it was time to retire, and she settled down in Cascade and opened a laundry. She often ended her day with a drink and a cigar at the local saloon with the men of the community. There, she earned respect for her business savvy. One day a fellow who had not paid is laundry bill came into the saloon; Mary saw him, stepped up behind him and knocked the man down with one blow. She then put her foot on his chest and wouldn’t let him up until his bill was paid. After that, customers made sure their laundry bill was paid up!
She loved baseball and before each town game, she presented the players with buttonhole bouquets from her garden; she also would help out the local mothers if they needed someone to watch their children.
She was known and loved in town, so when cowboy artist Charles Russell lived in Cascade for a time, he couldn’t resist sketching a pen-and-ink drawing called A Quiet Day in Cascade, which depicts Mary being upended by a hog and spilling a basket of eggs.
The town adored her. They declared her birthday a holiday and closed the school on that day.
In 1914 Stagecoach Mary died of liver failure. The whole town participated in her funeral.
I have got some important visitors coming this week. My daughter Autumn and granddaughter Gracie come and then Khadija visits the next week. It will be nice to have some family hanging out!
I did manage to learn a lot about wiring relays and was able to fix the brake lights on Grace’s motorcycle. That was a relief as it had me baffled for awhile. A few good YouTube videos on automotive relays finally got me pointed in the right direction. Now we are ready for our New Orleans trek.
Spring training has started and the reports from Arizona seem to be great for the Cubbies. I am looking forward to a great season!
Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!
Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
Don & Mike
Ransomware -What Me Worry?
We have not run into too many cases of ransomeware on Macs but not only is it common on PCs, it has made it into plot lines of shows like Homeland on Showtime. Once your files are held hostage it is too late so it is best to be informed.
Malware makes headlines regularly these days, and although Macs are targeted far less than Windows PCs, Mac users still need to remain vigilant. A particularly serious type of malware is called “ransomware” because once it infects your computer, it encrypts all your files and holds them for ransom.
Luckily, despite the virulence of ransomware in the Windows world, where there have been major infections of CryptoWall and WannaCry, only a few pieces of ransomware have been directed at Mac users:
*The first, called FileCoder, was discovered in 2014. When security researchers looked into its code, they discovered that it was incomplete, and posed no threat at the time.
*The first fully functional ransomware for the Mac appeared in 2016, a bit of nastiness called KeRanger. It hid inside an infected version of the open source Transmission BitTorrent client and was properly signed so it could circumvent Apple’s Gatekeeper protections. As many as 6500 people may have been infected by KeRanger before Apple revoked the relevant certificate and updated macOS’s XProtect anti-malware technology to block it.
*In 2017, researchers discovered another piece of ransomware, called Patcher, which purported to help users download pirated copies of Adobe Premiere and Microsoft Office 2016. According to its Bitcoin wallet, no one had paid the ransom, which was good, since it had no way of decrypting the files it had encrypted.
Realistically, don’t worry too much. But it’s likely that malware authors will unleash additional Mac ransomware packages in the future, so we encourage you to be aware, informed, and prepared.
First, let’s explain a few key terms and technologies. Apple’s Gatekeeper technology protects your Mac from malware by letting you launch only apps downloaded from the Mac App Store, or those that are signed by developers who have a Developer ID from Apple. Since malware won’t come from legitimate developers (and Apple can revoke stolen signatures), Gatekeeper protects you from most malware. However, you can override Gatekeeper’s protections to run an unsigned app. Do this only for apps from trusted developers. Even if you never override Gatekeeper, be careful what you download.
Apple’s XProtect technology takes a more focused approach, checking every new app against a relatively short list of known malware and preventing apps on that list from launching. Make sure to leave the “Install system data files and security updates” checkbox selected in System Preferences > App Store. That ensures that you’ll get XProtect updates. Similarly, install macOS updates and security updates soon after they’re released to make sure you’re protected against newly discovered vulnerabilities that malware could exploit.
Although regular backups with Time Machine are usually helpful, KeRanger tried to encrypt Time Machine backup files to prevent users from recovering their data that way. Similarly, a bootable duplicate updated automatically by SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner could end up replacing good files with encrypted ones from a ransomware-infected Mac, or a future piece of ransomware could try to encrypt other mounted backup disks as well.
The best protection against ransomware is a versioned backup made to a destination that can be accessed only through the backup app, such as an Internet backup service like Backblaze (home and business) or CrashPlan (business only). The beauty of such backups is that you can restore files from before the ransomware encrypted them. Of course, that assumes you’ve been backing up all along.
If you ever are infected with ransomware, don’t panic, and don’t pay the ransom right away. Contact us so we can help you work through your options, which might entail restoring from a backup or bringing files back from older cloud storage versions. There are even decryptors for some Windows ransomware packages, and such utilities might appear for hypothetical Mac ransomware as well.
To reiterate, there’s no reason to worry too much about ransomware on the Mac, but letting Apple’s XProtect keep itself up to date, staying current with macOS updates, and using an Internet backup service will likely protect you from what may come.