Winter 1895 in Cascade, Montana. A nearly sixty-year-old Black woman who was born enslaved leans into a blizzard, driving a U.S. Post Office wagon through drifts that have turned men around. Her name is Mary Fields, and she will become a postal history legend. But before we meet Stagecoach Mary, we need to understand the postal 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 how the mail 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 justi ...