The Fastest Nun in the West

'At just 22 years old, the short-of-stature Sister Blandina stepped straight into the Wild West'

Before a woman started on a journey west in the 1800s, she would be warned about numerous perils to avoid, so it’s not surprising that when Sister Blandina Segale boarded the stagecoach in Cincinnati to go to her new mission in Trinidad, Colorado, she was particularly concerned about cowboys, “of whom she’d heard many unsavory stories.”

Sister Blandina was born Maria Rosa Segale in the mountains near Genoa in northern Italy in 1850. She moved with her family to Cincinnati when she was 4. She took her vows with the Sisters of Charity at the age of 16, and at 22 she boarded that stagecoach for Trinidad to begin her life as a missionary.

That life would lead her to build schools and orphanages and help fund a hospital, but the legend of Sister Blandina began with that stagecoach ride west and the stories she’d heard about cowboys. She was horrified when the coach stopped one night and the driver’s lantern revealed “a tall, lanky…man, wearing a broad brimmed hat” and carrying a buffalo robe. The man settled himself on the seat beside her and held out his robe, asking if she’d like to share part of his “kiver.” Before she could protest, he’d plopped half the robe across her lap, and the driver closed the door. “We were in utter darkness,” she wrote in a letter home.

“By descriptions I had read I knew he was a cowboy! With crushing vividness—'No virtuous woman is safe near a cowboy’ came to me. I made an act of contrition—concentrated my thoughts on the presence of God—thought of the Archbishop’s blessing, ‘Angels guard your steps,’ and moved to such position as would put my heart in range with his revolver. I expected he would speak—I answer—he fire.”

Instead, the cowboy asked, “What kind of lady be you?” to which Sister Blandina stammered, “A Sister of Charity.”

The cowboy was puzzled. “Whose sister?” Before their ride was over, Sister Blandina had learned that the cowboy had run away from home six years before and hadn’t written a word to his mother since. He promised that he would write her as soon he got off the stage.

When Sister Blandina arrived in Trinidad and built her first school, she found herself in a wild territory that was home to Civil War veterans, uprooted natives, and farmers. Blandina wrote to her sister that the area was rife with “men with money looking to become millionaires, land-grabbers, experienced and inexperienced miners, quacks, professional deceivers, publicity men lauding gold mines that do not exist.”

In another letter, Blandina wrote about a boy named John who came to fetch his sister from Blandina’s schoolroom. “He looked so deathly pale that I inquired, ‘What has happened?’”

What had happened was that John’s father had shot a man in the leg. The gun had been loaded with buckshot, and the victim was slowly dying. John’s father was sitting in jail as a mob gathered outside, waiting for the man to die so they could hang his killer.

Blandina despised such violence. So she hatched a plan: She convinced the dying “young Irishman” to forgive his shooter. Fearing that the mob would “tear [the shooter] to pieces before he was ten feet from the jail,” she walked the prisoner, “trembling like an aspen,” past the angry crowd. “Intense fear took possession of me,” Blandina wrote. They continued into the sickroom, where the killer bowed his head: “‘My boy, I did not know what I was doing. Forgive me.’”

“I forgive you,” the dying man replied, and the prisoner remained safe until a judge arrived to convene a trial and send him to prison.

Blandina also got to know the famous outlaw Billy the Kid when she nursed one of his gang members as he died.

“At any time my pals and I can serve you,” Billy told her, “you will find us at the ready.”

She had a chance to collect that debt on one of her numerous stagecoach trips when the driver yelled into the carriage that a man was speeding toward them on his horse. Two of the men in the carriage took out their revolvers, but Sister Blandina asked the men to keep their firearms lowered. When the “light patter of hoofs” drew near, Sister Blandina shifted her bonnet so the outlaw could see her. “Our eyes met, he raised his large-brimmed hat with a wave and a bow, looked his recognition, fairly flew a distance of about three rods, and then stopped to give us some of his wonderful antics on bronco maneuvers.” After that, the coach “made the fastest trip ever known from Trinidad to Santa Fe,” and she became known as “The Fastest Nun in the West.”

Sister Blandina’s letters to her sister detailing her adventures in the southwest in the 1870s and 1880s were collected into a book, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, published in 1932. She was also celebrated in mid-century comic books and on the 1966 television show Death Valley Days.

A movement to declare her a saint has spurred investigations into her stories and the many legends surrounding her time in Trinidad and Santa Fe, and evidence has been found supporting the truth of at least some of them. Who knows, maybe someday ‘The Fastest Nun in the West’ will become a saint.

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Cowboy/Cowgirl Lingo of the Day

Lynching Bee – A hanging

As in: Sister Blandino shut down that lynching bee.

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I first found Sister Blandino’s story in a book (Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier) that was loaned to me by Trudi Howley who interviewed me for her podcast, Inscape Quest. You can listen to the interview on Apple podcasts here: