Twenty Something
The stranger draped a buffalo hide over her shoulders. Sister Blandina Segale braced for a bullet.
It was December 1872, near midnight on the Colorado plains, in the heart of the Wild West. The 22-year-old Italian-born Sister of Charity was bound for Trinidad, a frontier town she had never seen. Back in Cincinnati, she had imagined Trinidad was in Cuba. Now the stagecoach lurched toward the Rocky Mountains, its wooden frame shuddering over hard-packed earth. Outside, the plains stretched into darkness.
No easy way out. No one she knew.
Barely 5 feet tall, Sister Blandina was already frightened. Men back in Ohio had warned her about cowboys. When the driver stopped for supper, Sister Blandina was too nervous to eat.
Around midnight, with miles still to go, came footsteps.
A tall, lanky man climbed aboard. A cowboy, she decided immediately. The very sort she had been taught to fear.
He reached toward her with a buffalo hide.
Was it a kindness?
Sister Blandina could not imagine one.
“I made an act of contrition — concentrated my thoughts on the presence of God — thought of the Archbishop’s blessing, ‘Angels guard your steps,’” she later wrote to her sister.
“I expected he would speak — I answer — he fire,” she wrote. “The silence and suspense unimaginable.”
Then came his questions.
“What kind of a lady be you?”
A Sister of Charity, she answered.
Whose sister? Was she a Quaker?
Soon Sister Blandina was doing the questioning. Why had he become a cowboy? He had read about the life and run away from home, he admitted. Had he written to his mother?
He hadn’t — and he knew it was “beastly.”
She urged him to write the moment he left the stagecoach.
“I will,” he promised, “so help me God!”
There is no record here of a conversion, no shootout, no miraculous escape. Just a runaway son in a cowboy’s clothes and a young nun who discovered she had misjudged him.
It’s my favorite part of the story. She asked about his mother. Her own family was hundreds of miles away.
Sister Blandina’s adventures grew more dangerous. She cared for the sick, defended prisoners, confronted outlaws and helped establish schools and hospitals across the Southwest. She once took a crowbar to a dilapidated schoolhouse, inspiring the townspeople of Trinidad to help her build a better one. Six men joined the effort, and soon a new one-room schoolhouse rose on a stone foundation.
Sister Blandina recorded her experiences in a journal later published as “At the End of the Santa Fe Trail.”
Her remarkable life is drawing renewed attention. Earlier this year, Vatican theologians voted unanimously to advance her cause for sainthood. She remains a servant of God as the Church continues its review.
As winter nears, I keep thinking of that buffalo hide.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” We usually picture ourselves as the generous host. On this stagecoach, the stranger went first. He offered warmth. She offered an attentive ear. Neither was what the other expected.
As Catholics we believe in the dignity of every person. It’s a beautiful conviction and a demanding one. It asks us to look past a first impression, whether it’s formed in a school pickup line, a parish meeting or the comments section of a news story. It asks us to see a person rather than a type.
Sister Blandina’s fear was real. But so was the possibility that she had someone all wrong.
The coach kept rattling through the darkness. The young sister was wrapped in a buffalo hide. What she took for a threat was, after all, a blanket.
Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Grey Cloud Island, Minnesota.