Nuns & Guns: Meet the Fastest Nun in the Wild West
Ever heard of Sister Blandina Segale? Us neither!
Known as the "Fastest Nun in the Wild West," Rosa Maria "Blandina" Segale was born in 1850 Italy on a small mountain near Genoa. Living in poverty and seeking a better future, her family immigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio when she was four years old where she later joined Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati. She was sixteen.
She set out on the Santa Fe Trail alone for her new assignment at a school in Colorado.
After spending four years in Santa Fe, she went to Albuquerque where, besides her work of teaching, opened a Wayfarers’ House, became a defender of Native Americans and “Mexicans,” and went on begging trips to mining and railroad camps to raise money to support the Sisters’ missions. Later she returned to Trinidad, and spent a short time in Pueblo, Colorado. The memoir of her time in the Rockies is published as At the End of the Santa Fe Trail.
Her time as a sister yielded many stories of her heroism on the frontier where she met Billy the Kid and worked amongst the Apache and Comanche. She calmed mobs of armed men from taking the law into their own hands, helped criminals seek forgiveness from their victims, and even saved a man from a hanging party. AND she's a Servant of God, which is the first step toward becoming a saint.
