M  ary Riddle (1902–1981)—a member of the Satsop and Clatsop tribes in Washington state—was born Nannie Riddell in Bridgeport, Washington. After the death of her mother in 1905, Riddell and her two brothers were treated as orphans by the U.S. government and grew up in boarding schools in Oregon.

Throughout the 1920s, Riddell lived a freedom-filled lifestyle enabled by her inheritance from her wealthy paternal grandfather. She decided to become a pilot after witnessing a woman crash her plane and wanted to prove that women could fly, despite claims to the contrary.

In 1929, Riddell enrolled in Tex Rankin’s flight school in Portland, Oregon as Mary Riddle. Mary was also her paternal grandmother’s name, and it remained the name she would go by for the rest of her life. The next year, Riddle became the second Native American woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license—the first being Bessie Coleman—and the first Native woman to do so in the United States. Within a couple of years of earning her pilot’s license, Riddle made a name for herself as a barnstormer— a pilot who performs before crowds, doing stunts and giving people rides. She also headed up the Seattle chapter of the Ninety Nines, an organization for women pilots founded in 1929 and based out of Seattle’s Boeing Field.

Being a barnstorming pilot was just as much about marketing as it was about flying. Riddle used her heritage and stereotypes about Native American culture to draw a crowd by growing out her bobbed hair, wearing stereotypical buckskin clothing, and billing herself as the Indian Princess Kus-de-cha, which she said was a Quinault Native American name meaning Kingfisher. Some aspects of her persona were based on facts, but just as much of it was a marketing ploy—such as promoting herself to the press as years younger than her actual age, a practice adopted by many female performers of the time. In 1937, Mary Riddle earned her commercial pilot’s license and went on tour with a barnstormer group, parachuting out of Boeing 80-A for paying audiences below.

World War II halted civilian flying in the United States. Though Riddle would have met all other eligibility requirements, at 41 she was too old to join the WASPs—Women Airforce Service Pilots. Instead, she trained as a sheet metal worker for the Air Transport Command and served as a “Rosie the Riveter.” After the war, her flying career was over. Mary Riddle never married and died in 1981.

Biography provided by Brenda Mandt, The Museum of Flight