![]() "Ford Reliability Tour Planes at Ford Airport, 1925." High level view of aircraft participating in the first Ford Commercial Airplane Reliability Tour lined up in rainy weather at the edge of the field (right foreground to left background) at Ford Airport, Detroit, Michigan, at the end of the tour on October 4, 1925. When Ford announced the 1925 Reliability Air Tour, to promote commercial aviation, Beech asked Bowhan to pilot Travel Air #2, a Travel Air B-6 with OX5 engine. The NAA issued license number 6068 to Bowhan on December 13, 1923.īeech left Swallow in 1924 to start his own company, named Travel Air Manufacturing company. Beech, test pilot and manager for Swallow Aircraft Company at the time, served as witnesses. Wolfley, district governor of the National Aeronautic Association (NAA), and Walter H. He underwent trials to earn his pilot’s license on October 25, 1923, in a Laird Swallow. Bowhan marketed his Osage heritage and he was often known by (and would sign with) the stereotypical nickname, “Chief.” One of his many business ventures was “ Chief’s Flying Circus,” a barnstorming enterprise operating from Kansas, south to the Rio Grande. ![]() Charlotte was his frequent flying companion. Their daughter Frances (nicknamed Frankie) was born in 1923 (Indian Census Rolls usually listed Bowhan’s daughter as Evelyne, born in 1922).Īviation was booming in Wichita, Kansas, in the early 1920s and Francis Bowhan was at the heart of the scene. At age 21, Francis Bowhan married Charlotte Blair (born in West Virginia), age 19, on Jin Oklahoma (interestingly, they filed for marriage again in 1934 in Indiana, according to Ancestry). Army to reach the rank of major general). Tinker, later the first Native American in the U.S. Under the Osage Allotment Act of June 28, 1906, she and her children were “entitled a headright share in the distribution of funds from the Osage mineral estate and an allotment of the surface lands of the Osage Reservation.”īowhan attended school in Pawhuska and then Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri (following in the educational footsteps of Osage aviator Clarence L. Ida (listed as the Osage head of household, since her husband was white) and her children were counted every year by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian Census Rolls. Ida Bowhan was recorded as 1/8 th Osage and Francis and her other children 1/16 th. On the special Census form for the “Indian Population,” extra questions reflected what the white Census Bureau thought it needed to know about the Native American population: proportion of other blood (Indian, White, Negro), whether or not they were living in polygamy, and, if so, were the wives sisters. The 1910 Census mistakenly enumerated him as Mart and Ida’s daughter. Bowhan grew up on Main Street in Pawhuska. Ida and Mart married on September 12, 1899.įrancis D. Mart Bowhan was a white man from Kansas who set up a harness and saddle manufacturing business in Pawhuska around the turn of the century. According to family lore and census records, her family, along with many others, moved to the land purchased by the Osage in 1872. Ida’s father, Francis Trumbly (most likely her son’s namesake), was a councilman and prominent attorney in Pawhuska, the capital of the Osage Nation. ![]() Ida May Trumbly, his mother, was a member of the Osage Nation, her family genealogy tracing back generations. NASM A-2231įrancis Dawson Bowhan was born on Apin Elgin, Kansas to Mart and Ida Bowhan. Grace of the Pioneer Tire Company of Omaha, Nebraska, owner of the aircraft. "Chief" Bowhan (left) with Mary Grace and her husband F. Posed standing beside nose of aircraft are pilot Francis D. 98) on the ground, possibly at Roosevelt Field, Long Island, New York, circa September 1928. Three-quarter left front view of Cessna BW-5 (r/n C6623, National Air Races race no.
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