When Katherine Stinson first crossed the 49th parallel in mid-1916 for demonstration flying, she was already recognized as one of the world’s leading female aviators. At barely 100 pounds she was a slip of a thing, but her radiant smile, stylish attire, and signature handkerchief made her larger than life. On her Brandon–Camp Hughes appearances that July, Indigenous hosts conferred on her the name “Kinyauhdiwe” — “the girl who flies and returns.” She was of one-quarter Cherokee heritage.

In December 1916 she sailed to Japan for a five-month tour, where postcards captioned her the “American Queen of the Sky” and she signed cards in Katakana with brush and sumi ink. She returned to Canada by rail in July 1917 with her Partridge-Keller biplane for a second summer fair circuit, flying at Calgary’s Industrial Exhibition and picking up a bear-cub mascot who eventually retired to the Chicago zoo. A handwritten letter from Buffalo’s Hotel Statler, dated August 8, 1917, to her Canadian fan Mr. Stead, thanks him for snapshots and mentions waiting on a new Curtiss Special being built.

Her defining Canadian moment came on July 9, 1918, when she flew that Curtiss Special from Calgary to Edmonton with a mailbag of a reported 259 letters — Western Canada’s first aerial mail. The Edmonton Bulletin captured the frenzy: “Here she comes!’ shouted a thousand voices,” as crowds swept police aside. The biplane bore military serial 901, her personal winged logo on the cockpit door, and a distinctive Red Cross on the tail; complimentary fair passes were jettisoned along the route. Calgary Postmaster G. C. King handed her the mailbag; Edmonton Postmaster G. S. Armstrong received it.

More than twenty covers from the flight survive, mostly in collectors’ hands: five ordinary envelopes, plus folded letterheads sealed with red legal stickers — including secretary Amy Hall’s hasty note to her mother on Calgary Industrial Exhibition letterhead. The most celebrated is the “map cover,” a letter Stinson wrote and signed to Mr. Richardson on a piece of the very Rand-McNally Alberta map she used for the flight, “hoping we soon have a regular route between Calgary & Edmonton.”

She continued on to Lethbridge’s July 29–30 fair and stampede, where a postcard billed her “THE BIRDGIRL” and another gave a fine profile of the Curtiss Special — a machine one greenhorn reporter dismissed as “a strange sprawling bird-shaped thing.” Her final Canadian flight came at Peterboro on September 13, 1918, where she praised the seventy Canadians training at her family’s Stinson Aviation School in San Antonio.

That fall she put flying aside to drive a Red Cross ambulance in Europe. She returned home with influenza that developed into tuberculosis and never piloted again. Yet her fame endured: a decade later, collectors sought her signature on inaugural NWT airmail covers alongside Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and a Calgary–Edmonton re-enactment on July 9, 2006 unveiled a replica of the Curtiss Special — red stickers and all.