Background
William Stinson Soule was born in Maine in 1836. At the age of 27, he served in the Union Army during the Civil War but was
wounded at the Battle of Antietam, resulting in a discharge.
In 1865, Soule worked at a photographic gallery in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, before heading west to improve his health,
taking his photography equipment with him.
In 1869, Soule traveled to Camp Supply in Oklahoma; it was there he photographed Indian prisoners of war from the American
Indian conflicts in the Great Plains. Later that same year, he traveled to Fort Sill, which served as an Indian agency and
a
military control headquarters for various Plains Indians. Here, Soule photographed studio portraits of members of the Plains
tribes, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache, from 1870 to 1874.
Around 1874, Soule left Fort Sill and traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, where he opened and ran a photography studio until
his retirement in 1902. Soule died in Boston at the age of seventy-two in 1908.
Philip Hildreth Reade (1844-1919) was a Brigadier General in the United States Army
and fought against the Plains Indians in the American Indian Wars in the late 1800s.
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