A. A. HYDE COLLECTION OF WILLIAM S. SOULE PHOTOGRAPHS
MS 95-11

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Biographical sketch

William S. "Will" Soule made his way west in 1867.  At age 29, he was a wounded Civil War veteran looking for a way to improve his health.  Upon his arrival at Fort Dodge in Kansas, he clerked in trader John E. Tappin's post store.

When Soule left for the west, he brought along equipment for landscape and portrait photography.   He was acquainted with photography through several means:  his employment, after his injury, with a photographic gallery in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; and his brother, John P. Soule, who established the Soule Photographic Company in Boston before the Civil War. 

Soule's photograph of a scalping victim taken near Fort Dodge became his first published work.  An engraving was made from his photograph, and it appeared in the January 16, 1869 issue of Harper's Weekly.  To view this photograph (not part of WSU Special Collections' holdings), click here.

Soule left Fort Dodge for Camp Supply, Indian Territory, in the spring of 1869, and arrived in Fort Sill, Indian Territory, in late 1869 or early 1870.  Fort Sill was a military headquarters and an agency for several tribes, including the Kiowa, Wichita, and Comanche.  Belous and Weinstein, in their book, Will Soule: Indian Photographer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma 1869-1874 (1969), purport that most of Soule's Indian portraits were taken at or near Fort Sill, and they date them between 1870 and 1874.

Soule returned to Boston in late 1874 or early 1875, and partnered with W. D. Everett in the photographic business.  His brother John P. Soule secured copyrights for many of the Indian portraits through the Library of Congress.  Soule died in 1908.

According to Belous and Weinstein, 166 paper prints and 69 glass plate negatives have survived.  Other repositories with various collections of Will Soule's work include the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Denver Public Library, and the Bureau of American Ethnology through the Fort Sill Artillery and Missile Center Museum.

This particular collection of 21 Soule photographic prints was owned by A. A. Hyde of Wichita.  A document in the collection describing the source of these photograph reads: "Indian Chiefs of the Indian Territory secured at Camp Supply, Indian Territory by Mr. Charles E. McKinney of Lee and Reynolds Trading Agency about the year 1870.  Property of A. A. Hyde, Wichita, Kansas."   Hyde was a Wichita businessman, philanthropist and inventor of the world-reknown ointment, Mentholatum.  He died in 1935.

Source:  Belous, Russell E. and Robert A. Weinstein.  Will Soule: Indian Photographer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma 1869-1874.  Los Angeles:  Ward Ritchie Press, 1969.

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