Charles Howard (photographer)
A private in the Fourth Infantry, Charles Howard served as photographer for the Stanton Expedition in 1877, traveling throughout eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska and into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory.
[2] He was sent to Fort Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters of the Department of the Platte, and then left with 158 other new recruits aboard a Union Pacific train for Carter Station in southwest Wyoming.
Daguerreotypist John Wesley Jones visited the garrison in 1851 and Samuel C. Mills, traveling with the Army bound for Utah, produced at least one image of Fort Bridger in 1858.
Captain William H. Bisbee, Fourth Infantry, sent a payment for photographs of his child to Howard through the post trader at Fort Bridger, complaining that "they are not at all good."
Here he could have obtained additional photography supplies at establishments such as the Art Bazaar, the studio of the noted photographer Charles Savage, before returning to Fort Bridger.
His camera, chemicals and developing equipment were forwarded to Cheyenne shortly afterward, where the expedition assembled on July 5 to make final preparations for their departure.
The Stanton Expedition next traveled to Camp Robinson and the Red Cloud Agency, arriving on September 30 just over three weeks after the famed Oglala war leader Crazy Horse had been fatally bayonetted.
They returned along another Black Hills trail, arriving back at Camp Robinson on October 25, the same day that the Oglala left the Red Cloud Agency for their new home on the Missouri River, escorted by two companies of the Third Cavalry.
With winter rapidly descending on the northern Great Plains, the Stanton Expedition departed Camp Robinson on October 28, heading south to Sidney Barracks through four to six inches of snow.
After four months in the field, the soldiers had mapped some thirteen hundred miles of trails through western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming and the Black Hills of Dakota Territory.
"[7] Following the disbandment of the expedition, Private Howard was ordered to accompany Captain Stanton back to Department Headquarters in Omaha where the soldier remained for some eight months, printing his photographs.
By early 1878, he had opened his own photographic studio on Douglas Street in Omaha and began selling his images as large format prints, stereoviews and carte-de-vistas.
McGowan moved to North Platte while Mitchell opened a new portrait gallery of his own called the Bee Hive Studio on Sixteenth Street in Omaha.
Lacking funds to continue his survey of military roads, Captain Stanton decided not to attempt another summer of field work and released Private Howard from his service in Omaha, sending him back to his old regiment.
His earliest is an image of an unidentified Indian, presumably Shoshone, wrapped in a blanket outside Judge Carter's post trader store at Fort Bridger, circa 1875–1877.
The majority of his Native American views are from the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies, located in northwestern Nebraska, taken in October 1877 while he was part of the Stanton Expedition.
Of the Minneconjou and Sans Arc leaders who had recently surrendered at the Spotted Tail Agency, he was able to photograph Touch the Clouds, Red Bear and Roman Nose.
