Charles Albert Woodruff (April 26, 1845 – August 13, 1920) was a career officer in the United States Army.

He was promoted from private to corporal, was wounded at Battle of Cold Harbor in 1864, and convalesced in Vermont until being discharged at the end of the war.

In retirement he was active in several business ventures and resided in San Francisco before moving to Berkeley, California.

[3] Woodruff volunteered for the Union Army during the American Civil War, enlisting as a private in Company A, 10th Vermont Infantry Regiment on June 5, 1862.

[3] He had recently been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 117th Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops, but could not accept because of his need to convalesce.

[3] In 1867, Woodruff passed a competitive examination to obtain appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

[9] In addition to maintaining a correspondence with other participants in the campaign with whom he discussed his experiences, he also communicated with several writers and historians who researched the subject.

[9] In the summer of 1908, Edward S. Curtis, an ethnologist and photographer of the American Indians, walked the Little Bighorn battlefield with three Crow scouts who had served with the U.S. Army during the 1876 campaign.

[10] Woodruff accompanied them so that Curtis could have the scouts' recollections of the fight considered by an experienced army officer who had knowledge of the battle.

[10] As a result, Curtis left the account of the Crow scouts out of the volume of Sioux history he published later that year.

[5] He was assigned as chief commissary and acting assistant adjutant of the Department of the Missouri at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas from August 22, 1878, to October 9, 1879.

[3] Woodruff was purchasing and depot commissary of subsistence for the Department of California in San Francisco from August 1889 to April 1894.

[3] It was so well received that afterward, the GAR's George H. Thomas Post Number 2 in San Francisco paid to print and distribute 10,000 copies.

[5] Woodruff was assigned from July 1900 to August 1902 as chief commissary for the Military Division of the Pacific in Manila, Philippines during the Philippine–American War.

[5] In 1905, he was a member of San Francisco's Fusion Campaign Committee, a coalition of Republicans and Democrats that sought to overthrow the corrupt government of Abe Ruef and his Union Labor Party.