Floyd Schultz was born in November 1881 at Fort McKavitt, Texas, spending much of his youth at Fort Riley, Kansas due to his father's Army career. Schultz had an early career as a mechanic with the Union Pacific and Omaha & Grand Island Railroads. Retiring in 1911 to Clay Center, Kansas with his wife Adah Jane (Broceus) Schultz, he entered into a business partnership operating a theater. This business grew, and Schultz became a local civic and social leader.

In addition to business interests, Schultz throughout his life had a personal interest in collecting Native American artifacts and photographs and conducting archaeology and ethnography. Schultz conducted amateur archaeological investigations particularly in Clay, Geary, and Riley Counties, Kansas. He also visited the Potawatomi Prairie Band reservation in northeastern Kansas throughout the late 1920s to early 1940s, taking both notes and film footage/photographic stills of life on the reservation.

Floyd Schultz died in April 1951.

Albert B. Reagan was born near Maxwell, Iowa in January 1871, the son of William Simpson and Annie Emily Regan. As a teenager, his family moved near Fredonia, Kansas; Reagan returned to Iowa a few years later to teach.

Reagan graduated from Central Teachers' College in Oklahoma in 1898 and joined the U.S. Indian Service, first working at Fort Apache, New Mexico. He continued his studies while working with the Service, completing a bachelors of science degree from Valparaiso University of Indiana in 1902 and a bachelor of arts from the University of Indiana in 1903, as well as a masters in 1904. Eventually he received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1925.

Reagan married Otilla Adelaide Reese in 1903, and they moved to Nett Lake, Minnesota and then Arizona, where Reagan served as principal of first the March Pass Indian School and then the Cornfields Indian School. Reagan spent over 30 years with the Indian Service, he and his wife also living in Colorado, South Dakota, Washington, and Utah. He was apparently fluent in Apache and may have learned other Native American languages, and he wrote several papers and monographs on Native American ethnography and archeology, as well as other topics. He held academic and museum appointments in anthropology with the Victoria Memorial Museum in Canada, Laboratory for Anthropological Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He also donated Native American artifacts to several museums, including the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas.

Dr. Reagan died in May 1936. Floyd Schultz made contact with his widow Otilla in 1942, at which time he acquired prints of several of Reagan's photographs.