Floyd Schultz was born in Texas in 1881, but grew up in Junction City, Kansas, where his father was stationed at Fort Riley. Schultz started his career as a mechanic with the Union Pacific and Omaha and Grand Island Railroads. After retiring in 1911 to Clay Center, Kansas with his wife Adah Jane (Broceus) Schultz, he entered a business partnership operating a theater. As this business grew, Schultz became a local civic and social leader.

Throughout his life, Schultz had a personal interest in collecting Native American objects and photographs, supported by his first wife, Adah Jane, and his second wife, Marguerite. Schultz conducted amateur archaeological investigations particularly in Clay, Geary, and Riley counties in Kansas. Some of these involved burial mounds, where Schultz exhumed human remains and retained them, later donating them to the University of Kansas. He also visited the Potawatomi Prairie Band reservation in northeastern Kansas throughout the late 1920s to early 1940s where he obtained many objects for his collection as well as took notes, film footage, and photographic stills of life on the reservation.

Throughout this personal interest, Floyd Schultz was in contact with the Kansas Historical Society and donated indigenous items to them. In 1948, Schultz donated his extensive archaeological collection, and its associated field notes and maps, to the University of Kansas. Following his death in 1951, his widow Marguerite donated the associated documentary films and ethnographic records to the University of Kansas. Other Indigenous items were sold to Pat Read of Lawrence, Kansas. Indigenous objects collected by Schultz have been found in museums such as the Denver Art Museum, among others.

[Information retrieved from theis collection, the Floyd Schultz collection at RH MS 446, and the Floyd Schultz Collection at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum.]

Marlin F. Hawley, a native Kansan, received a Masters of Arts in anthropology from the University of Kansas in 1990. After graduating, Hawley published a book, A Keen Interest in Indians: Floyd Schultz, the life and work of an amateur anthropologist based on his master’s thesis. Hawley went on to serve as an archaeology curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society and continued his research on the history of archaeology in the Midwest and Great Plains.

[Information retrieved from this collection and a 2017 author biography for an article Hawley published in the Sage Journal.]