Dates

• Existence: 1867 - 1925

Biographical History

Walter Mason Camp (1867-1925) was a railroad engineer and writer, in the midwestern United States. Camp also performed research on the history of the Indian Wars of the Plains, in particular the Battle of the Little Big Horn of 1876.

Walter Camp was born on April 21, 1867 to Treat Bosworth Camp and Hannah A. Brown in Camptown, Pennsylvania. In 1883, he began his railroad service on the Lehigh Valley Railroad as a trackman, which would lead to his forty-two year railroad career. He entered Pennsylvania State College in the fall of 1887, and graduated as a civil engineer in 1891. In 1895 Camp resumed post graduate studies in electrical and steam engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In 1898 Walter married Emeline L. F. Sayles in Blue Island, Illinois. Walter Camp became the engineering editor of the "Railway and Engineering Review" in 1897 and served faithful and well as a railway editor for the following twenty-eight years.

Walter Camp's interest in documenting the Indian Wars began in 1903, after which his vacations for the following twenty summers were spent in research among the Indians and in talking with people who had survived the Battle of the Little Big Horn and other battles. He personally visited over forty battlefields and interviewed almost 200 survivors of western battles. Walter Camp died in 1925 in Kankakee, Illinois having published very little of his Indian wars research, but having collected an amount of original source material during his lifetime.

Citation:

Railway Review, Aug. 8, 1925: p. 197-198 (Walter Mason Camp; Walter M. Camp; b. 1867 Camptown, Pennsylvania; d. 1925 Kankakee, Illinois; parents: Treat Bosworth Camp and Hannah A. Brown; worked Lehi Valley railroad; student Penn State College; graduate University of Wisconsin; married Emeline L. F. Sayles, Railway and Engineering Review editor; research on Indians of the Plains during summers, Battle of the Little Big Horn)

Custer in '76, Kenneth Hammer, 1976 (Camp, Walter M.)

Manuscripts, Hammer, Kenneth and Dennis Rowley, 1975 (Custer's Man Camp--Oral Historian Without Peer)

Found in 76 Collections and/or Records: