Charles E. Freeland was an amateur photographer who had a job with the Woodmen of the World fraternal organization as a recruiter for new members. The photo album was made on one or more recruitment trips for the Woodmen to Alaska. He had a variety of jobs in his life. In 1910 he was a foreman in a prune packing company in Salem, Oregon. In the 1920s and 1930s he was a janitor of an apartment building in Portland, Oregon. He left behind over a hundred photographs, mostly from the period of 1900 to 1920. He had a wife, Florence, and a son, Charles D. Freeland.

According to family tradition, Freeland had an early traveling motion picture show which he took to logging camps and towns all along the Pacific Coast including Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. The movie provided the draw for his recruitment work with the Woodmen of the World.