Charles Alexander "Lonesome Charley" Reynolds likely was born March 20, 1844, in Warren County, Illinois. Conflicting accounts, however, also list his birth date as 1841 or 1842 and his birth site as Stephensburg, Elizabeth, or Warren County, all in Kentucky.

In 1859 his family moved to Pardee, Atchison County, Kansas. Shortly thereafter Reynolds left his family and moved farther west, where he developed skills as a hunter, trapper, and scout. He returned to Kansas in 1861 and served three years with the 10th Kansas Regiment, Company B, during the Civil War. By 1865 he was back on the western frontier.

In 1873 he served as scout for the Seventh U.S. Cavalry during the U.S. Army's Yellowstone Expedition, which was formed to protect the Northern Pacific Railroad Company's surveyors. The next year he was the Seventh Cavalry's scout on its Black Hills Expedition; he carried the first dispatches telling of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills through 150 miles of hostile territory to Fort Laramie, Wyoming. In 1875 he served as chief scout on General James Forsyth's exploration of the Yellowstone River, and in 1876 he was again with the Seventh Cavalry, as chief of guides and scouts, on the Big Horn Expedition into Montana Territory against the Dakota Indians. He was killed on June 25, 1876, during the Battle of the Little Big Horn and is buried at the Custer Battlefield National Monument.

No biographical information on Alexander Brown could be located. It is known, however, that he was the only non-commissioned officer in the Seventh Cavalry's Company G to survive the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Biographical data on Reynolds was taken from Remburg, John E. and George J. Remburg, Charley Reynolds: Soldier, Hunger, Scout and Guide (Kansas City, Missouri: H . M. Sender, 1931). The diary is reprinted in Michael J. Koury, Diaries of the Little Big Horn (Papillion, Nebraska: The Old Army Press, 1969).