Charles Watson Boise, American geologist, was the son of Watson Elliott Boise and his wife Grace Sisson Pomeroy. He studied at the University of North Dakota. Although he became a geologist he demonstrated an interest in literature by publishing Varsity verse: A selection of undergraduate poetry written at the University of North Dakota (with P.B. Griffith, 1908).
Boise visited some of the diamond fields of southern Africa around the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918). On the basis of his findings he published two papers, "Diamond fields of German South West Africa" (South African Mining Journal, July 1915) and "The Vaal River diggings in Griqualand West" (Mining Magazine (London), 1916).
In 1926 Boise was living in London. In that year he and W.R. Degenhardt applied for a United Kingdom patent relating to a "Disintegrating or mixing apparatus", described as an apparatus for disintegrating clayey material or for mixing sand and cement or other materials. A United States patent for this invention was granted in 1929.
In 1927 Boise bought Emmetts Garden, an Edwardian estate near Sevenoaks, in Kent, England. In his later years he provided financial support for an expedition led by L.S.B. Leakey and his wife to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. There, in July 1959, Mary Leaky found a well preserved large-toothed hominid skull which Leakey named Zinjanthropus boisei (later Australopithecus boisei) in honour of his financial backer.
Boise married Hazel Crawford in Silver City, New Mexico, United States in January 1922. They had a son and a daughter.
