He convinced Congress to create the United States Entomological Commission and was among the founders of the American Association of Economic Entomologists.

The son of a Church of England minister, Charles Valentine Riley was born on 19 September 1843 in London's Chelsea district.

Sometime later his mother remarried which may have played a part in his decision, taken at the age of seventeen, to cross the Atlantic Ocean to America with scant resources.

[2][3][4] Riley's journey west ended in the U.S. state of Illinois where he was employed as a laborer on a farm in Aroma, a small community in Kankakee County some fifty miles south of Chicago.

Riley had become acquainted with the farm's owner, a British expatriate named George Edwards, sometime earlier when the latter was visiting London.

Around 1864 he left the Edwards’ farm to work for the Chicago-based Prairie Farmer, a leading agricultural journal as reporter, artist, and editor of the entomological department.

A few months later he joined the 134th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, mustering out before the end of 1864 after fulfilling his one-hundred day enlistment commitment.

[10] He was one of the first to practice biological pest control, introducing a beetle that was the natural enemy to a scale that was damaging the California citrus industry.

He published two journals, The American Entomologist (1868–80) and Insect Life (1889–94) and Riley was the first to recommend for the establishment of the Office of Experiment Stations, in 1878 before the National Agricultural Congress.