John Wells Foster

[3] The survey lasted only eighteen months but made significant contributions towards understanding the basic geological structure of the state.

In 1847, Foster and Josiah Dwight Whitney were hired to assist Charles T. Jackson in making a federal survey of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which was about to become a major copper and iron mining region.

For a time he worked in the land department of the Illinois Central Railroad but then joined the faculty at the Old University of Chicago where he served as a professor of natural history.

Foster had been interested in archaeology since his work on the Ohio geological survey and spent many years studying the remnants of the Indian mound builders culture.

Just prior to his death in 1873, he published Prehistoric races of the United States of America which laid out the results of his studies of the mound builders.