Edward Daniels, one of Wisconsin's early but little known men of science, was appointed by Governor Leonard Farwell in 1853 as the first State geologist of Wisconsin. Daniels, a young man of twenty-five years of age, had hardly begun his survey before Governor William A. Barstow replaced him with James G. Percival. In 1857, however, Daniels was again appointed as one of the commissioners of the expanded Geological Survey. This position he resigned in 1861 in order to organize the First Wisconsin Cavalry, in which he served as colonel until 1863. After the Civil War he became associated with Horace White in coal mining investments in Illinois. By the 1870s Daniels began to turn his attention to social and political reform movements in the United States and Mexico. In Virginia he attempted to establish a cooperative farm and a cooperative industrial school, projects which proved unsuccessful and impoverished him. Sporadically he still engaged in scientific work, and in 1883 went to Minnesota for brief service as curator and corresponding secretary of the St. Paul Academy of Science.
