D.C. of Washington Thomas Foster

Thomas Foster is a hard-to-trace historical author whose name survives mainly through The Iowa, a 1911 book credited to Thomas Foster and William Harvey Miner. Library and public-domain records describe it as a monograph on the Iowa people, and they note that much of its material was reprinted from Foster's earlier publication, Foster's Indian Record and Historical Data.

From the surviving introductions and catalog records, Foster worked in Washington, D.C. and described himself as an "Indian historiographer." The earlier Indian Record and Historical Data appears to have begun in 1876 and lasted only a few issues, suggesting an ambitious research project that may have been difficult to sustain.

Very little confirmed biographical detail about his life has surfaced in the sources available here, so the work itself is the clearest guide to his legacy. What stands out is his effort to collect and organize historical information about Native nations in print, leaving behind material that later readers and researchers could still access decades afterward.