Short answers, pulled from the story.
The United States Geological Survey was founded on the 3rd of March 1879, authorized through a last-minute amendment to an unrelated congressional bill. The legislation charged the new agency with classifying public lands and examining the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.
Clarence King was the first director of the USGS. He assembled the agency from a collection of existing regional survey organizations. After two years, he was succeeded by John Wesley Powell.
The current USGS motto is "science for a changing world," which has been in use since August 1997. A previous slogan, "Earth Science in the Public Service," was adopted on the agency's hundredth anniversary.
The USGS has produced nearly 57,000 individual maps in its 7.5-minute, 1:24,000 scale quadrangle series, covering the 48 contiguous states, Hawaii, U.S. territories, and parts of Alaska. In 2015, the agency launched the topoView website, which provides access to a digitized collection of more than 178,000 maps dating back to 1884.
The National Earthquake Information Center, located in Golden, Colorado on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines, detects the location and magnitude of earthquakes worldwide. It coordinates with regional seismic networks under the Advanced National Seismic System and notifies emergency responders, authorities, and the public about significant earthquakes both domestically and internationally.
The USGS operates five volcano observatories: the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage, the California Volcano Observatory in Menlo Park, the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in Hilo, and the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.