When William Clark and Meriwether Lewis arrived in Louisville during the summer of 1803, they were looking for a few good men. The city was little more than a rough-and-tumble mudflat, a river town on the fringe of the frontier. But it also fostered the determined, adventurous, self-reliant, strong-spirited men the captains sought.
Lewis and Clark were on the edge of history; a fortunate few would join them. The “nine young men from Kentucky,” was how Clark described their first recruits.
Charles Floyd was one of the earliest to join. Floyd was handpicked by the captains to join the Corps of Discovery, a military unit they were assembling to explore the Missouri River in search of something that did not exist, although they didn’t know it at the time.
Floyd was born in 1782 in Jefferson County. Little is known of his early life, although when Floyd was a teenager, he and his family moved just across the Ohio River into what today is southern Indiana but then was part of the Northwest Territory, a swath that included land from the Ohio to the Great Lakes, and from Appalachia to the Mississippi River.
By October 1803, the nucleus of the Corps of Discovery had been selected. They assembled near the Falls of the Ohio. Floyd was probably about 20 years old. The young Kentuckian certainly had qualities the captains judged critical for the upcoming journey. But he also had connections. His father and uncles had served with Revolutionary War hero Gen. George Rogers Clark, who lived nearby and was the older brother of Corps co-leader William Clark.
Floyd’s commanders apparently looked upon the young man with favor, appointing him as one of three sergeants. They headed down the Ohio River, selectively adding more men. Then, after spending a few days near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, they paddled their way up the Mississippi and established a winter camp near the mouth of the Wood River just north of today’s East Saint Louis, Illinois.
They departed in mid-May, entering the mouth of the Missouri River on a journey fraught with danger. Floyd, the young Kentuckian, would be the only member of the group who wouldn’t return.
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By mid-August, the men had muscled their way more than 700 miles up Missouri River to the rolling country that today defines southwestern Iowa. Wildlife was plentiful. Spirits were high.
Then, an unexpected crisis.
“Serjeant Floyd is taken verry bad all at once with a Biliose Chorlick,” Clark recorded in his journal entry of Aug. 19, 1804. “We attempt to relieve him without success as yet, he gets worst and we are much allarmed at his Situation, all attention to him.”
There was reason to be alarmed. He almost certainly was suffering from appendicitis. His condition quickly deteriorated.
The next day, Clark, who was attending to the ailing sergeant, recorded, “Sergeant Floyd much weaker and no better … Floyd as bad as he can be no pulse & nothing will stay a moment on his Stomach or bowels.”
That afternoon, he died.
“Floyd Died with a great deal of Composure,” Clark noted. “before his death he Said to me, ‘I am going away I want you to write me a letter.’ We buried him on the top of the bluff. 1/2 Mile below [is] a Small river to which we Gave his name, He was buried with the Honors of War much lamented, a Seeder post with the Name Sergt. C. Floyd died here 20th of august 1804 was fixed at the head of his grave. This Man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and Determined resolution to doe Service to his Countrey and honor to himself. after paying all the honor to our Decesed brother we camped in the Mouth of floyds River about 30 yards wide, a butiful evening.”
It was a fitting eulogy and burial ceremony for the first United States soldier to die west of the Mississippi River.
But he didn’t stay buried. When the Corps returned two years later, the captains stopped to visit Floyd’s grave only to discover it had been disturbed. Clark blamed the locals: “found the grave had been opened by the nativs and left half uncovered,” he recorded on Sept. 4, 1806. They refilled the grave and continued downriver.
(A sign near the monument that today marks Floyd’s gravesite suggests that the disturbance the captains found in 1806 had been caused by wolves.)
Floyd still didn’t stay buried. By 1857, the Missouri River had shifted and threatened to erode the hillside gravesite and carry the sergeant’s remains downriver. The townspeople of Sioux City, Iowa, moved Floyd’s remains about 200 yards east. A few years later, interest in the Kentuckian was rekindled after his journal was published. His remains again were moved, this time placed in an urn covered with a marble slab. But he still didn’t stay put. A monument to Floyd was erected in 1901, into which his remains were entombed. In 1960, the site in Sioux City, Iowa, was declared a National Historic Landmark. Today, the 100-foot-tall white sandstone obelisk caps Floyd’s Bluff in honor of one of the Corps’ original “nine young men from Kentucky.”
Readers may contact Gary Garth at outdoors@kentuckymonthly.com