Sgt. Charles Floyd

You don't really need to know a man named George Rogers Clark, but let me introduce him anyway as the Revolutionary War leader who engineered victories over the Brits in Virginia, where he was born, and as far west as Illinois, which wasn't Illinois at the time. George Rogers Clark was notable, no question. But he was soon out-heralded by his little brother William, who needs no intro. I'm talking about William Clark.

But I'm bringing up the old war hero for another reason: another Revolutionary War vet, this one named Robert Clark Floyd, served under George Rogers Clark's leadership out west, and this man, a frontiersman to be sure, had a son named Charles--that's right, Charles Floyd, whose life is memorialized in a thousand ways all around us, right out my window in fact, where the Floyd River runs and occasionally floods. 

Now if your skeptical mind is at work, you might want to think that Charles Floyd was chosen for the Corps by way of family connections, that his father's legacy is what got him aboard. Understandable conclusion, but wrong.

Dozens of young men applied for the job of finding some waterway through to the Pacific Ocean—wild adventurers, who’d look in the face of murderous savages, bears and who knows what kind of monsters. Every last one of those men had to shoot straight and think on their feet out in the middle of nowhere. Many were inspired, but few were chosen. 

Among them was our own Sgt. Charles Floyd, one of the first seven men signed. More notably, Charles Floyd was selected to be one of only two sergeants. Mr. Lewis had given the job of selecting mates over to Mr. Clark, who'd been living at his famous brother's place in St. Louis. When Mr. Clark showed up and shook hands with Mr. Lewis, a moment Stephen Ambrose claims was "the moment the Lewis and Clark Expedition began."

But we've gone back in time. What Sioux City's most visible monument commemorates, high on a bluff above the river and I-29, is the life and death of the only member of the Corps to pass away on the expedition--and the deep grief the Corps felt as they laid his body to rest. For a trip across the breadth of half a nation at that moment in time, to lose only one member is remarkable. 

Several days before he passed away, everyone knew Sgt. Floyd was sick. Mr. Lewis had opined that Sgt. Floyd was suffering from bilious colic. Medical experts long ago decided that Lewis's diagnosis was understandable but wrong. Sgt. Charles Floyd died here, in a place that would become Sioux City, by way of what medical professionals guess was a ruptured or perforated appendix. 

It's comforting to know that had Sgt. Floyd been taken to the most advanced hospital out east, had his doctor been the famous Benjamin Rush, there was no diagnosis or treatment for a ruptured appendix. He simply couldn’t have had better care.

A descendant of George Shannon, Kate McMullen, wrote a fictional diary of her famous ancestor. In it, she describes her sense of what happened on the bluff where today the monument stands. This is how Kate McMullen imagines young Pup Shannon describing what happened that day.

We dressed Charlie in his uniform and laid him in a wooden coffin. .. We all put on our dress uniforms and carried Charlie up to the knob of a hill that overlooks the river. There we dug his grave and lowered it into it. Capt. Lewis read the funeral service. I spoke up, saying, "Charles Floyd died with great dignity at only 22 years of age. He was a fine sergeant and a leader of the men on this Expedition." Others murmured, "Amen." We marked Charlie's grave with a red cedar post, which Whitehouse had branded to say: 

C Floyd, Sergeant 

First United States Regiment, Infantry 

1782-1804. 

 __________________________ 

Kate McMullen, My Travels with Capts. Lewis and Clark, by George Shannon, 2004.