Chapter 4
Sergeant Floyd
Floyd’s Bluff, present-day Sioux City, Iowa
Only one member of the Corps of Discovery died on the whole expedition: Sergeant Charles Floyd, who fell suddenly ill and died on 20 August 1804, probably of a burst appendix. He was buried on a bluff above the Missouri near present-day Sioux City, Iowa.
19 August 1804
Charles Floyd is 22, a sergeant from Kentucky, and one of the men who keeps a journal. On 19 August, the morning after Lewis’s birthday dance, he suddenly falls very ill.
Clark writes that Floyd “is taken verry bad all at once with a Biliose Chorlick.” He cannot keep any food or medicine down. His pulse grows weak. The captains try everything they know, but Lewis’s few weeks of medical training in Philadelphia were not enough for this, and neither was anything else anyone knew in 1804.
Doctors today think Floyd’s appendix burst. At that time there was no surgeon anywhere in the world who could have saved him.
20 August 1804
The next day, as the boats come up to a high bluff on the east bank, Floyd dies. Clark writes:
“Serj. Floyd Died with a great deal of Composure, before his death he Said to me, “I am going away” I want you to write me a letter.”
They carry him to the top of the bluff and bury him “with the Honors of War much lamented.” At the head of the grave they fix a post, carved with his name and the words “died here 20th of august 1804.” They name the place Floyd’s Bluff, and a small river nearby Floyd’s River.
Then, because there is nothing else to do, they go on up the Missouri.
Floyd’s journal
Floyd’s own journal survives, and it lets us hear his voice. He writes the way he talks, and he spells the way he talks too.
On 31 July, three weeks before he died, he wrote: “I am verry Sick and Has ben for Somtime but have Recoverd my helth again.” On 15 August he went fishing with Clark and ten men, and they “Caut 300 and 17 fish of Difernt Coindes.” His last entry, on 18 August, tells how the men sent after the deserter Moses Reed came back, bringing Reed and the Oto chiefs with them.
The next morning he fell ill. He never wrote in his journal again.