Sergeant Floyd: The Only Man Lewis and Clark Lost

Of the approximately thirty-three people who made the entire Lewis and Clark journey to the Pacific and back, only one died along the way. Sergeant Charles Floyd fell violently ill near this bluff on August twentieth, eighteen oh four, almost certainly from a ruptured appendix causing peritonitis, a condition that no frontier medicine could have treated. The corps buried him on the high ground above the Missouri River with full military honors.

He was twenty-two years old. The grave was partially exposed by erosion by eighteen fifty-seven, and his remains were moved twice more before the Floyd Memorial Association finally erected a permanent monument in nineteen oh one: a one-hundred-foot sandstone obelisk in an Egyptian style, with Floyd's remains sealed at its base. Thousands attended the dedication on Memorial Day.

It was the first structure in the United States to be designated a National Historic Landmark, receiving that status in nineteen sixty. The bluff and monument overlook the river the corps paddled north into the unknown.