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Floyd's Monument
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 or the next several decades, Floyd's grave remained a landmark on the Missouri River. The American artist George Catlin painted Floyd's Bluff, with the cedar marker still in place. The following year Prince Maximillian von Wied, the Prussian explorer and man of science, noted that someone had renewed the cedar post after prairie fires damaged it.
| Marble slab placed on Floyd's Bluff August 20, 18952
When the Floyd monument was begun five years later, the sergeant's bones were disinterred for reburial a fourth and final time. The disposition of the stone slab is unknown.
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In 1848 a man named William Thompson built a cabin on the bluff near Floyd's grave, and the following year a French Canadian trader for the American Fur Company settled at the mouth of the Big Sioux River. In 1854 a surveyor for the U.S. government laid out a town between the Big Sioux and Floyd's River, a logical place for a settlement, inasmuch as it had long been a favored fording place, campsite and gathering point of the Yankton Sioux and other Indian tribes. In only four more years the new town gained official identity with a post office, and saw the first steamboat arrive from St. Louis.
Floodwaters undermined the bluff early in the spring of 1857, and part of the grave slid toward the river. Local citizens who were aware of the significance of the site, quickly recovered all but a few bones, and on May 28, 1857, those remains were buried for the third time, with appropriate military and religious ceremonies, 200 yards east of the original site. New wooden markers were erected, but over the next four decades they were steadily whittled away by souvenir hunters, and grazing cattle obliterated all other evidence of the gravesite.
In 1893 Floyd's long-lost journal came to light, and the publication of it served to revive public interest in the site.2 On August 20, 1895, the sergeant's remains were interred for the third time, beneath a three-by-seven-foot marble slab, and plans were begun to erect a permanent monument to his memory.
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Dedication ceremony, Memorial Day, 19013
Courtesy Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.
The bones recovered from the 1857 grave and buried beneath the marble slab, consisting of the skull, mandible, tibia, fibula, clavicle, and some ribs and vertebrae, were encased in concrete beneath the base of the 100-foot-tall obelisk. |
On August 20, 1900, Floyd's bones were reburied for the fourth and last time. On May 30 of the next year the present hundred-foot-high sandstone obelisk was dedicated, and Floyd's place in American history was commemorated with due ceremony. In October of 1966 the monument became the first site to be listed in the National Registry of Historic Places.
On October 27, 1997, the plaza surrounding the monument was dedicated to the memory of Dr. V. Strode Hinds(1927-1997), of Sioux City, Iowa, "a man who brought Lewis and Clark history to life through his programs, conversations and work with people of all ages." Dr. Hinds was a president of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation in 1981-82.
Before Floyd's remains were sealed in the concrete core of the obelisk's base, someone made two plaster casts of the skull and jaw, and took photographs, and also took photographs of them. One of the casts has long since been lost. The other, in the Sioux City museum, served as the basis for a reconstruction of Floyd's face by a forensic artist in 1997, and placed on a specially designed and suitably uniformed mannequin, which is housed in the Sioux City Welcome Center museum.5
Bronze plate attached to Floyd's monument in 1901.4
--Joseph Mussulman; rev. 01/04 1. Olin D. Wheeler, The Trail of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1904 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 90.
2. Reuben Gold Thwaites rediscovered Floyd's journal at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 1893. It was first published in 1894 in the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings by James D. Butler. Paul Russell Cutright, A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 128.
3. Wheeler, 167.
4. Ibid., 170.
5. V. Strode Hinds, "Reconstructing Charles Floyd," We Proceeded On, Vol. 27, No. 1 (February 2001), 16-19. See also James J. Holmberg, "Monument to a 'Young Man of Much Merit'," We Proceeded On, Vol. 22, No. 3 (August 1996), 4-13. Funded in part by a grant from the National Park Service, Challenge-Cost Share Program.
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