While the country continues its bicentennial celebration of the Voyage of Discovery launched by President Thomas Jefferson and led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, western Iowa tells its own part in the adventure—including the story of the only death to occur among the men during the expedition.

Banish the thought of blood-sucking mosquitoes in Iowa in August, and the Corps of Discovery must have had a pretty good journey along the Missouri River in 1804.

“They were certainly eating their best through here as far as a balanced diet goes,” says Bev Rowland Hinds, 53GN.

In 2003, Bev Hinds received the Petersen/Harlan Award from the State Historical Society of Iowa for her long-term contribution to Iowa history.

A popular member of the Humanities Iowa Speakers’ Bureau, Hinds has been researching Lewis and Clark history for more than 30 years. She and her late husband, Strode Hinds, 52DDS, 54MS, 54R, joined the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation in 1971 and spent most family vacations following various parts of the trail from 1974 onward.

At first, Bev followed her husband’s lead, taking photos of sites and people at the meetings, while she pursued her own research on pioneer women, including “shady ladies of the West” and how prostitutes helped settle the frontier. Together, the couple missed only three national meetings of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, the last time in 1997, the year Strode died in the same month the event was scheduled. Afterwards, when people accustomed to asking Strode for information about the Voyage of Discovery turned to her for answers, Bev began to fill his role in the foundation and in Sioux City, where she lives.

“William Clark celebrated his 34th birthday on August 1, when the expedition was camped on the Nebraska side of the river about 15 miles north of today’s city of Council Bluffs,” Hinds says. “He ordered venison, elk, and beaver tail to be prepared for a special meal. For dessert, the men feasted on raspberries, cherries, grapes, and plums.”

The bounty of the prairie and the river was more than sufficient to feed the 50 or so men who made up the Corps of Discovery at this juncture in the expedition.

Later on, Hinds points out, the men ate a diet dominated by red meat, much of it beyond its prime. Hunters from the Corps would often advance ahead of the main body, shooting game and leaving it to the heat, insects, and carnivores, all of which would attack the carcass before the party could claim it for a meal.

But, during the 34 days the Corps ascended the Missouri in the area now demarcated as Iowa and Nebraska, Lewis and Clark and their crew enjoyed more various fare. It was early in the expedition and supplies were plentiful. According to Clark’s record, they still had a store of coffee on July 18, while the men ate the last of the butter the next day.

In mid-August, when they camped along the Missouri for a week in the hope of meeting up with some Omaha Indians, Sergeant Charles Floyd wrote in his journal that he and ten of the men caught “318 coinds [kinds]” of fish. They managed that feat with a brush drag, a net made of willow branches that they lowered into Omaha Creek to sieve fish from the stream. A day later, Lewis led a fishing party that managed to catch 809 fish, more than half of them identified as catfish. On one occasion, Patrick Gass recorded catching nine catfish weighing a total of 300 pounds. Considered the best fisherman in the Corps, Silas Goodrich caught several blue catfish on July 29. One of those fish yielded a full quart of oil from its boiled-down fat.

“With fish, fowl, meat, berries, and other fruit, the men had a marvelous happening here,” Hinds says. On Meriwether Lewis’s 30th birthday, August 18, the captain allowed each man to have an extra gill of whiskey—making the daily total a hefty eight ounces—and the party stayed up dancing until 11 p.m.

Although the Corps would go on to more remote and dramatic lands during its nearly 8,000-mile journey, the men experienced several milestones of their voyage along the section of the river separating present-day Iowa from its neighbor Nebraska. It was here, near Omaha, that they passed the mouth of the Platte River and entered the upper portion of the Missouri, moving eventually from a prairie landscape to the Great Plains. Writing in his journal, the normally reticent Clark more than once became loquacious in describing the view.

Although the hills are not as "bald-pated" as they were when William Clark first described them, visitors to the Loess Hills can still find scenes that are reminiscent of the one he described.

It was Clark who first described Iowa’s Loess Hills as “Ball pated Prarie.” Walking on the Iowa shore on July 19, 1804, Clark wrote that he “…Came Suddenly into an open and bound less Prarie, I Say bound less because I could not See the extent of the plain in any Derection, the timber appeared to be confined to the River Creeks & Small branches, this Prarie was Covered with grass about 18 Inches or 2 feat high and contained little of any thing else, except as before mentioned on the River Creeks &C, This prospect was So Sudden & entertaining that I forgot the object of my prosute [pursuit] and turned my attention to the Variety which presented themselves to my view.”

A couple of weeks later, Clark was still admiring the landscape. “…The Prares Contain Cheres, Apple, Grapes, Currents, Rasp burry, Gooseberrie Hastlenuts and a great Variety of Plants & flours not Common to the U.S. What a field for a Botents [botanist] and a natirless [naturalist].”

Not everyone was so admiring of the thatch of grasses covering the hills. While resting at their Fish Camp on the Iowa side of the river, Sergeant Ordway described a trek to the Omaha village. “we passed through high Grass in the low Prarie & came to the Mahar [Omaha] Creek on our way . . . which was verry fatigueing for the high Grass Sunflowers & thistles &C all of which were above 10 feet high, a great quantity of wild peas among those weeds, we broke our way through them till we came to where their had been a village of about 300 Cabbins called the Mahar village. it was burned about 4 years ago immediately after near half the Nation died with the Small pox….”

Although Lewis and Clark were to have their first significant meeting with native tribes here, namely with the Oto and Missouri, they failed to find any people of the Omaha tribe in the area. According to the Indians they did meet, the Omahas were away from their village on a summer buffalo hunt.

“The Corps bebopped between the Iowa and the Nebraska sides all along this stretch of the Missouri,” Hinds says, “because they were working the part of the river that gave them the least resistance.” Since leaving Saint Louis on May 14, the expedition had been wrestling the river’s swift current, unstable banks, and hidden snags and sandbars. “They often couldn’t use their oars” on either the keelboat or the pirogues because of floating debris, so they used setting poles to walk the craft forward. And, when that didn’t work, they’d grab the cordelling ropes and pull the boats upstream. “Because the banks were often high and generally unstable from erosion, the men often stood in the river itself as they tugged on those ropes,” Hinds says. “I was on the end of a cordelling rope myself 20 years ago, and I can tell you it’s hard work.”

So it must have been a considerable relief for the Corps when the captains ordered a layover of several days on July 22. It was their first sustained rest on the journey. Holding up at a place they named Camp White Catfish on the Iowa side of the river, the crew kept busy. Patrick Gass, then a private, wrote in his journal that “our people were all busily engaged in hunting, making oars, dressing skins, and airing our stores, provisions, and baggage. We killed two deer and caught two beaver. Beaver appear plenty in this part of the country.” Meanwhile, Lewis worked on recording his observations, while Clark busied himself in drawing maps. On July 25, Sergeant Floyd noted that the Corps “Continued Hear as the Capts is not Don there Riting.”

Whether camped or advancing northward, the men kept a keen eye on the wildlife in the region. On July 20, Clark reported killing “an emence large yellow Wolf,” an animal believed to be an extinct subspecies of the gray wolf. Ten days later, Lewis wrote: “this day Joseph Fields killed a Braro as it is called by the French engáges. this is a singular anamal not common to any part of the United States. it’s weight is sixteen pounds. it is a carnivorous anamal. on both sides of the upper jaw is fexed one long and sharp canine tooth. it’s eye are small black and piercing.” The dead mammal Lewis described was a badger, the first specimen that he stuffed and mounted to be sent back to Washington, DC.

While some have complained that Captain Lewis wrote little in his journal during this phase of the expedition, Hinds points out that he was always walking on the shore and “when he describes the things he saw he does so so completely that you can see the scientist in him. He even counts the scales on the serpent he killed on August 5,” she says. According to his notes, the bull snake was five feet, two inches long with a circumference of 4.5 inches at its largest part. It had 221 scuta on its belly.

Lewis also observed a least tern, a species that’s now endangered along the river, and a flock of molting pelicans. Coming upon a thick carpet of white feathers covering the surface of the river, the men wondered at their source. “For three miles after I saw those feathers,” Lewis wrote in his journal, “we did not perceive from whence they came, at length we were surprised by a flock of Pillican at rest on a sand bar.” Lewis killed one of the birds and, as Patrick Gass noted in his journal, “In a bag under the bill and neck of the pelican…, we put five gallons of water.”

All of this was apparently too much for one of the men. Moses Reed challenged the unity and discipline of the Corps when he deserted early in August. The captains sent four men to bring Reed back, authorizing them to kill him “if he did not give up Peaceibly.” Ultimately, Reed was court-martialed on August 18. While the charge was serious enough to merit the death penalty, Clark wrote that Reed “requested we would be as favourable with him as we Could consistently with our Oathes.”

Reed’s punishment was severe, but not lethal. Clark notes that “we…only Sentenced him to run the Gantlet four times through the Party & that each man with 9 Swichies Should punish him.” The chiefs meeting with the Corps on that day—which was also Lewis’s birthday—were apparently bothered by Reed’s punishment, for they asked that he be pardoned, but neither Lewis nor Clark would relent. Discipline was of utmost importance to the success of the expedition. Needing his labor, they kept Reed with the Corps until it arrived at the Mandan Village in present-day North Dakota. In 1805, he was sent down-river when the keelboat returned to Saint Louis, his immortality assured because of his attempted desertion.

Sgt. Charles Floyd was a young frontiersman in his prime when he embarked on the Voyage of Discovery.

“Without a doubt, though, the most important incident was the death of the young sergeant, Charles Floyd,” Hinds says. Struck by violent abdominal pain on August 19, the 22-year-old died about noon the next day. Both Lewis and Clark mention Floyd’s illness in their journals, as do the other men who kept a record of their travels. Writing in his own journal for the last time on August 18, Floyd made no mention of being ill.

Sergeant Floyd was the first U.S. soldier to die west of the Mississippi River and the only member of the Corps to expire during its Voyage of Discovery. Without more evidence—only descriptions written by his comrades on the expedition—doctors today believe Floyd died either of acute appendicitis (a condition that Hinds notes afflicts white males between the ages of 20 and 24 at the highest rate for any age group and either gender) or a ruptured appendix with peritonitis.

“Given the treatments favored at the time–the practice of bleeding, plus emetics to make the patient vomit, diuretics to encourage the passing of urine, diaphoretics to make you sweat, and purgatives to clean the bowel—Captain Lewis probably helped Floyd die sooner,” Hinds says. “But we should remember that everyone was there with him when he died. Today, you can die in your hospital room alone.”

Joseph Whitehouse wrote in his journal that Floyd expired “with a great deel of composure. This disease which occasioned his death baffled all medical aid that Captain Lewis could administer.”

Clearly respected by his captains, the young Kentuckian whom Clark recruited for the expedition had been named one of the three sergeants of the Corps. He was buried with military honors on a bluff overlooking the Missouri at present-day Sioux City. Writing in his journal afterwards, Clark noted that “This Man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and Deturmined resolution to doe Service to his Countrey and honor to himself.”

Returning past the site two years later, Captain Lewis and several members of the Corps climbed the bluff to discover that Floyd’s grave had been disturbed. They once again covered the sergeant’s remains. A year later, Lewis urged the U.S. War Department to pay compensation to the young man’s father “in consideration of his loss.”

When it comes to the legacy of Lewis and Clark, Sergeant Charles Floyd’s death has been a boon for Sioux City. In the spring of 1857, the flooding Missouri River cut the bluff and exposed Floyd’s remains, scattering them to the river’s edge. Local citizens gathered up the bones and reburied them farther from the Missouri, since the hungry river had consumed much of the bluff that was their original resting place.

Interest in Floyd’s story was rekindled in the 1890s, when the young man’s journal was discovered (1893) and then published (1894). According to Hinds, local residents went looking for his gravesite in 1895, but they weren’t quite sure where to find it. By looking for changes in soil color, a method considered advanced for that time, they found the bones and put them in two urns.

First, though, Dr. Elliott Coues, an early editor of the journals of Lewis and Clark, measured Floyd’s leg bones. Since this was an era of great interest in phrenology, citizens arranged for two plaster casts to be made of the skull before the reburial of Charles Floyd on the 91st anniversary of his death. It was at that time that the Floyd Association was formed, with the intent that funds would be raised to build a memorial.

Finally, on August 20, 1900, Floyd’s remains were again interred—this time in the core of the limestone obelisk that would rise 100 feet above the bluff when it was finished in 1901. The column remains the tallest manmade monument to any member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 1960, it was designated the nation’s first National Historic Landmark.

“So much is happening this summer and fall along this middle stretch of the Missouri to mark the bicentennial celebration of Lewis and Clark’s expedition,” Hinds says. “People are following the trail in greater numbers than ever before, and all along the way we’re proving that you can do history accurately and still have fun.”