Sgt. Floyd’s Memorials

In May 1807, only 8 months after the expedition disembarked at St. Louis, the Pittsburgh bookseller David McKeehan published Sergeant Patrick Gass‘s journal, titled A Journal of the Voyages & Travels of a Corps of Discovery, under the Command of Captain Lewis and Captain Clarke of the Army of the United States. The prospectus appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette in March, and the first review of it appeared on 1 June 1809 in The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review. The Anthology‘s critic granted that Gass’s book was “written without lofty pretensions,” and that “as it is without a map, it cannot be of very lasting importance; yet it furnishes some details to satisfy us for the moment, till we are favoured with the principal work” that Meriwether Lewis had promised in early April 1807 but was never to be published.

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 28 May 1857, Floyd’s remains were buried for the third time, with appropriate military and religious ceremonies, 200 yards east of their original burial. 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.^[1]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 … Continue reading On 20 August 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 more fitting monument to his memory.

On 20 August 1900, Floyd’s bones were reburied for the fourth and last time. On 30 May of the following 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 newly established National Registry of Historic Places.

See also Floyd’s Monument by Air.