An event this weekend in Sioux City honors the man who was among the first to volunteer for The Corps of Discovery.
“Sergeant Charles Floyd was the only casualty of the Lewis and Clark Expedition back in 1804 and he died here in the Sioux City area on August 20,” says Matt Anderson, curator of history at the Sioux City Public Museum.
A group will stage a reenactment of Lewis and Clark’s encampment on the Sioux City riverfront during daylight hours today and tomorrow. It’s an annual event at the Sergeant Floyd River Museum and Welcome Center.
“Local reenactors come in and show people the way the Lewis and Clark Expedition members lived, how they set up their tents and did things around the campfires,” Anderson says, “so there’s a real opportunity to see how things were back in 1804 to 1806.”
Today at 6 p.m., the volunteers will go the grounds of the Floyd Monument on Highway 75 in Sioux City and reenact the burial of Sergeant Floyd. Diaries of others on the Lewis and Clark Expedition indicate Floyd’s fellow explorers believe he died of “bilious cholic,” but historians believe Floyd died of a ruptured appendix.
(Reporting by Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)