Have a Meri Birthday!

Meriwether Lewis, leader of the Lewis and Clark expedition, was born on this day in 1774.

From 1804 to 1806, the Corps of Discovery explored the area from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. One of the first men to volunteer for the odyssey, Sergeant Charles Floyd, was also the first casualty. Floyd died on August 20, 1804 and was buried near present-day Sioux City, Iowa.

In the 1830s, painter George Catlin traced part of the Lewis and Clark journey up the Missouri River in his quest to document American Indian life, customs, and lands.

The landscapes Catlin painted on the Upper Missouri (and those that he described) are by far the most accurate and interesting of all that he did during his western travels.…

[T]hese thoughts came forth one clear day in 1832, after Catlin had climbed the high bluff on which Sergeant Floyd of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay buried. "I … sat upon his grave, overgrown with grass and the most delicate wildflowers," he recalled, "and contemplated the solitude and stillness of this tenanted mound; and beheld from its top, the windings infinite of the Missouri, and its thousand hills and domes of green, vanishing into blue in the distance, when nought but the soft-breathing winds were heard, to break the stillness and quietude of the scene."

Source: William H. Truettner. The Natural Man Observed: A Study of Catlin's Indian Gallery (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press in cooperation with the Amon Carter Museum and The National Collection of Fine Arts, 1979).

Pictured: George Catlin, 1796–1872, Floyd's Grave, Where Lewis and Clark Buried Sergeant Floyd in 1804, 1832, oil, 11 1/8 x 14 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.