As a little boy, John Hamilton loved visiting the Floyd Monument.

"Mostly I liked looking across the river through the binoculars they had set up there -- two minutes for a quarter," Hamilton, now 43, recalled recently. "But I always wondered who Floyd was and why he was important enough to have a giant monument made for him."

Hamilton, who was born in Sioux City but grew up in Minnesota, got his chance to learn more about Sgt. Charles Floyd -- and the rest of the Corps of Discovery -- last year as he did research for a book about the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Hamilton read from Corps members' journals, devoured the most respected books on the topic and, finally, got in the car with his wife, Sue, threw in his cameras and followed the Lewis and Clark Trail, tracking the expedition from St. Louis out to the Pacific coast.

"I've always loved the West," Hamilton said. "I like exploring. The cool thing about Lewis and Clark is really, it's a two-and-a-half-year camping trip. It intrigued me that these guys did that and managed to do it without losing even one guy other than Charles Floyd, who would have died even if he had stayed home. They didn't have a cure for appendicitis back then."

Hamilton also did research and talked to staff members at interpretive centers along the route. With a degree in photojournalism and a history minor from the University of Minnesota, he also filled the book with pictures to make the journey come alive for his young readers. The book is filled with photos of historical sites, Lewis and Clark re-enactors, vast landscapes, and wildlife. He also makes use of historical portraits and maps throughout the work.

Author canoed, hiked same places
Lewis and Clark took well over two years to make the trip in 1803-06. The Hamiltons completed the journey in two weeks. "It was a lot of travel. We averaged 400 to 500 miles a day," he said. But they took time to canoe and hike in some of the same areas traveled by the explorers.

"That was a neat perspective, to get in the water and go through the bluffs they went along," he said of canoeing the Missouri River in the White Cliffs area of Montana. And, in the Bitterroot Mountains, they hiked part of the same ancient Indian trail used by the Nez Perce tribe to travel east to hunt buffalo. They could see how the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with winter setting in, might have perished there without help from the Nez Perce.

In fact, the help the Corps of Discovery received from the Native Americans struck Hamilton as one of the main themes of the journey. "You don't really get that when it's glossed over in the junior high history text," he said. "But they would have died many times over, even if just the Mandan Villages hadn't been where they were. It's likely they would have frozen or starved to death just that first winter."

Another theme is how the explorers' experience with Indians differed from tribe to tribe. For instance, Hamilton said, the Blackfeet, who had a couple members killed by Lewis' men on the return trip, don't view their encounter as favorably as the Mandans, who took them in for the winter and became good friends.

The tribes were different nations, different cultures and also differed by geography, between the plains, mountains and coast. "I hope I get that across in the book; there wasn't just one group -- the Indians," Hamilton said.

Survival and boredom were also key challenges for the Corps, Hamilton said. "Especially at Fort Clatsop (in present-day Oregon). It was wet, chilly, nasty. There wasn't much for them to do, the food was bad. They had quickly depleted the supply of elk and they thought the prices the Indians were charging them were exorbitant. And they were bored silly. But they still had to keep some semblance of military structure."

Sioux City Journal, December 2, 2002