Carl Frederick Wimar was born in Germany, but brought to this country by his parents in infancy, and, at an early age, disclosed his artistic temperament and talent. Returning to Germany, he studied under the great painter Luetze, the painter of the celebrated picture at Washington, of Washington crossing the Delaware, copies of which are familiar to the public. Wimar afterwards painted the fresco pictures in the dome of the rotunda of the St. Louis Court House. I saw him paint a portrait of Captain Atkinson, a son of General Atkinson, as we were ascending the river, in the cabin of the boat, which I thought denoted marked artistic skill as well as being a faithful likeness of the man. Poor Wimar died with consumption five years later at the age of thirty-four, ending all hopes of his attaining the highest eminence of fame as an artist, that I believe he must surely have reached had he lived to mature age. He was naturally an amiable gentleman as well as a great artist. Along the Missouri above Omaha, the country is mostly prairie, with extensive bottoms on one side or the other, beyond the bottoms rising gradually as it recedes to the general altitude of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet back a mile or two from the river, the absence of timber and gently undulating topography affording a good panoramic view from the deck of the boat as she battled upwards against the strong current. Just below Sioux City, a small town at that time, our pilot pointed out Floyd’s Bluff, an oval-shaped hill lying at right angles to the river, its base washed by it, and into which the river seemed to be cutting and undermining. On the summit of this bluff we could see a post and a pile of loose stones, as we supposed placed there to mark the grave of Sergeant Floyd, the first American soldier to lose his life in our then newly-acquired Louisiana Purchase. Sergeant Floyd was one of the soldiers accompanying Lewis and Clark’s exploring expedition, who died and was buried on this bluff as they passed up in 1804, and here in this solitary grave he had rested more than half a century. Even then, in 1858, there was no house or settlement in sight, and I remember to this day the melancholy impression in my youthful mind, from his dying and being buried in the wilderness so far from friends and relatives. A late Congress did justice to his memory, performing a graceful and becoming act in authorizing the erection by the Secretary of War of a monument at the grave of Sergeant Floyd, appropriating $5,000 for the purpose.