On June 16, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition passed present-day Waverly in a flotilla of a keelboat and two pirogues while searching for timber to replace oars worn out in nearly daily struggles with the swift lower Missouri River. William Clark went ashore near "Snag" (Cranberry) Island to look for trees suitable for oars and for traces of an old French fort, but he found neither. There he encountered a dangerous stretch of rolling water and shifting sandbars that he called the worst he had ever seen, and the expedition managed with difficulty to get through before camping on the north shore just above present-day Waverly. The next day the party traveled only another mile before stopping to make new oars and a new towrope at a "rope walk camp," where Clark sent Nathaniel Pryor and other men to gather ash timber and set others to making a towrope from the cords of a cable provided by Lewis at Pittsburg. During the two-day stay, Clark measured the river's swiftest current at 23.66 miles per hour. Many of the men were suffering from boils and dysentery related to drinking river water and from infected mosquito and tick bites. Clark grew irritated with the complaints of the French engagés, whom he called "French higherlins," but increasingly admired the enlisted soldiers who endured the journey's hardships without complaint. On June 17, 1804, Clark also searched for Fort Orleans, an old French fort shown on a 1797 map by James Mackay nearly opposite abandoned sites of Little Osage and Missouri Indian villages. Fort Orleans had been established in 1723 by Etienne de Bourgmont to promote trade with the Missouri Indians in what is now Carroll County above the mouth of the Grand River, but its exact location has never been determined with certainty.