The grand old lady of the mountain fur trade, Steam Boat Yellow Stone, steamed south on the Mississippi River in the summer of 1835. After five years of nosing her prow across the sandbars and around the snags of the Upper Missouri River, the steamboat headed for New Orleans. Hauled out at the New Orleans pier for a major retrofit, Yellow Stone would be recommissioned a U.S. flag vessel, bound for the foreign waters of Texas. At that time, Texas, a restless province of Mexico, boiled with notions of separating from the mother country and becoming an independent republic. Yellow Stone would be there, playing a vital role.

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On the Missouri River, she had been first to power past the Council Bluffs and as far upstream as Fort Tecumseh (near present-day Pierre, S.D.). The 120-foot-long sidewheeler's debut on the Upper Missouri had been orchestrated by Pierre Choteau, Jr., the St. Louis-based agent for David Astor's American Fur Company. Now, Yellow Stone's hull bore the brunt of warping and 'grasshoppering' through sandbars and snags along the Missouri. Replaced by larger and fancier steamers, she was too tough to die. At a time when most steamboats her age were decommissioned, if they still floated, her career was about to undergo a dramatic change. The first steamboat in the fur trade, she was sold into the foreign trade with Texas as a 'cotton packet.' Her destiny, though, would be that of heroine in the Texas Revolution.

Under new owners, and with a new mission, Yellow Stone spent 40'supervisory' days, hauled up. More than a linear mile of cypress and oak went into rebuilding her worn and ravaged hull and decks that encapsulated the still-powerful single engine and its twin boilers. The cost of the retrofit, when Yellow Stone slid down the shipping ways at New Orleans, was about $4,000, less than the original shipwright's bill of $7,000.

Once Yellow Stone was back in the water on New Year's Eve 1835, her boilers were stoked. Her twin columns of black smoke rose high into the sky over New Orleans. Captain Thomas Wigg Grayson sounded her deep-throated whistle and backed away from the Crescent City's pier. But she was late for her Texas welcome–a grand ball for her officers and crew had been held the week before, on Christmas Day.

Texans were eager fans of steam. Henry Austin, cousin of empresario Stephen F. Austin, had roomed with Robert Fulton in New York and had brought the first steamboat to Texas in 1829, the tiny Ariel. Another fan was the host for Yellow Stone's celebration, Henry Jones, who operated a plantation and ferry landing. One of Austin's 'Old Three Hundred' colonists (a reference to the first 300 Anglos to settle in Texas), Jones was anxious for Yellow Stone's arrival. Her size dwarfed existing packets, and the cotton trade was booming. The harvest in 1835 produced more than 5,000 bales of cotton awaiting transport to New Orleans, as well as hogsheads of sugar and corn piled up on landings up and down the Brazos River.

A promise of 5,000 acres of land and $800 cash had enticed Yellow Stone's owner, Thomas Toby & Brother of New Orleans, to put her into the Texas trade. The two-deck sidewheeler, newly registered in the United States, was placed in service to Texas entrepreneurs Samuel May Williams and Thomas F. McKinney. Traders and shippers, they operated out of Quintana, an old fort and post on the west side of the Brazos, where river waters poured into the Gulf of Mexico.

Sam Houston, who was elected major general of the Texas army in November 1835 and thus was the leader of Texas' forces for independence, had been calling on the Tobys of New Orleans to recruit men and arrange for supplies and financing for Texan troops. So when Yellow Stone backed away from New Orleans, it was no surprise that the 'nonhostile' ship carried men, munitions and supplies. With packed decks, she voyaged toward the Mexican province that brimmed with rebellion.

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