Yellow Stone trimmed the normal sailing time from New Orleans to Galveston to two days, instead of 10. Her passengers were of a different sort than she had carried in the past. On trips up the Missouri, she had carried not only fur traders but also royalty such as Prince Maximilian von Wied of Germany and painters such as Karl Bodmer and George Catlin, who wished to glimpse the Rockies and the Indians. Yellow Stone’s first passengers to Texas were 47 young men, the Mobile Grays, all itching for a fight. In the upper deck saloon, many of them toasted the success of their coming venture. Others polished their muskets and reveled in dreams of glory about Texas’ fight for freedom and of land grants promised to volunteers. Diverting her cargo from the Brazos, Captain Grayson’s orders were to take these men to Texas’ deep-water port, Copano on Copano Bay, northeast of present-day Corpus Christi. The Mobile Grays arrived in early January 1836 and marched more than 100 miles to join Colonel James Walker Fannin, Jr.’s troops at Goliad, southeast of the Alamo, on the San Antonio River. Scouts reported that Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and thousands of troops were crossing the Rio Grande. Skirmishes at the Alamo, first line of defense for the colonies, had already begun, along with pleas for reinforcements. Fannin’s troops fortified La Baha presidio at Goliad and waited.

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While the Mobile Grays marched, Yellow Stone steamed for Quintana with a new captain. A veteran of Texas’ rivers and the cotton trade, John E. Ross took the helm of Yellow Stone, and Grayson moved to a smaller steamboat, the 65-ton Laura.

Two years before, Ross had delivered an earlier vessel to Galveston, Cayuga, an 88-ton steamboat with a 6-foot draft. A third larger, Yellow Stone also drew 6 feet, deep for Texas’ rivers and bays, but Ross was a veteran at finding troughs through the rivers and around rocks and shoals. Where there was only 2 or 3 feet of water, such as at the Velasco Bar, it was ‘full steam ahead.’ He represented a breed of Texas steamer pilots who approached low water with the saying, ‘Tap a keg of beer and we’ll run four miles on the froth.’

When Yellow Stone plowed across the Velasco Bar, where the Brazos River laid up its silt, she was inaugurated into the cotton-packet trade. Ross guided Yellow Stone up and down the Brazos, stopping on the Lower Brazos, a wider, deeper section of the river, at Brazoria and Columbia (originally called Bell’s Landing).

The ship steamed into the Middle Brazos section above Fort Settlement (Richmond) and continued toward the village of Washington (named for Washington, Ga., it became known as Washington-on-the-Brazos) and Robinson’s Ferry. The river grew treacherous, with rocky shoals peppering the riverbed and sunken cottonwoods littering the bottom. Along this stretch, towns were fewer, so planters built landings on their riverfront property. Yellow Stone’s master, Ross, steered the vessel around the numerous hazards and stopped to take on cotton and sugar at various landings. He delivered the crops downstream to waiting sailing ships off Quintana. A round trip took about five days, with overnight stops, since he practiced the Western steamer tradition of tying up at night. Plantation owners continued to plant, though the winds of war blew like a hurricane, so Ross and Yellow Stone continued to steam the Brazos.

Twin Mexican forts, Quintana on the west bank of the Brazos and Velasco on the east, were active ports. Quintana’s beaches served as resorts for plantation owners and their families. But 1836 was not a usual year, and though it was still winter, many families from the tidewater region flocked to the ports to catch a schooner for the United States. These wealthy Texas families were forerunners of the ones involved in the terrifying exodus that became known to history as the ‘Runaway Scrape.’

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