Yellowstone (steamboat)

By design, the Yellowstone was the first powered boat to reach above Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the Missouri River achieving, on her maiden voyage, Fort Tecumseh, South Dakota, on June 19, 1831.

Beginning in St. Louis, The Yellowstone made her maiden voyage on April 20, 1831 [16], and reached Pierre, South Dakota, on June 19, 1831, six hundred miles farther than any other steamboat,[17] dramatically opening the way for regular travel and trade along the upper stretches of the Missouri River.

Many of the crew and passengers, including the firemen and assistant Indian Agent Robinson Pemberton Beauchamp, died, and the boat was under threat of being burned by locals in both Iowa and Nebraska who were afraid of contagion.

During the winters when ice prevented such travel and late summer when water levels were insufficient for the six foot draft of the vessel, the Yellowstone served the cotton and sugar cane markets along the lower Mississippi River.

Departing New Orleans on New Year's Eve, 1835, she was loaded with arms, ammunition and forty-seven volunteers of the Mobile Greys[23] destined to support the Texans in their fight for Independence against Santa Anna.

[27] Soon after the Texans' victory at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, the Yellowstone was waiting nearby and received the wounded Commander in Chief, Sam Houston, the new republic's interim president David G. Burnet, the captured Santa Anna and forty-seven Mexican prisoners.

[28] Later that year and still in service (then as a packet boat along Buffalo Bayou), the Yellowstone was called upon to take the body of Texas hero Stephen F. Austin to burial, and then return mourners along the Brazos River afterward.