The Steamer Yellow-Stone (on the 19th April, 1833)
Engraved by Lucas Weber Printed by Bougeard
Tableau 4. The Steamer Yellow-Stone (on the 19th April, 1833)
$1,550.00

Above Jefferson City, Missouri, on April 18, 1833, ten days upstream from St. Louis, the steamboat carrying Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer encountered an area of the river so densely packed with driftwood that it could proceed no further. Maximilian recorded in his journal entry for the day that they stopped for several hours, while members of the crew attempted to cut through the snags, and others on the riverbank pulled the boat along by large hawsers or ropes.

Getting away again that afternoon, the Yellow-Stone ran aground a short time later on a large sandbar and was forced to remain stationary, overnight. The next morning a party of traders in a flatboat from nearby Fort Osage arrived to offload part of the ship's cargo to lighten its draft. Bodmer waded ashore to make a sketch of the scene which later was reproduced in the atlas of aquatints published in Europe.

The Yellow-Stone spent the night of April 13 near Fort Osage and arrived the following afternoon at Liberty, Missouri, below the mouth of the Kansas River, near or within what are now the metropolitan environs of today's Kansas City. Two days later, the steamer docked at Fort
Leavenworth to take on wood and submit to the customary search by military authorities for illegal shipments of whiskey into the territory.

The subsequent print described the incident of the 19th with greater clarity and detail than the sketchy watercolor preserved in the Joslyn collection.

Another view of the steamer on the snag-infested waters of the Missouri is represented in Tableau 6 of the published series.

Note: the modern Liberty, Missouri, is several miles north of the river, east and north of Kansas City, Missouri. The confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers is in the heart of the metropolitan area.

Text by David Hunt, Director, Stark Museum, Orange, Texas, USA

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