By way of the Red River

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Until the development and bespeckling of its prairie landscape with railroad lines, there were only two ways to Texas: a long, hard journey over land or by water. A young man could travel a maximum of twelve miles per day by land but, this number should likely be halved as trails were sparce and novel complications commonplace. As such, land travel from Philadelphia to New Orleans (~1200 miles) took approximately six months and a round trip required a time investment of at least one year. 

In 1811, Robert Fulton refined existing steamboat technology and built the ship New Orleans with the goal of navigating to New Orleans by river. The single-engined steamboat New Orleans left Philadelphia in October 1811. For three months Fulton navigated the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and New Orleans arrived to much excitement in the city of the same name on January 10, 1812. What was previously a six month journey was completed in a mere eighty-three days.

By the mid-1830s, towns along the Red River in Arkansas developed to support settlement in Texas. One such place, Washington, Arkansas, is remembered as a popular waypoint along the path to Texas and the birthplace of Jim Bowie's eponymous knife at the hands of a blacksmith named James Black.

While coaches ran to Arkansas and Louisiana, the coaches could not cross the Red River. In 1842, a Chickasaw farmer named Joe Mitchell operated a ferry across the Red River near Denison but, before coach routes could reach the area, Mitchell died in 1847. As the Butterfield Overland Mail Route set its sights on Texas as a destination, another slaver along the Oklahoma side of the Red River named Frank Colbert sought and obtained permission from the Chickasaw Nation to operate a ferry across the Red River to present-day Denison, Texas. Beginning in 1853, Butterfield Overland coaches were ferried at no cost to the occupants into North Texas. Settlement blossomed.