Captain Richard King was an experienced riverboat pilot long before he married. He helped Union general and later President Zachary Taylor during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and this taught him how to conceal munitions on shipboard. During the Civil War he became a Confederate officer who arranged for the shipment of Southern cotton to Mexican ports. After becoming a rancher, he invested both in railroads and in port improvements for the shipment of goods in and out of Brownsville and Corpus Christi.
The U.S.S. Signal on the Rio Grande River, 1863: King captained this type of heavy stern-wheeler used for munitions transport.
A steamboat loaded with bales of Southern cotton: Ships like this would depart from Gulf ports in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, travel by night along the Texas Gulf shoreline, and then put in either at Matamoros on the lower Rio Grande or else some Mexican port farther south. There the cotton would be transferred to British ships, while the stern-wheeler would be filled for the return trip with munitions, clothing and shoes for use by Confederate soldiers.
Once King became a rancher, he invested in railroads. Pulled by steam-powered locomotives, the trains stopped at the King Ranch to pick up cattle, horses, and mules while dropping off lumber, bales of wire and dry goods of all sorts including bolts of cloth for clothing, furniture, nails and iron barstock for making horseshoes.
With partner Mifflin Kenedy, King continued in the shipping business long after the Civil War. This is one of King’s own steamboats, the Bessie, unloading goods at the port of Matamoros in 1884.