There is still quite a tempest in the Texas teapot brewing about the Yellow Rose of Texas story. I'm adding a link to what you can consider the definitive story of Emily West, who was a free black woman employed by James Morgan at the time of San Jacinto. This article was written to counter a bunch of nonsense that was self-published (no peer review involved, and very shaky research all the way through) by a woman named McVea. She was (in so many words) casting doubt on the research and collection holdings we have in Special Collections at UT Arlington.

There have been a couple of other articles in the past few years that mention Emily West. Here is one (a brief mention) and a longer article here. This web version doesn't have the image of her signature, though it was included in the print article. The web version was usually put up as mostly text by someone who knew enough html to get the pages up but not enough to arrange photos throughout. Getting one in there was as much as she attempted.

SRS