Bayou City's conversion to a cotton-clad lacked some of the protections of an Ellet ram. Her boilers were not dropped into the hold. She was shallow draft, so dropping her boilers might not have given them that much protection. Her bow was undoubtedly reinforced with large timbers. Her ironing was probably flat railroad "strap iron", not rails. Most of the iron I've read about that was used for this purpose was 1" strap iron. A separate ram was apparently not used, just the reinforced bow. I have reason to believe that she may have been ironed forward above deck, a standard mid-war tactic used by the Confederates to protect the boilers and engine spaces on high-pressure steamboats. We know that she used about 150 bales of cotton for her "cladding" because Magruder states that he had it removed late in the war to be used to raise money for other military expenditures. She wasn't a new boat, had seen hard use and wore out as the war progressed. Ed Cotham published some good data on how rickety she had become by the summer of 1864. One major drawback of this vessel was her low freeboard. She was "bulkheaded" for her delivery trip to Galveston and would have been subject to swamping if used off-shore. Exactly what happened to her is unknown. She does not appear on the list of vessels captured at Galveston at the end of the war. The J.F. Carr is listed as beached to prevent her from sinking. Carr was last heard from at Corpus Christi in the winter of 1864, so I wonder if the beached vessel might have been the Bayou City?