Fur Traders and Trail Blazers (Part III)
by Merrill J. Mattes
In my research I have found well over 300 references in emigrant journals to Robidoux Pass and the trading post there. More than half of these also tell of one or more “French-men” there as traders. Many of them refer to a “Robidoux” with a great variety of spellings, but only a small handful of these witnesses reveal a first name.
Charles Darwin, a forty-niner, had a conversation with “squawman Antoine Robidoux”, finding him to be a man of some learning who “regaled me with Indian lore”. George Gibbs, a civilian with the Mounted Riflemen, refers to a sign reading “A. Rubidue Tinware”. Ezekiel Headley in 1850 refers to “the blacksmith Antoine, one of the Robidoux brothers of St. Joe”, but the editors of the Peter Decker and G. W. Bruff journals agree with me that it was Antoine the younger who was stationed at Scotts Bluffs. Another 1850 emigrant, Solomon Gorgas, refers to the blacksmith and his helpers as “hard-looking customers” but that “Rubedous himself is a gentleman.” This sounds more like young Antoine than Joseph IV. So what is the basis for my conviction that despite these references to the gentlemanly Antoine, Joseph IV or Joseph E., first-born of Joseph III, was at lease a co-equal operator of the Scotts Bluffs trading post, and certainly the most flamboyant one?
While son Joseph Robidoux may not be identified specifically by many 1849 and 1850 emigrants, he is clearly identified by Thomas Cramer, and emigrant of 1859, who writes: “Here [at Scotts Bluffs] in 1854 my old friend Joe Robideau was located … Joe is a curious specimen of the race. He has resided so long among the savages that he more resembles them in his habits and tastes than the people to whom he originally belonged.” Thus it seems to me that while his cousin, the younger Antoine, filled the role of a “gentleman,” who could hobnob with cultured emigrants, it was Joseph Jr. who was the one disparaged by others, with the references such as “renegade white,” “a desperado,” and “a savage son of papal France.”
Indian descendants from South Dakota reservations informed me when I was superintendent of Scotts Bluffs National Monument that their common ancestor was Joseph, and that he was kicked in the head by a mule and buried at or near Horse Creek, west of Scotts Bluffs. However, Cramer, Coy, and Orral Robidoux all testify that Joseph the younger left western Nebraska some time in the 1850s and took up life in northeastern Kansas, marrying an Otoe woman. Subsequently, according to Kurz in 1859, this same Joseph became a problem to his father because of his fondness for the bottle, and on occasion had to be confined to his father’s cellar. Clearly this was the same Robidoux described at Scotts Bluffs as a “savage” or “desperado”. Susan Bettelyoun, daughter of James Bordeaux, identifies that man buried at Horse Creek as “Joseph Silko Robidoux”, but it appears that she and the descendants I interviewed have got it wrong and that their true father, Joseph E. or Joseph IV, did abandon his Sioux family, but that his place was taken by his cousin Sellico Robidoux. Sellico may have felt obliged to tack on “Joseph” in front of his name to cover for his vanished cousin and preserve the family honor.
I believe that Joseph III himself, the founder of Saint Joseph and the father of the seeming renegade, did visit his trading post in western Nebraska on more than one occasion. In 1849 Henry Page encountered, near the Big Nemaha, an older important-looking “Robadeau” riding eastward in style, in a horse-drawn buggy. In 1851 Prince Paul, Duke of Wurttemberg, reports that he met “the brothers Robidoux of Scotts Bluffs” at their post there, describing them as “my friends of 30 years standing”, referring to his first encounter with Joseph III near Council Bluffs in 1823. Earlier, in 1851, John L. Johnson says that near Fort Kearny he met “the Robydouse train. . .they had wintered at Scotts Bluffs. The old man was intirely [sic] blind.” It was brother Antoine who was blind in his later years, according to his biographer, and as also attested by Richard Burton, the British traveler, in 1860. So it’s my belief that the pair visited at Scotts Bluffs by the Duke of Wurttemberg in 1851 were, in fact, Joseph III, the head man of the outfit, and his brother Antoine.
The best clue as to which particular Robidoux’s were involved at Scotts Bluffs or on their caravan route to St. Joseph is to be found in the trading licenses issued to proprietor Joseph Robidoux III in three successive years, 1849, 1850 and 1851. I found these licenses more than 40 years ago when I was rummaging around in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Here named as his employees during that period are brothers “F” for Francois, “A” for Antoine, and “E” probably for Isadore, “J.E.” for son Joseph IV, and second “a” for nephew Antoine and finally, an “S” for nephew Sellico. Every one of these six individuals is mentioned at lease once in emigrant journals, as being at one of the trading posts, or on the road with robes for Saint Joseph. (Incidentally, Brother Louis of California fame apparently never figured in the Nebraska trade but the first Antoine referred to in the license could only be the hero of San Pascual, who later got involved in Nebraska doings in a limited way, though handicapped by battle wounds.)
In my Great Platte River Road there is a whole chapter on the Robidouxs of Saint Joseph and Scotts Bluffs, so I will minimize repetition here to concentrate on problems of identification.
Emigrant diaries call the Robidoux establishment at Scotts Bluff a “fort” or “station” but most often a “trading post”. This was a single, elongated log structure by the second spring north of the train. It was composed of a store, a blacksmith shop, and a dwelling, usually with a number of Indian tepees clustered in the vicinity. These Indians were mainly relatives of one or more of the Robidouxs, or rather, of their wives, because these Robidouxs were genuine mountain men or squaw men. Other Indians came in to trade buffalo robes but the great migration of white men in the early years of the gold rush provided the Robidouxs with a bonanza - primarily blacksmithing services, whiskey peddling, and the resale of abandoned emigrant wagons and gear.
