The Brothers Robidoux and the Opening of the American West

by Robert J. Willoughby

  One week later Antoine's bill emerged again, having been “severally read a first and second time, committed to a Committee of the Whole House, made the order of the day for tomorrow, the bills and reports ordered to be printed.”15 For reasons not explained that bill did not emerge again until January 1857, when reported as “severally with amendments.”16 On January 5, the Senate referred it to its Committee on Military Affairs, which held the bill until February 18, 1857, reporting it back without amendment. However, on March 3, the House journal recorded, “The Senate have indefinitely postponed bills of this House of the following titles, viz: H. R. 465. An act for the relief of Antoine Robedeau” and a number of similar relief bills.17

  Antoine attempted to keep action moving on his relief bill by writing to a friend in New York City, Edward Kern. Kern, a lieutenant serving during the Mexican War, knew Antoine in California. Antoine hoped to have Lieutenant Kern validate his bill of expenses. The failure of H.R. 465 to pass the Senate lay with the lack of documentation to support those claimed expenses. In June 1857, a letter transcribed for Antoine, because his vision had failed too much to write, began,

  I have lately received a letter from your brother in Philadelphia who informed me you are at present in New York and this enclosed to him to be forward[ed] to you. I am sorry to say I am now and have been for a long while confined, but am now down with a greater affliction than ever in addition to the total loss of my eyes I am afflicted with dropsy.

  My present object in writing is to beg to call your immediate attention to the following enclosed papers. My object is to have it duly certified by you and returned to me immediately so that I may present it before [the] coming Congress.

  Now my dear friend on your perusal of the items charged you will know therefore it is more than just and therefore trust you will give it your immediate attention & much obliged.

  Yours very respectfully, Antoine Robidoux.

  P.S. This bill has already been before Congress and passed in the House, but was dropped in the Senate and for want of proof such as I now ask of you.18

  H.R. 465 would not be revived in time to be reconsidered by the Thirty-fourth Congress. Antoine did send Kern another brief letter, asking for continued help, asking whether or not Kern received the documents forwarded through his brother, and requesting assistance in getting the attorney he had employed on his earlier trip to Philadelphia, a Mr. Edwards, busy on his bill. He also stated that his physical condition had improved a little. If the diagnosis of dropsy was accurate, he may have been suffering from some form of acute edema, the swelling of his legs caused by the pooling of fluid. As he could not get out of bed, he may have suffered from congestive heart failure that also presents as acute edema. As the correspondence appears to have been in Antoine's own hand, his eyesight had improved some. “In haste I write you these few lines, and I am sorry to say that I am confined to my bed with the dropsy and have been since 1st of March. I am little better. I sent some documents to your brother in Philadelphia which he informs me that he forwarded them to you. I hope dear friend you have received them and will take it as a great favor if you will give it your attention. If you can give these papers to Mr. Edwards my attorney whom I have employed to do my business any other information he may require, please inform him. Glad to hear from you, accept my best respects & believe me. Yours, Respectfully, Antoine Robidoux.”19

  With the end of the Thirty-fourth Congress the bill for travel reimbursement from the war died. The convening of the Thirty-fifth Congress sent Antoine's cause back to the beginning. However, he had attained a pension and on February 4, 1858, Mr. James Craig of the House of Representatives introduced “The memorial of Antoine Robidoux, praying for increase of pension for services in the war of 1812 and the Mexican war.” On the matter of the $870 he had requested, it took a complete year before another bill, H.R. 772, requesting “in full for his traveling expenses from California, after having been wounded at the battle of San Pascaul,” was introduced by Mr. James Buffinton of the Committee on Military Affairs. There is no indication that bill ever passed both houses, nor that his request for an increase in his pension was considered.20

  Antoine's claim for bounty land never advanced, either. On March 9, 1856, a Pension Office document, signed by J. Minot, the commissioner, stated that his service record in the War of 1812 could not be verified. “The claim is, therefore, suspended for other evidence of the service alleged. If there is any roll, discharge, or other record evidence of such service, it must be furnished.” In response, Antoine hired an attorney, William B. Chace of Washington, D.C., who did locate a Captain Robert Lucas, who vouched for Antoine's War of 1812 service in the artillery company of a Captain Sullivan, and a Thomas Swords, who sent a letter stating that Antoine had indeed served in the Mexican War under General Kearny. However, documents from June 1856, including a note from Antoine's congressman, still indicated the proof of War of 1812 service to be lacking. On July 21, Antoine wrote a hurried note, which read, “I respectfully request the Commissioner of Pensions to deliver my Land Warrant, submitted on the 15th, for 160 acres to John S. Gallaher. Signed, A. Robidoux.” The file contains no other documents indicating further progress.21

  Antoine spoke frequently of going back to Santa Fe to live out his days, probably with much urging from his wife, Carmel, and their adopted daughter, Carmelette, both of whom missed their former home in the Southwest. But after returning from his trip to the East, his strength never allowed him to complete the journey. The physical hardships had taken their toll, and yet in his own words he was still lucky to be alive. In 1856 he had stated that he could account for only three men out of a force of three hundred trappers who had gone into the Rocky Mountains thirty years before.22

  Infirmed and with progressive and near total blindness, Antoine lived out the rest of his life in St. Joseph in the care of his older brother and family. He died on Wednesday, August 29, 1860, in St. Joseph at the age of sixty-six. His obituary gave a number of statements about his life that may not have been completely accurate, but proved very complimentary to the man. “He was possessed of a sprightly intellect and a spirit of adventure.” Further, “Mr. Robidoux was a very remarkable man. Tall, slender, athletic and agile, he possessed the most graceful and pleasing manners, and an intellect of superior order. In every company he was affable, graceful, and highly pleasing. His conversation was always interesting and instructive, and he possessed many of those qualities which, if he remained in the States, would have raised him to positions of distinction.” During his last two weeks, “he was taken with violent hemorrhage of the lungs, which completely prostrated him, and from the effects of which he never recovered. He was attended to by the best medical skill, and his wife and many friends were with him to the hour of his dissolution. He will be long remembered as a courteous, cultivated, agreeable gentleman, whose life was one of great activity and public usefulness, and whose death will long be lamented.”23

  The beginning of the 1860s marked the decline of Louis's prospects in California. Nature turned against him in the form of drought, grasshoppers, earthquake tremors, and floods. After the floods, there was more drought, and the California paradise betrayed him. Adding to the fickle hand of mother nature, Louis faced Indian unrest, which resulted in stolen livestock and in 1860 or 1861 he fell from his horse and fractured a hip that did not heal properly, leaving him with a restricting physical disability. Confined much of the day to a chair or a bed, he gave up his positions in local government and spent little time in travel or socialization. Always a heavy drinker, he turned to the bottle for some respite from his troubles.24

  To the end he remained involved with the family and people around his rancho, taking part in their lives as a respected elder. In March 1862, Louis Robidoux and his second wife, Flavia Castillo, became the godparents of twins born to Don Jose and Dona Sofia Maso, near San Bernardino, California. The couple claimed to be the heirs to the old Spanish land claims of the baron of Arizona-ca, a high-rank
ing official. The Robidouxs were also the maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother. The baptism was performed at the church at San Salvador. Unfortunately, the mother and the boy twin died shortly afterward. At some later date, the surviving girl twin, having been left in the hands of several nurses and guardians, also lost her father and the entire estate became subject to an investigation of possible swindling. Louis and Flavia verified the true events, but according to the California investigator, Levi A. Hughes, the record books of the old San Salvador Church had been tampered with.25 Louis always doubted the level of justice received by non-Anglo Californians in the state's justice system.

  During the winter of 1861–1862, heavy snows fell in the mountains above the valley of the Jurupa, and in February heavy rains began. The valley immediately above Robidoux's rancho submerged under a wall of water, which first struck the settlement at Agua Mansa and washed it away. “Agua Mansa is, or rather was, a valley about six miles in length and from one half to three quarters of a mile in width, the river winding about midway through it, the soil a light sandy loam, very rich. It was one continued farm, divided into a hundred or more fields, each having its separate owner. At the lower end began the cottonwood forest of Rubidoux, much of this filled by the flood,” wrote Benjamin Hayes, a local judge who traveled the area frequently. He continued his account of the aftermath of the flood, writing, “a dreary desolation presented itself to my eye, familiar dwellings over-turned, or washed away; here a chimney, there a mere door-post or a few scattered stakes of a fence, lofty stout trees torn up, a mass of drifted branches from the mountain canons and a universal waste of sand on both banks of the river, where a few months before all was green and beautiful with orchard and vineyard and garden.” Further down stream, Louis was hard hit, which in 1862 ruined much of the bottomlands he farmed, destroying vegetable and grain crops.26

  After the flood of 1862, three years of drought followed. Cattle and sheep had to be sold off or slaughtered to avoid heavy losses, and little could be harvested from the fields, the topsoil had washed away and the remaining land was parched. By 1865, due to growing debt, which led to litigation, and subsequent selling off or foreclosure on property including his last holdings at San Jacinto and San Timoteo ranchos, his lands and prosperity dwindled to almost nothing. On September 24, 1868, Louis died of natural causes at age seventy-two, the last of the six brothers. His former holdings at Jurupa became heavily occupied by new California emigrants and laid the foundation for Riverside, California. In his honor, Mount Robidoux still overlooks the city.27

  Much infirmed and blind, Joseph Robidoux spent the last few years of his life in the apartment of a row house he had built not far from where the Blacksnake Creek flowed into the Missouri. His wife, Angelique, had died in January 1857, but he had a number of children and grandchildren to look in on him. He reached the age of eighty-five, by far the eldest of the six Brothers Robidoux who had done so much to help open the American West. On May 28, 1868, there appeared on the front page of his city's main paper a proclamation, “Joseph Robidoux, the founder of the city of St. Joseph, Missouri, is dead. As a tribute of respect to the memory of Joseph Robidoux, whose name is inseparably connected with the city of St. Joseph as its founder; It is hereby requested that the citizens of St. Joseph close their houses of business from two o'clock till five o'clock p.m. on Thursday, the 28th day of May, 1868 during funeral services. The members of the City Council and officers of the City Government are requested, and all others and citizens are invited to attend the funeral which will take place from the residence of Julius C. Robidoux, on Edmund Street between Fourth and Fifth streets at 2 o'clock on May 28th, 1868. Signed, George Hall, Mayor.”28

  The next day the paper reported that as requested most businesses shut down at noon and remained closed the rest of the day. “Edmund Street in the neighborhood of the residence of Jule Robidoux was densely crowded during the early hours of the afternoon by the old and the young—anxious to take a last look at the remains of the old pioneer, whose name is so inseparably connected with the city of St. Joseph.” His pallbearers were all prominent men of the city and included Robert Stewart, the former governor of the state of Missouri. “The remains of the deceased were taken to the Catholic cemetery and there consigned to their final resting place with all respect.”29

  Epilogue

  They all left the world as humbly as they had entered, with little or nothing of real tangible wealth to their names. The only one to this day with a substantial grave marker is Joseph, who was originally laid to rest in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery, then moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery in the town bearing his name. His monument stands twelve feet high and was erected by his grandson Louis in 1914. Around the base of the monument are the markers of Antoine, Michel, Francois, though not actually buried there, and Joseph's wife, Angelique, who died in 1857. All the Brothers Robidoux made and lost great personal fortunes, a reflection of that streak of gambler in each of them. Never patriot to much more than the desire for a new deal or the chance to make a profit, nonetheless they contributed to the founding of, and betterment of, the many communities they lived in, whether it was a frontier outpost or a city with great potential: St. Louis, Franklin, and St. Joseph, Missouri; the Council Bluffs/Omaha, Nebraska area; Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico; and Riverside, California.

  Americans, quite by accident, they seemed to remain stepchildren of the nation they contributed so much to. Though their presence in the West is frequently overshadowed by other mountain men and Indian traders of note, like Kit Carson, Bill Sublette, Thomas Fitzpatrick, or William Ashley, they stood as equals with nearly all their contemporaries and far above many of them, leaving a substantial and tangible legacy nearly everywhere they operated. In hindsight, many people might judge them to have been less than honorable, even scoundrels, in their dealings and treatment of the Native Americans, especially regarding the use of alcoholic drink to promote their trade and an ongoing sexual exploitation of Indian women. Their dealing with slavery, buying and selling both Native and African American victims, their sharp business practices, frontier polygamy, personal problems with drink or gambling, and the flippant way they approached their national identity make them less than admirable characters in the eyes of some.

  It must be remembered that the streak of adventurer that each of them carried, their zeal to achieve, their desire to seek and see, their willingness to risk, and great personal courage made them not only important contributors to the expansion of the nation, but brought them to truly epitomize the spirit of the American West. Their greatest legacy may be that they sired future generations of westerners, who followed in their ancestors' footsteps across the Great Plains and into the mountains, making their own impressions on the land and the native peoples. Others became urban leaders, merchants, and bankers, and their sons and daughters found the American dream, married well, and were blessed with grand families of their own. The number of descendants of the original Brothers Robidoux now number in the many hundreds.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Merrill J. Mattes, “Joseph Robidoux's Family: Fur Traders and Trail Blazers,” Overland Journal 6, no. 3 (1988): 2–9.

  2. Letter, Joseph Robidoux to Pierre Chouteau Jr., November 1, 1831, American Fur Company document 629, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri.

  Chapter 1

  1. William Foley, A History of Missouri: Volume I, 1673–1820 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 17. Also see John Francis McDermott, ed., The French in the Mississippi Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 8–9.

  2. William Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 4–8. Also see Janet Lecompte, “The Chouteaus and the St. Louis Fur Trade,” in Papers of the St. Louis Fur Trade, ed. William R. Swagerty (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1991), xiii. The historian Stan Hoig states Laclède served under Colonel Gilbert Maxent before retur
ning to New Orleans in 1762. See Stan Hoig, The Chouteaus First Family of the Fur Trade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 3.

  3. Foley and Rice, Chouteaus, 6–7; Foley, Missouri, 17–20; McDermott, 9–10; Lecompte, “The Chouteaus,” xiii.

  4. St. Louis Recorded Archives Index, Volume 2, Book 1:70, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. All references from the society are hereafter cited as MHS.

  5. Patricia Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 216–217.

  6. Marriage contract, St. Louis Recorded Archives Index, Volume 3, Book 1:186–187, MHS.

  7. Joseph's birthday has been quoted as August 3, 1784, a year Robidoux himself confirmed in a deposition, and August 10, 1783, used in some reference books, including the Dictionary of Missouri Biography. The church records from the St. Louis Genealogical Society also confirm the 1784 birthdate.

  8. Though this work is good for birth dates and other genealogical information, much of the history is anecdotal and occasionally contradictive. Orral Messmore Robidoux, Memorial to the Robidoux Brothers (Kansas City, MO: Smith-Greaves Printing Co., 1924), passim. Regarding the land grant, see Gilbert Garraghan, Saint Ferdinand de Florissant (Chicago: 1923), 54.

  9. Regarding the French architectural influence, see Charles Peterson, “The Houses of French St. Louis,” in The French in the Mississippi Valley, 17–41. Also see Paul Chrisler Phillips, The Fur Trade (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 2:223–227.

  10. Shirley Christian, Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 7–8.