Antoine Robidou was a fur trapper and fur trader, one of the first who started their expeditions to the Southwestern territorries of America after the Mexican War of Independence.
Background
Antoine Robidou was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, one of five sons of Joseph and Catherine (Rollet) Robidou. He himself and his brothers Joseph, Fransois, Louis, Michel were noted frontiersmen. Signatures of both Joseph and Fransois Robidou show that the name was spelled without the terminal x used by the present generation of the family.
Career
After the end of the Mexican War of Independence in 1821 Spanish authorities were removed from the Southwestern territorries of America and American fur trappers and fur traders moved their by small expeditions to start their businesses. "The first fur trader out of old Taos, " Antoine Robidoux has been called, and unless a prior claim can be proved for Ewing Young or William Wolfskill the distinction stands; he may have reached Taos as early as 1822. On what was probably his second expedition he set out with a small party, September 20, 1824, from Fort Atkinson, north of the present Omaha; and the Missouri Intelligencer (Franklin, Missouri) of April 19, 1825, mentions him as having been encountered in the previous fall on the "Green River (probably the Colorado of the West) at some point in the present Utah.
Probably in 1828 that he built a trading post on the Gunnison in what is now Colorado; about 1832 he established another post, Fort Robidou or Fort Uinta, in the Uinta Valley, northeastern Utah, that became a famous rendezvous for trappers, and for the next ten or eleven years he seems to have spent most of his time between these two posts and his New Mexican home.
He probably revisited the Missouri region in the winter of 1840-41, since there is general agreement that he was the "Roubideaux" who set in motion the first emigrant wagon train to the Pacific by telling John Bidwell wonderful stories about California.
John Charles Fremont, who was at the Uinta post on June 3-5, 1844, writes that it was attacked by Utes during Robidou's absence and that all its inmates were killed.
In the spring of 1846 Robidoux engaged with General Stephen Watts Kearny as interpreter for the New Mexican expedition, accompanied the detachment later sent to California, and was desperately wounded at the battle of San Pascual, December 6, 1846.
In 1847, partly recovered, he returned once more to Staint Joseph. He is said to have become blind in 1852, and on May 23 of that year Congress voted him a small pension. He died in Saint Joseph.
Personality
Well known over the whole frontier and highly regarded, he was one of the most energetic, daring, and adventurous of all the trader-trappers.
Quotes from others about the person
Robidou was of slight figure "a thin man, " writes Lieutenant Emory --and his portrait reveals a handsome, refined, and intelligent face.
Connections
In 1828 Robidou married Carmel Benavides, of a prominent New Mexican family, and established a home either in Taos or Santa Fe.
Robidou may have returned to the mountains in 1841 or 1842; in 1845 he abandoned them and moved with his wife and adopted daughter to Saint Joseph, Missouri, laid out by his brother Joseph two years before, in July 1843.