Family history states that Robert Stuart was born on February 19, 1785 in Strathyre, in the historic parish of Balquhidder, but grew up in Callander, both towns in Perthshire, about 15 and 20 miles northwest of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Except that he received a good common-school education, little is known of his youth.
After a perilous journey, attended by extreme privation and suffering, over a route which in considerable part had never before been seen by white men, the little party arrived in St. Louis on Apr. 30, 1813.
In 1807 he arrived in Montreal to join his uncle, David Stuart, then an agent of the North West Fur Company, and sometime later entered the fur company's service. In the spring of 1810 he met Wilson Price Hunt, who had gone to Montreal to complete the organization of John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, and following the example of his uncle he became a partner in the new organization.
On September 6 of that year he took passage on the Tonquin with the expedition for the Columbia. From the time of the arrival on March 25, 1811, Stuart was active and efficient in the affairs of the colony. In the summer of 1812 he was chosen by the partners as a courier to carry dispatches overland to Astor, and on June 29, with six companions, one of whom was Ramsay Crooks, he left Astoria.
After a perilous journey, attended by extreme privation and suffering, over a route which in considerable part had never before been seen by white men, the little party arrived in St. Louis on April 30, 1813.
From St. Louis Stuart hurried on to New York, where the dispatches were delivered. Astor employed both men, Stuart for several years serving as a traveling agent in the East, and later as Crooks's assistant at Mackinac.
About 1820, on the transfer of Crooks to New York, Stuart succeeded him, and for the next fourteen years he remained as the head of the American Fur Company for the upper lakes region.
For a short time after Astor's retirement and Crooks's assumption of the presidency of the reorganized company in 1834, he appears to have remained at Mackinac, but in 1835 he established a home in Detroit. Here he invested heavily in real estate, and with ample time on his hands busied himself in civic, educational, and church affairs. In 1837 and again in 1839 he was director of the Detroit poor.
In 1840 he was appointed by the governor to fill a vacancy as state treasurer - an office which he held for more than a year, and, from early in 1841 to April 14, 1845, he was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan. Business in connection with the project of constructing a canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River took him, in the fall of 1845, to Chicago, where he became the secretary of the Canal Company's trustees.
Here, three years later, he was seized with a sudden illness, from which he died. The body was returned to Detroit for burial. His widow, two daughters, and three sons survived him.
He died on October 28, 1848, and is buried at the historic Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit.
At Mackinac he had come under the influence of the Presbyterian missionary, the Rev. William M. Ferry, who seems to have converted him from a state of complete indifference to religion to one of zealotry, and tamed considerably the hot-headedness which, on one occasion, led him to fracture the skull of a worker who became unruly.
A man of great executive ability, energetic, politic, and shrewd, he managed the organization's affairs with signal success, being particularly interested in 1824 in lobbying for high duties for blankets and guns for trading purposes.
He became deeply concerned about many of the questions of his time. Though opposed to outright abolition of slavery, he was a friend and helper of runaway slaves; he was an advocate of justice to the Indian, of temperance, of better educational facilities, of adequate relief for the poor. The characterization made of him as a "severe man, " however, is not borne out by his letters, especially those to Crooks, which reveal in him a warm-hearted friendliness and an engaging playfulness of mood.
Quotes from others about the person
Stuart is described by a contemporary as "a severe man in all things, " including family discipline and religious observance.
Arriving in New York, he took lodgings in Brooklyn, where he met Elizabeth Emma Sullivan, to whom three years later, on July 21, 1813, he was married. His son David became a prominent attorney in Detroit, a representative in Congress, and, as a soldier in the Civil War, attained the rank of brigadier-general.
