Writing to M. and F. Robidoux (Michel and Francois) on July 3, 1847, from the Great Nemaha Sub Agency, Hardin offered a typical exchange, nearly always conducted by a messenger or wagon driver named Edward Brichnell, who traveled frequently between the agency and St. Joseph, about thirty miles away. “By the bearer Mr. Brichnell I send you twenty seven pairs of moccasins, also fifteen dollars cash which you will forward to J. Robidoux as I suppose he needs all that he can get.” Apparently, Hardin had an awareness of some cash-flow problems. A month later Hardin sent by the same carrier, “twenty seven dollars cash, 66 pr moccasins, 23 lbs deer [skins?], 1 wolf, 2 buffalo, 3 cat, 8 coon skins and 3 hides.” In the same letter he requested the brothers in St. Joseph to send out to his agency store, “1 keg Sal Eratus, 1 small box of tea, 1 pound patent thread, 1 dozen fine combs, 1 box candles, ribbon (assorted colors), 1 or 2 dozen brooms, needles, tobacco, and white American blankets.” Hardin also asked for some fresh eggs, and quoted the price for the moccasins per pair at 20 cents. He also noted, “we are occasionally obliged to let a blanket go to bury the dead when a poor one can be made to pass.”21
Regarding Robidoux's relationship with the army officers overseeing the Indian agencies on which he traded, Hardin gave some insight. Writing to Joseph directly he informed him, “I fear that Maj. Rucker will pass you while you are waiting for him at S. Joseph and come some other way. Should he have orders for paying the annuity at once he will undoubtedly endeavor to come in such a way as to prevent its being known generally, in order to make the payment before the country is crowded and the Indians and himself are harassed by claimants.”22 Of course, Joseph Robidoux clearly fell into that category of claimants, as years before he established the practice of extending credit to the Indians until they could use their annuity to pay him off. Officers like Major Rucker likely had doubts about the veracity of all the whites who traded with the Indians, and Joseph's reputation for making sharp deals preceded him.
Hardin, serving as Robidoux's chief factor, dealt directly with the tribal leaders on the agency and frequently showed some frustration with them and the way his boss across the river in St. Joseph handled business. Robidoux made a visit to the Nemaha Agency in October 1847 to personally collect payments from the tribe. The following day Hardin wrote, “Sir—you had hardly got out of sight before White Cloud [chief of the Ioway tribe] came to beg for 2 kegs of powder on credit for hunting.”23 Five days later Hardin received word to give the chief the powder he had asked for. The Sac and Fox tribes also inhabited lands in northeast Kansas and did business at the Nemaha Agency. In Hardin's notes he makes it clear Robidoux still found the importing of liquor to the Indians as a viable part of his trade. “I understand that the Sacs are waiting to get credit before they go hunting, which I humbly trust they will not get. They have money enough to buy all their necessities and some whiskey.”24
Hardin handled the paperwork for Robidoux's Indian licenses. Writing to his boss in December 1847, he reminded him, “If you will send an application in writing for a license dated at the time of giving your bond or a few days before say the 10th of August, I think Maj. Rucker will grant a license in the form required by the new regulations.” That process took five weeks, after which Hardin wrote, “Your license is here ready for the Maj. to sign. It would have been signed and forwarded before the Maj. left if Brichnell had returned with the papers or sent as he promised instead of lying on the bank of the river as though he had rather camp out than be at home.”25
Hardin handled not only Joseph Robidoux's business dealings for two years, but also some personal matters. He sent the following brief note in October 1848, “Sir—E. Brichnell requests me to write a letter to you for him. He says your squaw is very sick and wants something nourishing and wishes you to send her some chickens.” The next month, Hardin wrote, “Brichnell wishes me to inform you that your squaw talks of starting to the Nemahaw on Wednesday if you do not come up sooner and she wants a quantity of provisions. The amount of the order which you gave her when here she sent to her mother, and now her sister has come back for more.”26 Joseph had been keeping the Indian woman, another country wife, someplace outside St. Joseph, but not at the agency. The relationship discussed in the note clearly indicates that Joseph, well into his sixties, continued his polygamous ways, even with Angelique living in the same house in St. Joseph. From what Brichnell reported, Joseph supported the woman in some tangible way, and though not mentioned, may well have still been siring even more “papooses” with her. Hardin left Robidoux's employ later in 1848 and the following year Joseph sold his post near the agency to another trader.27
By 1848, Robidoux's town on the Missouri had grown into the “Queen City of the West,” meaning beyond it to the west lay nothing of greater urban stature until one reached San Francisco. Therefore, for a brief period, it could rightfully claim to be the queen city of the West, a title of urban prominence, previously and later claimed by any number of other cities west of the Appalachian Mountains during the nineteenth century. A traveler named S. C. Slater wrote to his father, John, back in New Market, Vermont, a glowing description of the place from the Missouri Hotel. “Previous to the fall of 1843, St. Joseph was nothing more than a trading post and was owned by one man, a Frenchman by the name of Robidoux. At the period above mentioned the first public sale of lots was made and the town has continued to increase until it now contains a population of 1,500 inhabitants. The demand for buildings is very great and a great many are going up. Fifty-two brick houses alone were taken under contract last spring. Settlers come in very fast and houses are sold and occupied before they are completed. Lots which sold at the commencement of the town for $100 are worth 6 or 8 or perhaps 10 times that amount now. A lot on Main Street sold last spring for $1500 and 2 large store houses are being built upon it. The best lots have been sold, but ‘Old Joe’ has many for sale at $100 to $150, which will be very valuable in a few years. Of the continued growth and prosperity of St. Joe there is little doubt and it certainly offers fine inducements for speculations. I prefer it to any place I have seen yet in Upper Missouri.”28
During late 1847 and early 1848, the Robidouxs had settled into a permanent base in the pass south of Scott's Bluff. So much so that the moniker Robidoux's Pass began appearing in nearly every written reference to the place in emigrant journals. There are also references to at least a temporary base of operation at Ash Hollow. Mountain man Joe Meek, traveling east along the Platte in 1848, found a “Robidou Fort” there, kept by a Frenchman named Le Beau, probably an engagé of Joseph Robidoux. The fort could not have amounted to much as there are no other journal references to anything of notable size there, other than a Sioux Indian village. Offering supplies to immigrants could prove lucrative, but money could also be made from a continued Indian trade in the one great commodity of the Plains, buffalo robes. As the references of immigrants going west encountering various Robidoux business ventures increased, there were marked references to the occasions of passing wagons and ox-drawn carts going the opposite direction, reeking of their uncured cargo of buffalo hides, being guided by a Robidoux or some of their engagés.29
News began to trickle out in late 1848 confirming rumors of a major gold find in California. Buried in the middle of the second page of the St. Joseph Gazette (Ridenbaugh added the town's name to his paper earlier that year) for October 27, 1848, assuming one skipped over all the election hoopla of the front page, Joseph Robidoux would have read, “An Immense Bed of Gold, one hundred miles in extent, has been discovered in California, on American Fork and Feather rivers, tributaries of the Sacramento, near Monterey. Mr. Colton, the alcalde of Monterey, states that the gold is found in the sands in grains resembling squirrel shot, flattened out. Some grains weigh an ounce each. It is got by washing out the sand in any vessel, from a tea saucer to a warming pan. A single person can gather an ounce or two a day, and some even a hundred dollars worth. Two thousand whites and as many Indians are on the ground. All the American settlements are
deserted, and farming nearly suspended. The women only remain in the settlements. Sailors and captains desert the ships to go to the gold region, and laborers refuse ten dollars a day to work on the farms.”30
Though the same edition ran a story three times as long on hemp cultivation, Joseph Robidoux working from his base in his new city looked west seeing St. Joseph as a prime jumping-off point for the overland trek. Thousands of emigrants needed everything, and the merchants of St. Joseph intended to provide it. The growing city had regular steamboat service from St. Louis, ferry service to cross the Missouri River, good camping grounds, and men ready to organize the wagon trains, and it lay closer to the Platte River Road than did Independence, fifty miles to the south. Joseph Robidoux knew there would be a tremendous demand for horses and mules, and he began to acquire stock.
Rudolph Kurz spent much time in St. Joseph as the gold fever built and commented in his journal, “At the end of January 1849 the first gold seeker showed himself in St. Joseph.” They represented the vanguard of a massive migration that sent prices in St. Joseph into a climbing spiral. “The farmer fixed no price for his products but advanced them higher and higher with each new band of adventurers. A bushel of corn, formerly only 15 cents, advanced to $1; a barrel, containing 5 bushels was $5. Ham, formerly from 3 to 7 cents a pound, was now 12 cents; butter, from 8 to 25 cents. Oftentimes bread could not be had at all.” As the spring brought thaw and grass emerged, Kurz noted, “The city was packed so full of people that tents were pitched about the city and along the opposite bank of the river in such numbers that we seemed to be besieged by an army. Every house lot that was enclosed became a stable and brought in money to the owner.”31
On May 4, 1849, the St. Joseph Gazette ran an article under the title, “Off For California—full of names of those departing for the gold fields. Miamisburg, Ohio, California Mining and Trading Company.” In part it read, “Arrived in St. Joseph two weeks ago on steamer John Hancock, and have been camped at Mr. Wells' 3–4 miles north of town, on the river road. They have employed Mr. A. Robidoux, of this place, who will go with this company in the capacity of pilot. The company is well supplied with everything necessary for the trip and expect to go through without delay.” The little article may refer to brother Antoine, returned from California after the close of the Mexican War and residing in brother Joseph's town for a while, or the nephew Antoine, who also knew well the route along the Platte River Road.32
Field agent Bruce Husband, working for Andrew Drips at Fort John in May 1849, wrote concerning the growing flow of California immigrants on the road to Fort Laramie. It seemed that someone down the road had been trying to influence the immigrants to stay away from Drips's operation and those actions hurt his business. “We might make a little by the shop but every party that has passed inform me & in fact everyone here, that the free men who are with the Sioux at Ash Hollow, scare people from having anything to do with us. Mr. Robidoux is particularly mentioned as having told that we were all damned rascals & cheats at this place. I am not aware of having given any one cause to say this of us & I shall make him aware of my opinion of his conduct if I ever see him.”33 No doubt Joseph, still full of business savvy, had camped some of his nephews at Ash Hollow to drum up business for the operations farther along the trail.
While Independence battled to claim preeminence as a jumping-off point for emigrants going to California, by 1849 St. Joseph had made every effort to sell itself as the superior point of departure, and in fact, surpassed its older neighbor to the south. Lying in the bluffs on the east side of a great C-shaped bend in the Missouri River, it had regular steamboat service and could be reached by overland roads from St. Louis and other points east. By virtue of the fact that one could outfit just as completely there and that it lay fifty miles north of Independence, with the advantage of bringing the emigrants one hundred miles nearer to the Blue River junction, saving a full week to ten days of trail time, Robidoux's town had a most powerful selling point.
J. Goldsborough Bruff, the fastidious and impeccably organized leader of a company from Washington, D.C., selected St. Joseph to disembark from the steamers and prepare for the overland trek in 1849. The first week of his meticulous journal reflected the routine of emigrants preparing to strike out across the plains and the view of the St. Joseph area seen by everyone who came there. “April 27…At 5 p.m. reached St. Jose [Joseph]—and repaired to the Camp. Regulating matters in Camp, and breaking mules, the latter quite a task for many who had seldom seen a mule. Rousing the camp every morning at 4 o'clock. May 7…As far as we could see, over a great extent of vallies & hills, the country was speckled with the white tents and wagon covers of the emigrants.”34
Sallie Hester also left from St. Joseph in the year 1849. Like many of the emigrants, her observations of the scene around St. Joseph reflect an awe, a true sense of the scope of what the grand migration to see the elephant was all about. On April 27, she wrote, “St. Joe. Here we are at last, safe and sound. We expect to remain here several days, laying in supplies for the trip and waiting our turn to be ferried across the river. As far as eye can reach, so great is the emigration, you see nothing but wagons. This town presents a striking appearance—a vast army of wheels—crowds of men, women and lots of children and last but not least the cattle and horses upon which our lives depend.”35
Margaret Frink, traveling to California with her husband in 1850, left from St. Joseph. Her diary is most impressive in the scope of its detail, and even more so, in the fact that it presents a woman's voice into a historical event that males so clearly dominated by their sheer numbers. She wrote on April 23, 1850,
We got into St. Joseph at 10 o'clock this morning. The whole country around the town is filled with encampments of California emigrants. This is the head of the emigration at the present time. They have gathered here from the far east and south, to fit out and make final preparations for launching out on the great plains, on the other side of the Missouri River. Every house of entertainment in the city is crowded to its full capacity. This has been a backward spring season, and thousands are patiently waiting for the grass to grow. Traveled two miles north of the town and settled into a cabin until the grass should grow on the Kansas and Nebraska prairies, and remained for the next fifteen days. We still lacked something to complete our stock of supplies: for we had neither pickles, potatoes, nor vinegar. The army of emigration was so numerous that the demand for these and many other articles could only with difficulty be fully supplied. Mr. Frink traveled sixteen miles through the farming country searching for pickled cucumbers. I prepared the vegetables and put them up in kegs of apple vinegar; these were our principal defense against that dreadful disease, the scurvy, from which the overland emigration of 1849 had suffered so severely. Not many days had passed before we began to hear frightful tales of Indian depredations on the plains, which had a tendency, at first, to shake the resolution of some members of the party.36
While Bruff waited to move his company he continued his preparations, which included adding more men. Whereas other emigrants came and went from train to train, company to company with only a nod of acceptance or a tip of the hat good-bye, joining or leaving Bruff's military style operation required an oath. “I had to swear 4 men to the constitution of the company, in accordance with said constitution,” he wrote in his journal. However, when looking at the cut of the men he agreed to take on, he realized their acceptance of the by-laws in no way reflect anything like his own commitment to following them or seeing the trek through. “I had intimated, at the meeting which adopted said constitution, how many of the men would regard the obligation about as much as singing psalms to a dead horse, or whistling jigs for a milestone.” Completing his list of necessary supplies, he jotted down, “I purchased a common thermometer, the only one left for sale, in St. Jose.”37
The singular disadvantage of using St. Joseph as a jumping-off point seemed to have been the limited ability of its ferries over the Missouri to keep up with the
tremendous demand. At the height of the season, a week, even two, of waiting was not out of the ordinary. That dissuaded some and sent others either up or down the river looking for other ferrying operations to get them across to the Kansas side. As Bruff described it, “There were but two very indifferent scows at the ferry, and these were being plied from the earliest day till midnight, every day; had been so for weeks, and from the mass herd, would continue for several weeks more. From the principal street in St. Jose, down 300 yards crossing a bridge, to the river bank, was one dense mass of wagons, oxen, and people, and as soon as a wagon entered the scow, the next moved down to the water's edge, and the mass in the rear closed up to the front, affording the opportunity to one or more lucky wagons to fall in the extreme rear, &c. Fighting for precedence was quite common, and a day or two since, 2 teamsters, in one of these disputes, killed each other with pistols. This slow mode of crossing the river, would, I thought, take my train of 14 Company and 2 private wagons, to gradually get into place and cross, in a very disjointed way, about a fortnight.” Being as well organized as he was, and to an extreme in comparison to most emigrants, Bruff weighed his options and decided on a different course. “I knew that the opposite site side for a considerable distance was marshy, there were many streams to cross, forage was scarce, and besides there was plenty of Cholera there. Whereas, by going up river, corn &c. could be had, on reasonable terms, a tolerable road laid before us, and lastly, a country of high rolling prairie intervening between the Missouri and Platte rivers.”38
The Brothers Robidoux and the Opening of the American West Page 28
