The Brothers Robidoux and the Opening of the American West

by Robert J. Willoughby

  During 1851, a small army post had been built near his ranch to protect the settlers from Indians who raided to steal horses and cattle. Not long after arriving in California, Robidoux reported the number of horses stolen and cattle driven off and butchered by the Indians to be as high as a thousand in a three-month period. Louis realized the Cajon Pass at the head of the Santa Ana River valley could be made safe with little expense if the army constructed a fort to block the route used by the Mojave and other Indian raiders. When built, the fort, constructed of heavy adobe bricks, covered two acres. The garrison remained quite small most of the time but at one point the fort housed two hundred soldiers. One observer described the early commander of the fort, a Captain Lovell, as “a sedate, methodical, sober kind of officer, who seemed perfectly content to sit in his elegant quarters, issue orders to his little army of a dozen or so well-fed, clean shaved, white cotton gloved, lazy, fat fellows, resigned to a life of well-fed indolence.” Apparently the presence of the troops did little to stop local Indians from stealing livestock on a regular basis or from making other threats. Robidoux's house was also built of thick adobe and the stone walls had loopholes for muskets, indicative of the danger that still existed in California. Once, Louis accompanied the local army commander to meet with a band of the San Jacinto Indians and served as the interpreter. Both sides expressed a desire for peace, but raids to pilfer livestock continued.59

  In 1853, Louis won election as a county supervisor for the newly formed San Bernardino County and became the board's first president. Much of his political support came from a community of former New Mexico residents who had settled west of his Jurupa rancho at Agua Mansa. His tenure on the board lasted until 1861. During most of that period he frequently found himself at odds with the other members of the board, who were Mormons. Members of the Mormon faith had migrated to the Los Angeles area shortly after the war with Mexico. A detachment of troops from the Mormon Battalion had seen the San Bernardino valley in February 1847. Though not favored by Brigham Young, 80,000 acres were purchased in 1851 and a fairly substantial Mormon settlement of one thousand existed in San Bernardino Township. When the county organized they elected two of the three supervisors, Louis being the odd man out.60

  He generally got on with the Mormons until 1856, even though there were complaints about the Mormons from “gentiles” in his constituency. When Louis filed a suit to collect a debt from three Mormon men, named Lyman, Hopkins, and Rich, the situation became more personal. The three Mormons felt that no lawsuit was needed, that they intended to pay the note, but Louis would not wait any longer. As the Mormons saw it, “For the first time our place was the scene of one of those legal robberies that so often characterize civilized nations. A lawsuit was instituted by the owner of Jurupa Rancho against one of his neighbors, and the parties appeared before the justices of the peace here and called for a jury of our people. It is to be hoped that this is the last time our Gentile neighbors will bring their difficulties to us to settle.”61 Since Louis served as the justice of the peace he had to be disqualified to hear his own suit. Fueled by the prejudice and hatred that had followed Mormons almost everywhere they had been, efforts commenced to expel their community from the San Bernardino valley in 1856. Louis joined the local anti-Mormon party, called the Independents (or Apostates by the Mormons), and participated in an anti-Mormon political meeting. There he became drunk and nearly precipitated a bloody brawl. Afterward he traveled under guard until many of the Mormon families began withdrawing during 1857–1858.62

  During the decade of the 1850s his rancho prospered, producing cattle and sheep, a substantial wool shearing, orchard and vineyard land, corn, and bread grains. Louis must have relished the capacity to produce two thousand gallons of wine and hundreds of gallons of peach and other fruit brandies. In 1854, his assessed value in land and personal property, including his house, horses, cattle, and sheep, as well as money owed him by others, amounted to over $20,000, clearly a prosperous life. But the 1854 assessment showed a marked decline in the once huge landholdings of Robidoux. While the Jurupa Rancho still had 3,000 acres, and his San Timoteo holding consisted of 640 acres, Louis had lost court battles before the American judges and land commissioners. Much of the problem stemmed from the fact that the original Bandini grants, sold or given to migrants from New Mexico, omitted or did not clearly state their property rights. When new arrivals staked claims to lands near Robidoux and he could not produce clear titles to the San Jacinto and much of the original San Timoteo Ranchos, nor even verify exact boundary lines, again the fault of Bandini, he lost some of it.63

  Other issues that weighed on Louis Robidoux's mind involved water rights and the system of taxation on land, which he attempted to avoid by under reporting his holdings. Louis had selected the site of his rancho prior to the Mexican War, when the land was sparsely settled and the stream through his property flowed more than plentiful. After the United States took California and large numbers of Anglos arrived, seeking land and irrigation rights, water use became an issue.64 In 1856, while on business in Los Angeles, his drinking got the better of him again and he landed in jail for a few nights. At the sprawling Jurupa Rancho the arrival of new neighbors was not all bad. They brought with them an increase in the opportunities for social exchange. Louis hosted parties for feasting and dancing, which no doubt helped him maintain his political popularity. A tutor came to educate the children on the rancho and a priest said Mass there once each month. In 1858 Louis served on a committee to supervise the building of a new Catholic Church in the town of San Bernardino.65

  CHAPTER 12

  The End of Their Era

  Isadore and Michel remained in business in St. Joseph as partners until Isadore died during the summer of 1852. In the probate records of Buchanan County, Missouri, Isadore is listed as having died intestate, with Michel, also referred to as Mitchel or Mitchell in some documents, appears as “the surviving partner of Michel Robidoux & Co.” To secure the settlement of debts owned by brother Isadore, Michel as the administrator of the estate and Joseph and Felix Robidoux posted a bond of $26,000.1 Michel remained in St. Joseph. He maintained until his death an ongoing business relationship with Major Andrew Drips and the trade area around Fort Laramie. It is believed he died in April 1858 at age sixty, survived by his wife, Susan, the sister of Joseph's wife, Angelique.

  Francois retained St. Joseph as a base of operation, in some business association with his brothers during the 1850s. Having built no real financial security, and by 1850 having given up all his property and connections in St. Louis, he continued to work the trade routes on the plains between St. Joseph and Scott's Bluff, either as a guide for emigrants or trading with Indians. Buchanan County Records indicate probate administration for Francois Robidoux was issued in April 1856 and that he died intestate. No St. Joseph newspaper carried an obituary or death notice, and there is no known grave site. Possibly he died at Scott's Bluff or somewhere on the plains between there and St. Joseph. In Mount Olivet Cemetery in St. Joseph, at the base of the monument to his brother Joseph, there is a marker for him, stating that he died on the Great Plains in 1857.

  In St. Joseph, Joseph Robidoux saw the zenith of his empire come and go. Son Jules assumed the operation of the storefront mercantile business and civic activity. Joseph had made large sums of money from the Indian and fur trades and from real estate, but he proved a soft touch for, as Kurz described them, “his 60 papooses, his seven white children, and several brothers in rags and tatters,” who “continually consume his substance,” as well as business associates who professed friendship, got loans, but never repaid them. Gambling proved his greatest vice, and he was well known throughout the community as always open to a good card game. Apparently his skill, particularly bluffing, for a time, proved formidable. But in Joseph's case, as with most gamblers, luck and guile were balanced with an amount of losing, leading to financial wreckage. Kurz spent much time in St. Joseph and knew of Joseph's gambling skills. He recounted a
popular story:

  As I have said already, he had a passion for card playing. As he went every spring to St. Louis, and, indeed to New York, for the purpose of selling furs and also of bringing back a new stock of Indian goods he had, on the steamers, plenty of opportunity for gambling. The game usually played is one in which that player wins who risks the highest stake; whether he actually holds the highest cards in his hand is immaterial. The game is called poker. On one of the old man's trips up the Missouri he met with an experienced partner; they were strangers to each other. Robidoux, rather poorly dressed as was his habit, did not impress his opponent in the game as one to be feared, so after they had been playing for quite a while, the latter, with the intention of springing a surprise, put up a considerable sum. Old Robidoux, however, instead of showing concern, called to the waiter; “Bring that old trunk of mine here! Here are one thousand dollars in cash; I bet'em all.” The stranger could not increase the amount; consequently, not withstanding the fact that he held the better cards, he lost the game and was obliged to give up his high stake of 700 or 800 dollars.2

  Joseph remained a promoter of his town throughout much of the decade of the 1850s, especially in regard to the coming of the railroad. Work proceeded slowly while members of the Missouri delegation in Congress tried to get federal support for the project. When railroad officials agreed to build a spur line to the town of Palmyra, Missouri, fifteen miles north of Hannibal, planning, if not actual work, accelerated. Once completed, St. Joseph would be directly connected to Chicago and become the western terminal of the entire American railroad system up to that time, with the obvious repercussion of also being the natural choice as the jumping-off point for the railroad to California. The Hannibal and St. Joseph company received federal land grants of over 600,000 acres, which greatly increased the revenue potential of the line. A major piece of the financial puzzle fell into place when John Duff, a wealthy New England rail contractor, bought into the project, investing one million dollars. Finally in 1853, the surveyors staked out the bed for the first twenty-five miles of track running east from St. Joseph with grading and bridge work to begin.3

  Despite ongoing words of encouragement from the town founder, Joseph Robidoux, and the haranguing of local newspaper editors, things proceeded slowly. St. Joseph had added the Adventure, a Whig paper, to balance the Democratic Gazette. Both editorial columns asked, “when will things get moving?” The final answer to that question came with the entrance of John Murray Forbes, the Boston capitalist who had financed railroads across Michigan to Chicago and from there on to Quincy, Illinois, on the east bank of the Mississippi. He had no particular interest in Robidoux's town other than it represented an extension of the growing hinterland of Chicago, rapidly becoming the dominant city and transportation hub of the plains. Forbes pumped in capital, purchased most of the shares in the Hannibal and St. Joseph company, and got the work moving. Robert Stewart, the primary original promoter and president of the company, resigned to run for governor of Missouri. He won the election, becoming the first governor from Robidoux's town, and his stepping aside gave Forbes the free hand he wanted with the line. In early 1857 an engine was ferried across the Mississippi at Quincy and work began in earnest for the first time. Building of the 180-mile line commenced from both ends and joined at Chillicothe, seventy miles east of St. Joseph in late 1858. The grand opening of the line took place on February 22, 1859, with a train carrying company officials arriving to perform a ceremony at Blacksnake Creek in the presence of Joseph Robidoux. They poured symbolic waters from the Atlantic Ocean, Lake Michigan, and the Mississippi into the Missouri at the mouth of the creek, the marriage of waters that marked a great day in American railroad history.4

  Immediately following the opening of the Hannibal and St. Joseph line talk arose of throwing a bridge across the Missouri River at St. Joseph and getting the transcontinental under way. St. Joseph's mayor, M. Jeff Thompson, became a leading promoter and invested in a company to push on to Marysville, in Kansas Territory, securing $100,000 in initial subscriptions. Meanwhile, an intrastate battle brewed between the promoters of the Hannibal and St. Joseph line and the still-not-completed Missouri Pacific line to connect St. Louis with Kansas City, as to which should be the jumping-off point for the transcontinental. Of course, that decision would ultimately come from the Congress of the United States, and heavy lobbying for both positions took place in Washington, D.C., and the respective local presses. In April 1860 the St. Joseph newspapers boasted that the Special Committee on the Pacific Railroad had determined a central route for the transcontinental best, meaning Chicago and any cities connected to Chicago would benefit. Joe Robidoux and the people of his town waited for word throughout 1860, but in the meantime, a crisis of unimaginable consequences brewed on the near horizon.5

  The exact whereabouts of Antoine and his family during the period between 1850 and 1855 is undocumented. It is possible he spent some of that time in north-central California, having gone there to trade with the hordes of gold seekers. He may have stayed briefly in Santa Fe. But in early 1855 his presence in St. Joseph is documented by his efforts to get bounty land and a pension from the U.S. Government for his service in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War under Kearny. The Congress had passed new bounty-land legislation in March 1855 and Antoine petitioned to be declared eligible. He presented a claim for bounty land on April 3, 1855, and his attorney in St. Joseph, George Hall, sent it on to Loren Waldo, the commissioner of pensions in the Franklin Pierce administration, along with an affidavit from Antoine's doctor, documenting his disabilities.6

  But by the end of 1855, nothing had been heard from Washington and Antoine's financial situation must have begun to strain as the inability to do physical work and blindness encroached. He personally traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with his representative, J. S. Phelps, who in turn went to meet with then secretary of war Jefferson Davis. Not finding the secretary in, Phelps left a note with Davis's clerk stating that “Robidoux is now in the City, old, infirmed and blind, on his way to Philadelphia with a view of obtaining if possible some relief of the latter infirmity. He thought an application had been made last Spring and expected to get his pmt. But it seems that no such application can now be found and as an old Indian, trapper & hunter and one whose life has been directed to the frontier service, asks in his old age that the bounty of the Government may be made subservient NOW to his wants and necessities.” Jefferson Davis read the note and wrote on the back of it, “Refer to Comm. Pensions & so advise Mr. P-, Feb. 26/56.”7

  On March 11, 1856, John Phelps of the U.S. House of Representatives made a motion to introduce, “a bill for the relief of Antoine Robedeau.”8 That the name had been misspelled mattered not. Two weeks later, “The petition of Antoine Robedoux [misspelled again], praying for a pension for services as a Spanish interpreter under General Kearney” was referred to the Committee on Invalid Pensions.9 The accompanying committee report stated, “His attending physician, a man of good reputation as a surgeon, in his profession, testifies that the effect of this lance wound is now, and has been, since the reception of said wound, such as to render him entirely unable to make a support for himself and family by manual labor.”

  Emerging with a favorable recommendation of passage from that committee on May 23, 1856, and reported to the Committee of the Whole House without amendment, the full bill, H.R. 196, read as follows:

  A Bill

  For the relief of Antoine Robedeau.

  1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives

  2 of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That

  3 the Secretary of the Interior shall inscribe on the invalid pen—4 sion roll the name of Antoine Robedeau, who was an inter— 5 preter to General Kearney whilst in command of the army of

  6 the West, and was wounded in the Battle of San Pasqual, at

  7 the rate of sixteen dollars and sixty six cents per month to

  8 commence on the first day of Dec
ember, eighteen hundred

  9 and fifty five, and to continue during his natural life.10

  With passage in the House, Antoine's pension bill went to the Senate where it appeared in the Senate journal on August 9, 1856. “Mr. President: the House of Representatives have passed the following bills, in which they request the concurrence of the Senate: H. R. 196 an act for relief of A. Robedeau.”11 The Senate cleared Antoine's pension bill on August 22, 1856, as Senator Asa Biggs “reported from the committee that they this day presented to the President of the United States [Franklin Pierce] the following enrolled bills: H. R. 196, An act for the relief of Antoine Robdeau,” among nearly two dozen similar relief bills that same day. President Pierce signed it into law the next day.12

  Later that same summer of 1856, the House of Representatives saw another petition regarding Antoine's service during the Mexican War introduced by Benjamin Pringle. “The memorial of Antoine Robidoux [spelled correctly], praying compensation for services as interpreter and guide to the United States army under General Kearney, in the war with Mexico.”13 Antoine asked Pringle to present his memorial for expenses to cover the cost of his recuperation and the return trip from California to St. Joseph. That petition went to the Committee on Military Affairs, which quickly returned it to “the Committee of the Whole House,” with the accompanying Report No. 226. The report concluded, “The committee, looking at the great affliction he has suffered in behalf of his country, and at the fact that he was doing duty as a staff officer at the time of his wound, think that he is entitled at the hands of the government to his traveling expenses.” But apparently problems exist in the documentation for the record shows that the Whole House “be discharged from the further consideration of the papers in the case of Antoine Robideaux [yet another spelling], and that the same be referred back to the Committee of Military Affairs.”14