Antoine Robidoux was the most colorful and perhaps the best known of the six Robidoux brothers. He is known so much not through the records of St. Louis or St. Joseph, as through the documentary sources from places scattered across the Western half of the United States and from a wide array of others who knew and met him and briefly described their encounter. He is in some ways more controversial than his brother Joseph--virtually villanized as a ruthless slave trader by the Mormons of Utah, he is referred to as a "gentleman" in his obituary and by many others who had his acquaintance. One time becoming a Mexican citizen and first non-Mexican Alcalde' of Santa Fe, he publicly denounced and chastized the other American traders of Santa Fe for not following suit. Twenty years later he is literally leading Kearny's Army of the West against the Mexican Government. Known as the Kingpin of the Colorado fur trade, he died in poverty, blind and crippled from his lance-wounds. Well respected and even liked by many different Indians, his two forts were some of the few trading forts ever to be attacked …show more content…
He apparently was not a man without contradictions--both good and bad. To villainize him for buying and selling slaves and possibly for enslaving Indians for profit is to ignore the cultural and historical context in which he was operating. He died several years before the Civil War began. He was raised by a father who was also a slave owner in a slave state. He entered into Spanish territory where the slave trade had been conducted continuously for more than a century already, where Indians higher on the totem pole of life habitually and unhesitatingly preyed on other Indian groups. To claim that he was not a man without strong vices, is not to say that he was also a man without strong virtues also. Good or bad, he was a man who stood tall in his own time, and a man for many, if not all,