-
Chapter 3: Working the Missouri
- University of Missouri Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
46 CHAPTER 3 Working the Missouri By 1819 the oldest brother, Joseph Robidoux, was no longer a young, freewheeling fur trader who traveled extensively throughout the MississippiMissouri river valleys. He had reached middle age, but still enjoyed the frontier life, while keeping a family, consisting of his wife and eventually eight children, comfortably ensconced in St. Louis. By all accounts he had a friendly, engaging personality,hospitable and generous to family and stranger alike,and remained still just as ambitious as in his youth. On the subject of business no one could be more hard nosed, and his pen and tongue could be caustic, while his overly confident personality, frankly, irritated others. Shrewd and self-serving, by all accounts of his contemporaries, he openly reflected his ambition to be successful at what he did. His younger brothers, down to twenty-year-old Michel, all worked for or with him to some extent, coming and going from Joseph’s post near the mouth of the Platte, routinely commuting down to St. Louis and back. The end of 1819 witnessed the revival of the fur trade on the Missouri and gave all indications of becoming a wide-open market. The United States Government’s factory system neared extinction, thanks to the efforts of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, a power westerner in Congress and an unabashed disciple of the Chouteaus and their business. His legislative support led to the factory system officially going out of business in 1822. Another important move by the government to help the western fur traders involved the appointment of William Clark, the great explorer and former territorial governor of Missouri, as superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis. He held the post from 1822 to 1838, and as a friend of the Chouteaus, with a complete understanding of the needs of traders, he exercised generous leeway in the granting of licenses and passports for Indian trade from St. Louis all the way to the Rocky Mountains. The big British firms, the North West Fur Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled the north from Oregon to the Great Lakes, and sent agents to encroach down the Missouri even into Sioux territory . Manual Lisa again revived and reconstituted his Missouri Fur Company, recruiting new, younger partners: Andrew Drips, Charles Bent, Joshua Pilcher, Working the Missouri 47 and Lucien Fontenelle. Lisa continued to work the Council Bluffs area, but his daring and imagination took the company high up the Missouri, beyond the Mandans toward the Yellowstone country, to reestablish the bases abandoned nearly a decade before.1 Manuel Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company initially may have employed one of the Robidoux brothers for a time. Manuel Lisa identified one of them as an agent in a letter to his wife, Mary, dated May 25, 1819, written at Fort Lisa, asking her to tell them “to remain.” Remain where is not identified, and may better be translated as to not do any business until he returned. The same letter contains references to a number of other giants of the Missouri trade, Bernard Pratte, Michael Immel, and Bartholomew Berthhold. Considering the date of the letter, it well may have been at the time of his aborted expedition just prior to breaking with Berthold & Chouteau.2 It did not take long for Lisa’s competition to get organized and enter the picture, either. The outfit of Bernard Pratte and Louis Vasquez also pushed up the Missouri above Council Bluffs. In the years after the War of 1812, Joseph and Francois competed with an old nemesis, and brother-in-law of the Chouteaus, Jean Pierre Cabanné (1773–1841), near the Platte confluence, who operated his own company until 1819. Joseph and Francois operated a trading post with Alexander Papin in 1819, located on the Missouri near the site called Nashanotolona. According to the license documents they were in partnership with “Chouteau and Butholl” (Berthold, Chouteau & Company) of St. Louis, and licensed to trade with the “Ottoes, Ioways, Missourias, Pawnees, Mahas, Piankeshaws, and Sioux.” Their combined capital of $12,000 represented a truly sizable investment for that time. Berthold, Chouteau & Company, also called the French Company, took a cautious position, remaining on the lower Missouri, rarely operating farther north than Council Bluffs. Robidoux developed a good personal relationship with the Otoe Nation, who occupied the land south of the Platte and along the Missouri River. He also traded with the Omaha Nation (Mahas) in the area around the Bluffs.3 In faraway New...