Antoine Robidoux and Fort Uncompahgre

Antoine Robidoux and Fort Uncompahgre is a short biography of a fur trader and the trading post he ran in what is now Western Colorado. The description calls Robidoux perhaps the first permanent white settler in the region. His post drew well known mountain men, among them Joe Meek and Kit Carson.

What held the business together, the description says, was his relationship with the Ute Indians, whom he depended upon. Ken Reyher tells how Robidoux controlled the fur trade in this part of the West for a little over two decades. It is described as a lively tale, and it covers the hardships that came with Robidoux's way of living.

The story has a place you can still visit. The trading post has been recreated as a living history museum in Delta, Colorado. At 96 pages, this is a compact book that a reader can finish in an evening, and it is the first of Reyher's books that Western Reflections published. The Open Library subjects are fur traders, biography and history, and the book works as all three.

This is a book for readers of fur trade and mountain man history, and for anyone planning a visit to Delta who wants the story before seeing the fort. Teachers and librarians in Western Colorado will find a short, readable account of the region's early trade. Readers curious about Ute history will find the subject treated through the trading relationship. It is nonfiction and brief, so it also suits someone new to the period who wants a first book rather than a thick academic study.

This was Ken Reyher's first book with Western Reflections, according to the description of his later Silver & Sawdust. He is a former history teacher and crop dusting pilot, and he lives outside Olathe, Colorado, not far from the country where the fort stood. See his author page for the four books that followed.

More about Ken Reyher →

Fort Uncompahgre was a trading post built in 1828 by Antoine Robidoux, a trader based in Mexican Santa Fe. According to Wikipedia, it stood about two miles below the confluence of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre rivers, near present day Delta, Colorado, and was also nicknamed Fort Robidoux. Its design was meant more to secure goods and livestock than to defend against attack.

Wikipedia's article on Robidoux gives his dates as September 24, 1794 to August 29, 1860, and says he was born in Saint Louis and died in St. Joseph, Missouri. It describes the fort as arguably the first permanent trading operation west of the Continental Divide. In 1829 he and his brother Louis received near exclusive trapping and trading rights in Ute country and were granted Mexican citizenship.

The post was abandoned in 1844 when hostilities broke out between the Utes and Mexicans. The exact site of the original fort has been lost. In 1989 and 1990 local historian William Bailey led a group that rebuilt it, and the reconstruction is open to the public.

Source: Wikipedia, Fort Uncompahgre