After days of hunger he would fall in with the fortune to kill a deer, wolf or buffalo. All indifferent to its kind, indiscriminate as to its quality, he would greedily fill of its carcass bloodraw ; and striking a fire to keep away creatures that were a little more wild than he, he would lie down by the remnants of the half eaten carcass to sleep the fitful sleep of the jungle man ; while around him from the wilderness dark, two by two, burned luminous eyes of firewild hungry beasts.

When the great tides of humankind started on the overland trail, in the early forties, Robideaux remembered his old trade as a blacksmith, and took up his abode at Ft. Laramie, where he served the travelers by fixing their wagons, for enormous compensations, and by shoeing horses, mules and oxen, with hand forged shoes at the mild figure of three dollars per shoe.

By the spring of 1848, he had accumulated enough to lay in a supply of traders goods, and removed to "Scotts Bluff Hills." Scotts Bluffs were originally designated in the plural, and extended along the range, intersecting with the main Chalk mountains to the south and southwest.

Robideaux built a small trading station near the springs near the head of a canyon, and put up a blacksmith shop to continue his trade. John Evans Brown mentions him as "Rebedere," and says, "it was at that well known springs in the Scotts Bluffs." The springs referred to are those just above Woolridge's place. Brown was a forty-niner. Later he moved farther from the hills apparently to avoid danger from Arapahoe raids.