The rifle that Herb photographed has no connection to Wayne Robidoux, or any other Robidoux that I know of, other than Wayne drew up a detail set of blueprints to make a duplicate of the rifle.
That said, the family name of Robidoux, with its many spellings, can be found all across North America. They initially came to Acadia and New France. From there, they spread out through Canada, the Great Lakes region, St. Louis, Louisiana, and the West. The name has long been associated with the fur trade.
Joseph Robidoux II, a fur trader from Canada, was one of the early inhabitants of St. Louis in the 1770s. He raised six sons that were all involved in the fur trade. The eldest, Joseph III, ran his father's business in St. Louis. The other five sons went west. One of them, Antoine, went to Taos in the spring of 1824. Antoine trapped the southern Rockies with other trappers from Taos. He eventually established the first trading posts in Western Colorado. Fort Uncompahgre was constructed by Antoine Robidoux in 1828 at the confluence of the Gunnison River and the Uncompahgre River, near the present town of Delta, CO. In 1832, Antoine Robidoux built a second trading post up near where Herb lives that was called Fort Unitah. He built a third trading post around 1837 on the Green River in present day Utah called Fort Robidoux, but it was short lived.
From the Amazon description for the book
Robidoux Chronicles: French-Indian Ethnoculture of the Trans-Mississippi West by Hugh M. Lewis
Robidoux Chronicles treats with comprehensive documentary detail the factual history of the Robidoux lineage in North America from the first progenitor who arrived in Quebec in about 1665, through the famous six brothers who distinguished themselves as Mountain Men, up until even recent times on reservations in the US. Many members of the Robidoux family were intimately connected to the entire history of the North American fur trade. The six brothers, born in St. Louis before the coming of Lewis & Clark, were important fur-traders during the classical Rendezvous era of the North American fur trade. They became key players in the organization & articulation of the Overland Trail, only to die soon afterward in relative obscurity upon the plains of Kansas & Nebraska. By the 1950's, the story of the Robidoux had been almost entirely forgotten. Subsequent historians had lost all but a scant & fragmentary knowledge of the true role & exploits of the Robidoux & their French-Indian compatriots upon the frontiers of the old west. Antoine Robidoux was the first to establish permanent trading settlements west of the Rockies in the Inter-Montane corridor, & his brother Michel was one of the first expeditions to traverse the length of the Grand Canyon. The eldest brother Joseph became one of the earliest established traders on the upper Missouri & founded St. Joseph, Missouri, which was later to be the primary starting point of the Overland Trail. His younger brother Louis became one of the earliest ranch owners in California, becoming Don of the Jurupa, that encompassed the areas known today as Riverside, San Bernardino, San Jacinto & San Timoteo. An entire inter-tribal French-Indian ethnocultural orientation had developed upon the plains, prairies & mountains of the Trans-Mississippi west a good fifty years before the coming of the Iron Horse & the Pony Express, & has been carried on today in proximity to the reservations of Kansas & Oklahoma, South Dakota & Wyoming.
I have no idea if Wayne Robidoux is a descendent from any of these fur trade Robidoux's that originated from St. Louis.
