[1] While Barada was a historic man, contemporary accounts of his prodigious strength helped establish him as a regional legend, in the mold of Paul Bunyan and Febold Feboldson.

Antoine Barada was born in 1807 at St. Marys, Iowa, which was once located across the Missouri River from Nemaha County, Nebraska.

His parents were Michel Barada, a French-American fur trapper and interpreter, and Ta-ing-the-hae, or "Laughing Buffalo", a full-blood Omaha and sister to the chief.

[1][3] His namesake grandfather, Antoine Barada, Sr. (1739–1782), was born in Gascony, France, and was one of the first settlers of St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1856 they returned to Nebraska to settle on the Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation; because of his half-Omaha ancestry, Barada was eligible for a land patent from the US government.

In Love Song to the Plains, the early 20th-century Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mari Sandoz stated, "'Toine Barada stories were told as far as the upper Yellowstone.

"[5][6] In the 1930s, Louise Pound of the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration collected dozens of stories about Barada, many of which are repeated today.

[7] His strength was well known as well, and he was always asked to assist with barn raising, as he would single-handedly hold heavy beams in place while they were fastened down.

Legend says that all of Nebraska would have flooded from this bung hole if Antoine Barada hadn't plugged it by sitting over it.

Unlike many Native American tribes, the Omaha have a patrilineal system of descent, so may have rejected Barada because of his French-American father.