As a young man, Louis Rubidoux, was one of many of French-Canadian ancestry who worked as fur trappers and mountain men in northern New Mexico.

California ranchers Lugo and later Juan Bandini with the help of Lorenzo Trujillo and Santiago Martinez, had recruited the New Mexicans from Abiquiu, in exchange for land, to help fend off indigenous people from taking their horses.

At the time, accompanied by his New Mexican wife and their infant daughter as well as his namesake nephew Luisito, he came through Sonora to live at Agua Mansa near today's Colton in the Riverside-San Bernardino area.

In New Mexico, Rubidoux and Wilson had been friends, but in California they were on different sides of an issue pertaining to the land rights of the New Mexican settlers.

He called himself a “prisoner of war” in a letter he wrote in the fall of 1846 to Spanish-born US Consul Manuel Alvarez residing in Santa Fe.

A few weeks after General Stephen Watts Kearny occupied Santa Fe on the August 18, 1846, Rubidoux and his neighbor Benjamin Wilson—together with 18 estrangeros or “strangers,” i.e., foreigners, non-Mexicans, met at Wilson's home.

Flores, a military officer of the Mexican army, “a man of superior attainments and courage,” attacked the next day, September 27, and set on fire the house in which they were gathered.

“From that moment I lost my liberty.” The prisoners were told to make “some determination of our property as well as of our families.” John Rowland expressed his desire that he would rather lose a leg than be cut off from his family.

Don Andres Pico succeeded Flores, and he asked for a treaty of peace that Colonel John C. Fremont granted “in quite an honorable manner for the sons of the country.” Rubidoux married Guadalupe Garcie (1812-1892) in 1834 in Santa Fe.

[4] California Historical Landmarks at the site of his home reads:[5] The Louis Rubidoux Nature Center in Jurupa Valley was named in his honor; the facility was closed in 2017 and plans were underway to reopen it, until it was destroyed by a fire in October, 2019.