Researched, authored and posted March 3, 2015 by author Patricia Nell Warren
A TWIST OF FATE. The beginnings of the Grant-Kohrs Ranch were humble. It's a colorful story. In summer 1862, Bannack entrepreneur Hank Crawford was looking for a butcher. He aimed to sell beef to miners, but didn’t want to be carving up the carcasses himself. Hearing a rumor that there was a butcher in a party just arrived in the Deer Lodge area, he galloped in search of this man, who turned out to be a 27-year-old German named Conrad Kohrs.
Kohrs had learned the butcher’s trade from his stepfather Claude Bielenberg, but he’d come west with the big idea of making his fortune in gold mining. Now, having found no fortune in four years' prospecting , he was broke and hungry. Crawford’s offer of $25 a month and board looked pretty good.
Crawford asked Kohrs if he had tools. All the young man had was a skinning knife and steel, but he rustled around and borrowed a scale and saw. For a steak knife, he ground down a Bowie knife.
So Crawford sent Kohrs to Deer Lodge to collect three fat heifers he’d bought from Thomas LaVatta. Kohrs's first task: drive them to Bannack. Then Crawford set off to buy more cattle.
Kohrs was so down and out, he didn’t own a horse, and he was no cowboy. Driving these three feisty heifers 120 miles on foot was an ordeal. First, just out of Deer Lodge, the terrible trio got in among Robert Dempsey’s cattle. He ran around like a madman, but couldn’t cut them out. Finally a passerby on horseback gave him a hand, and he got the little wild bunch on its way. The heifers kept trying to go back to Deer Lodge, so it took him three days to make the trip. He didn’t get much sleep.
The two men set up shop in a brush shanty, and their meat business was off to a galloping start. With Crawford off again on cattle-buying, Kohrs ran out of product. So, using some money from the till, he found a few local work oxen to buy cheap, as well as some moose that someone had killed. When Crawford returned, he was so pleased at Kohrs’s energy and initiative that he raised him to $100 a month.
Then fate took another twist. Crawford got in trouble with the gang of highwaymen that was already operating out of Bannack, and they threatened to kill him. Crawford took all the money in the shop and left town in a hurry. He fled to Fort Benton, where he took the next boat down the river.
Kohrs was left with the shop and the beef business. He had no money and no credit, but was adept at trading his way into more cattle. His energy and initiative won him supporters. In due course, he owned a horse, and learned how to drive cattle.
After that, as Kohrs wrote later in his autobiography with typical understatement, “I got along first rate.” He had found his way to a living that would pay off way bigger than gold-mining.
(“Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography,” edited by Conrad K. Warren (Platen Press, Deer Lodge, 1977. Photo from GRKO collection)
Researched, authored and posted January 31, 2014 by author Patricia Nell Warren
Back in the day, winter snow didn’t keep Con Kohrs from cattle-buying around western Montana. In his autobiography, he tells how busy he was during the winters of 1864-65, when he and John Bielenberg were building their chain of butcher shops throughout the mining camps and growing towns. Immigrants arriving in the camps would sell their ox teams and wagons right away. As this photograph shows, a single wagon train could yield dozens of cattle that would need a new home.
So Kohrs could pick up worn-out steers for a few dollars a head, fatten on his Montana ranges for a year, then resell them for as much as $100 a head. Though he also purchased large herds being driven into the territory, this old MO was still working for Kohrs & Bielenberg till the gold boom started to peter out in the late 1870s.
(John C. H. Grabill photo, first published and copyrighted 1887-1892, now in the public domain in the John C. H. Grabill Collection, Library of Congress. Jpg courtesy of Wikipedia Creative Commons.)
Researched, authored and posted June 8, 2014 by author Patricia Nell Warren
THE FIRST KOHRS RANCH. In summer 1865, one year before Kohrs purchased Grant’s ranch, he and his butcher-business partner John Bielenberg located a small ranch elsewhere in the Deer Lodge Valley. In his autobiography, Kohrs wrote: “That summer my partner and I bought about 400 head of poor work cattle at $40.00 per head and quite a few work horses to be used in handling our business. The cattle and horses were sent to Deer Lodge and put on a ranch we located on Race Track Creek in charge of a man named Dodge. He had a cabin and stable built on a little island in a sheltered place.”
It’s not definitely known where this ranch was located, but Kohrs may have been referring to a spot where Racetrack Creek broadens into a wide green bottom. The 400 cattle may have ranged on open grassy flats north and south of the Creek, as shown in this photo. Today one of the roads in the vicinity is named Bielenberg Road. This little ranch, with what were probably log buildings, may have been the genesis of the later Nick Bielenberg Ranch.
Kohrs’s 1866 decision to buy the Grant ranch may have been sparked in part by the existence of the fine ranch house on it –- one to which he could bring a wife. The following year he did indeed head back to the German community in Iowa with matrimony on his mind, and married Augusta Kruse.
In those early butcher-business years, it had been Kohrs’s practice to board his saddle horses and little beef herds at small strategically located ranches scattered around southwest Montana Territory. The stock could range under the watchful eye of the ranch owners, who managed things for him while he was on the road doing business. With no fences, and plenty of stock stealing going on, this was the best way for Kohrs to protect his interests. The Racetrack ranch is the only one he mentions as belonging to his own partnership.
(Photo by David J. Corcoran of Racetrack vicinity along Highway 173, south of Racetrack Creek. Photo © by Corco Highways, from www.corcohighways.org.)
Researched, authored and posted January 5, 2014 by author Patricia Nell Warren
Conrad Kohrs’s first winter of ranch ownership, 1866-67, with a newly purchased herd grazing in the Deer Lodge Valley, was a grim encounter with weather extremes. Later, he confessed that he had put up little hay because previous winters had been mild and the old local mountaineers had told him hay wouldn’t be needed.
“On the 23rd of December," he wrote in his autobiography, "it commenced snowing and snowed every day for a week, until the snow in the valley was about two feet deep. On January 1st, extremely cold weather set in and it continued cold, the thermometer often getting down below forty degrees, when quicksilver freezes.
"On January 27th," Kohrs continued to relate, "the wind commenced blowing from the southwest, a regular chinook, and thawed heavily. The next day the wind sprung round to the northwest, leaving the snow with a heavy crust, and cold weather continued. In March a great many of our cattle commenced dying. We killed the poorest, boiled the meat and mixed chopped hay with it, making a broth, and saved some cattle by feeding them this slop. I paid $100.00 per ton for the little hay I could get.”
Quote from "Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography," edited by Conrad K. Warren (Platen Press, 1977)
(Photo reproduction of Frederic Remington’s “Drifting With the Storm” from Big Sky Journal
http://www.bigskyjournal.com/articles/big-sky-journal/arts-2010/104/images-of-the-west-the-great-die-up-1886-1887.html )
Researched, authored and posted February, 2015 by author Patricia Nell Warren
MATT CARROLL AND THE KOHRSES. Conrad Kohrs cherished this 1879 group photo of himself with fellow Montana pioneers and always kept it hanging in his ranch office, over the door. The photographees were associates of his from 1862, when he arrived in the territory. Back row, far right, is handsome dark-haired Irish immigrant Matthew Carroll. Kohrs would have met Matt when they were both in and out of the gold camps and Fort Benton.
Born in Ireland in 1837, Carroll found his way to Montana, where he made his mark as a trader and freighter. For a time, he and an associate ran a store in Fort Benton, where he recognized the importance of improving the reach of steamboat trade across the territory. In 1865, Carroll and several associates bought into a freighting company co-founded by steamboat captain John Roe. They built it into the biggest freighting concern in Montana, hauling freight and passengers between Fort Benton and Helena, as well as other gold camps. The company became known as the “Diamond R Transportation Co.,” after the brand used by John Roe. Typically a big freighting company owned thousands of oxen, mules and horses, necessitating use of a brand.
Carroll also was instrumental in construction of the Carroll Trail, a major wagon road between Fort Benton and Helena. For western Montana retailers, and also for ranchers, the Trail kept their goods, groceries and tools flowing in. For gold miners, well-guarded freight trains and Benton steamboats were the safest way to get their gold out of Montana and downriver to a bank in St. Louis. Positioned on the trail was Fort Carroll, built to provide security for the trains.
The Diamond R also helped supply the U.S. Army at Fort Macginnis.
The steamboat/freight wagon link serviced Montana Territory for two decades, till the railroads’ dominant arrival in the 1880s. Matt Carroll then went into politics, serving in the state legislature, but he always described himself as a “trader.” He died in 1909.
A family note: Carroll had a brother, John, whose grandson Edwin William Bache married the Kohrses’ granddaughter Anna Frederika Warren, sister of Con Warren.
(Photo by Bundy & Train, from GRKO collection. These historic early photographers had their studio in Helena. This photo is one of the most sought-after portraits of early Montana pioneers. In 2009, a single print sold at Cowan’s Auctions for $9400, including buyer’s premium.
Researched, authored and posted March 25, 2014 by author Patricia Nell Warren
TOUGH MEN, TOUGH HORSES. In the early days, March was often when Con Kohrs started hitting the road on horseback -- snow or no snow -- to find new beef herds for his butcher business. He tells this story: "In the spring of 1864, cattle got very scarce. Hearing of a bunch kept on Sun River and owned by the American Fur Company, I rode [from Virginia City] to Fort Benton to see the manager of the American Fur Company, who had the herd of mixed stuff. Was disappointed to find they had been sold a few days before.
"At Fort Benton, in order to relieve my horse, I bought another horse and started right back, making this trip from Virginia to Fort Benton and back to Deer Lodge, a distance of 480 miles in the latter part of March, when there was still snow on the ground, in six days.
"During the night I had to stake my horse out on bunch grass without shelter or grain. The ability of the horse to stand such a trip is ample proof of the quality of horses that were in the country at that time. Averaging eighty miles a day for six consecutive days, I considered this one of the greatest rides ever made."
Quoted from "Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography," edited by Conrad Kohrs Warren (Platen Press, 1977)
(Photo of Kohrs-Bielenberg rider and horse from GRKO archives)
Researched, authored and posted December 11, 2013 by Patricia Nell Warren
Kohrs had ridden to Chicago on the same train as his cattle, in a passenger car outfitted to serve a cowman and several of his men. All he had to do was sign some papers and enjoy a little socializing with cow-business cronies at the Saddle and Sirloin Club nearby.
(Photo from Grant-Kohrs Ranch NHS collection)