Originally researched, authored and posted by Patricia Nell Warren on March 29, 2015.
IN SEARCH OF A COWBOY. Now and then, people visit the Grant-Kohrs Ranch to search the archival records for information about a family member who worked at the ranch. Case in point: Sharon Boyce and her daughter Kyeann, who came looking for information on Sharon’s grandfather Steven Boyce. They were unable to pinpoint the year he arrived in the Deer Lodge Valley, but believe it was in fall 1886, when he arrived to deliver a herd of 600 Shorthorn cattle that he and a crew had been hired by Kohrs & Bielenberg to trail from Oregon.
Steven may have been around 25 years old at the time. It was the beginning of the infamous winter of 1886-87, and he survived it in a cabin probably many miles out of Deer Lodge, tending the cattle.
Boyce spent the next few years working for Kohrs & Bielenberg, involved with movement of cattle and horses between the ranch's various operations. Around 1890, Boyce went out on his own as a rancher. He purchased some Morgan mares from Kohrs & Bielenberg and trailed them up to the Bear Paw mountains, where he established his own outfit near Warrick. The following year, he purchased a Morgan stallion in Oregon, riding the horse into Montana himself. He also married and started a family. This photo was taken at the time of the couple’s wedding.
Kyeann and I have been in touch; she tells me that she and her mother are still digging out information about Steven’s life. Fortunately there is now a wealth of historical data from those days, where they can do their mining. So we may return to this story later.
Steven Boyce is an example of those highly skilled cowboys without whom the big ranches couldn’t have gotten things done on a daily basis. They could be trusted with the responsibility for an entire herd, and often risked their lives, especially when it came to delivering newly purchased cattle and horses across the great distances of the West.
Visit the Sharon/Kyeann website for more details on this developing research story:
http://www.itshardtokillacowgirl.com/2015/02/09/back-to-the-kohrs-ranch/
(Photo courtesy of Sharon Boyce, reposted with her permission. She also owns copyright on the website and its information)
Originally researched, authored and posted by Patricia Nell Warren on December 1, 2013.
The foreman received the new herd when it was first delivered by the seller. He then lived in the vicinity, at one of a number of small ranch outposts that Kohrs & Bielenberg maintained, so he could keep an eye on the cattle. In turn, he usually had a few cowboys to assist him. Tasks could include keeping cattle from drifting in a snow storm, chopping holes in river ice for them to drink, and reporting cattle rustling and outbreaks of blackleg. When it was time to sell the herd, the foreman was responsible for the final operation of trailing the herd -- or later, shipping via rail -- to the point where the next owner was ready to receive it.
Now and then, as Kohrs told in his autobiography, the boss joined in the receiving or delivery operation. But more often, the foreman was on his own to get the job done.
Over time, a map of Kohrs-Bielenberg operations showed herds at different locations in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and (in Canada), Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Kohrs first ran into Tom Hooban in 1863, when he was starting his butcher business in the mining camps. A young Irishman from Wisconsin, Tom was working as a herder for the George Forbes ranch near Boulder, and jumped ship to help Kohrs gather little beef herds here and there. For a time, Kohrs & Bielenberg maintained a base for these herds at a little ranch he knocked together near Race Track, in charge of a man named Dodge.
In 1866, wanting a better base with an actual house on it, Kohrs bought the Grant Ranch. In fall 1869, when grass started getting scarce in the Deer Lodge Valley, it was Tom Hooban who advised moving the cattle east of the mountains to where there was plenty of untouched grass on Sun River. He took charge of what became a major herd for Kohrs and Bielenberg, with the addition of purebred Shorthorns from Iowa.
Tom was not only knowledgable and reliable, but witty and high-spirited -- fun to be around. Beyond being an employee, he was a trusted confidant and close friend of the Kohrs family. Now and then, if herd duty didn't call, he traveled with the family -- for instance, to the Philadelphia Centennial celebration of U.S. independence in 1876.
The warm relationship lasted until Tom came down with “consumption” (tuberculosis). There being no Medicaid in those days, the Kohrs family took on the cost of his treatment and care. Tom died in 1884 and was much grieved by the Kohrses.
Meanwhile, shortly after hiring Hooban, Kohrs had also brought in Mitchell Oxarart. The Oxararts were a French Basque family, some of whom settled in California and took over a noted ranch at Encino (a national historic site today). Mitch had a growing resume with both cattle and horses. He stayed in charge of the Kohrs & Bielenberg herds in the Deer Lodge Valley for a time, but eventually took responsibility for herds in other areas of the Northwest.
Mitch worked for Kohrs & Bielenberg until 1879, when he bought out Kohrs’s interest in a herd of nearly 1700 beeves and became a stockman in his own right. Later he launched a second business as an importer and dealer in horses. With two business partners he incorporated as Oxarart and Company, registering a fleur de lis as his horse brand.
Hooban and Oxarart were just two of the talented foremen who made things happen for Kohrs & Bielenberg between 1863 and the early 1900s.
(Photo from "The Kohrs Packing Company" by Don Kohrs)
Originally researched, authored and posted by Patricia Nell Warren on December 1, 2013.
Lane's responsibilities were focused with the Kohrs-Bielenberg eastern-Montana range operation at the turn of the century. He shows up in photographs with Conrad Kohrs and banker Joseph Rosenbaum in the Chicago stockyards.
During the ranch's interim years, 1922-32, when Kohrs and Bielenberg had died and the downsized ranch was marking time as part of the Kohrs estate, it was Antoine Menard, French Canadian and former associate of Tom Stuart in his horse business, who was in charge of whatever livestock remained on the home ranch at Deer Lodge during those years.
Starting around 1932, when Con Warren took over management, it was initially Swedish immigrant Gus Strand who was the herdsman directly in charge of all the cattle, both the beef cattle and the dairy herd. Later, Warren expanded the property to include a summer range of several thousand acres away from the home place. Con increased his numbers to as many as 600 Hereford cow-calf pairs, which made it necessary to re-adopt the old-time model, with a man directly in charge of the herds that were up on the summer range.
This man was Wayne “Buzz” Ward. A genial warmhearted individual with a dry sense of humor, Buzz became a good friend of the Warren family. A resident of Deer Lodge, he’d owned his own small ranch and was a great horseman as well as cowman. In the summer, Buzz actually lived up at the mountain cow-camp, riding out every day to keep an eye on the several breeding herds up on that range.
Ward worked for the Grant Kohrs ranch from the mid- 1940s until his death in the late 1950s.
Ironically, today it’s hard to find photographs of these all-important men, without whose experience, good judgment and dedication to their jobs the Grant-Kohrs Ranch couldn’t have operated. We have photos of Tom Hooban, George Lane, Jim Spurgeon, Gus Strand and Buzz Ward. But we’re still looking for photos of Oxarart and others we’ve mentioned here.
(Learn more about Lane and the Bar U's colorful history in this Calgary Herald story:
http://blogs.calgaryherald.com/2012/04/03/calgary-stampede-100-day-countdown-1917/
(1917 photo from Calgary Herald)
Originally researched, authored and posted by Patricia Nell Warren on November 21, 2013.
OLD-TIME HORSE WHISPERER. The cowboy on the left, wearing a dapper tweed suit and holding a horse as he talks to Conrad Kohrs, is an important figure in Kohrs-Bielenberg range-ranching history. According to Con Warren, who often mentioned Bill Crowder when he reminisced about the old days, this man was not only a top range foreman, but also a genius at horse-breaking.
No big cow outfit that bred its own mounts could get along without a top hand like Crowder. A well-bred ranch horse was an investment. But in those days, horses weren’t asked to do hard work till their frames and joints were fully mature. So a bunch of colts and fillies usually ran wild and wooly till they were four or five. Then, one at a time, they had to be corralled and gotten rideable in a short time…all without ruining them or hurting them.
Once a horse was rideable, training went further to turn out the specialized mounts that were needed -- for roping or cutting cattle at close quarters, or the long-distance cattle gathering on the "big circle."
Bill Crowder was evidently a standout among the handful of cowboys in c. 1900 Montana who were known to be tops with horses.
Con Warren’s unpublished memoirs contain a touching tribute to Bill Crowder. Con tells about the first drive he made alone, as a kid, around 1920 or so. His job was taking nine loose horses from the ranch at Deer Lodge along country roads and over mountain trails to Augusta, where they were needed at a roundup. They were Dutch K horses that John Bielenberg had raised and Crowder had broken. “Knowing these things gave me a deep sense of satisfaction and confidence,” Con wrote later.
The horses were so well-schooled that young Con didn’t have a minute’s trouble. Especially since they included a blue-roan gelding named Bluch, who was trained as a lead horse. When the bunch got to a fork in the road, Bluch would turn his head and look back at Con for the hand signal to go right or left.
This is the only picture identifying Bill Crowder that we know of. (Unless he's the rider in that pic of a bucking horse that we've posted a couple of times.) Maybe Friends or readers of this page who live in eastern Montana, where he evidently lived, might know of Crowder family descendants there today.
(Photo by L.A. Huffman, who documented quite a few scenes at the Prairie Elk range headquarters. From a hand-colored print that Huffman gave to Kohrs & Bielenberg. Con Warren published it in his first edition of "Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography" in 1977.)
Originally researched, authored and posted by Patricia Nell Warren on July 13, 2016.
THE SEARCH FOR GRASS. To the earliest stockraisers in southwestern Montana, the seas of waving grass in those mountain valleys may have seemed like a limitless resource at first. But by the late 1860s, the Deer Lodge Valley was already showing the relentless effects of grazing by growing numbers of cattle and horses. It was Tom Hooban, foreman for Kohrs & Bielenberg, who suggested that the outfit move some of their cattle across the Divide into the Sun River drainage, a big country with which he was familiar. In 1869, Kohrs & Bielenberg became probably the first Montana ranch to make a major move onto the plains, with a breeding herd of around 1000 head that Hooban trailed onto Sun River that fall. In the Deer Lodge Valley, they kept only a beef herd that enabled them to supply their meat markets in the mining camps.
Hooban, a Wisconsin native, was a vivid personality who served as Grant-Kohrs foreman for nearly 20 years, and whose friendship was cherished by the family. He often accompanied them on their winter vacation trips, and kept things lively with his Irish humor and love of pranks. Eventually the rugged outdoor work and exposure to severe weather impacted his health, and he developed what was called "consumption" in those days. With Kohrs family support, he left their employ in 1884 and moved to the milder climate of California, but died later that year. In the Kohrs autobiography, the narration of his passing reveals how deeply the family felt the loss of this friend.
(Photo of Hooban from the Grant-Kohrs Ranch NHS collection)