blackfoot-valley

“ I had been raised in Indian country since I was 15 years old. I got along very well. I never locked a door then or since, never was hurt or threatened, and never lost a dollar or a hoof. My door was open to everyone and my table free to all who came. I harmed no man, nor did any harm me. My stock ranged the valleys and hills unmo- lested, and my money, as much as $10,000 to $20,000, lay in my cabin unmolested. I needed no protection. I cost nobody a dollar. After a time the territory was established, then counties, and then officers were elected. Then came the Assessors and the Collectors annoying me with their lists and tax collections, and laws for this, that and the other, and I concluded to leave for Manitoba.” The willing buyer of Grant’s land was Konrad Kohrs, a native of Den- mark who had run away to America at age 11, and in 1862 came to Montana seeking gold at Bannack, a wild, anything-goes town that boomed for several years before the Alder Gulch discoveries. (Located in the hills west of Dil- lon, Bannack was designated Montana’s first capital in 1864 upon becoming a territory, but even by then was in decline, and the next year the capital was moved to Viiginia City. Little is left of Bannack today. Structures now stand- ing are preserved as a state historic site.) Kohrs was astute enough soon to realize that he could do better by selling fresh beef to miners, and over a half-century he built one of the most noteworthy cattle empires in the entire Northwest. His operations expanded into eastern Montana, to four other states, and even into Canada. Kohrs was one of the minority of cattlemen who survived the destruction of eastern Montana’s open-range cattle herds in the terrible winter of 1886-87. At his ranch in Deer Lodge Valley, he then brought in and bred some of the finest Shorthorns and Herefords in the West. Kohrs finally sold out in 1918. The new owners let the ranch lapse into caretaker status through the 1920s. “Bannack Montana” 1880 courtesy Wikimedia Commons 108