Two Immigrants Shared an American Dream

By editor

Deer Lodge, Powell County, Montana, 1862

When John Francis Grant, a man who had spent his youth in Quebec and his adulthood trading with the Shoshone, decided to build a house in the Deer Lodge Valley in 1862, he was not thinking of posterity. He was thinking of cattle. Grant had a knack for acquiring livestock from emigrants on the Oregon Trail, trading one healthy cow for two exhausted ones, a business model that required very little capital and a great deal of patience. He built a two-story log house, married a few local women to cement his trading relationships, and settled down to become a wealthy man.

But the gold rush brought a different sort of people to Montana—men who preferred their contracts in English and their neighbors to look like themselves. Grant, who spoke French and had a large, mixed-race family, found the new atmosphere distinctly unneighborly. The road agents were bad enough, but the tax collectors were intolerable. In 1866, he decided he had had enough of American civilization and sold his ranch to a German immigrant named Conrad Kohrs.

Kohrs had left Germany at fifteen, worked as a cabin boy, sold sausages in New Orleans, and eventually found his way to the gold camps of Montana. He discovered, as many men did, that mining was a fine way to starve, but selling beef to miners was a reliable way to get rich. He bought Grant's ranch, married a woman named Augusta Kruse, and set about building an empire. By the 1880s, he was shipping ten thousand head of cattle a year to Chicago, his herds grazing over ten million acres of public land.

The Hard Winter of 1886-1887 nearly wiped him out, as it did most of the open-range cattlemen. But Kohrs was a survivor. He and his half-brother John Bielenberg adapted, fencing their land, growing hay, and breeding better cattle. Kohrs went on to become a state senator and a founding member of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, proving that a man who starts out selling sausages can end up running a state, provided he has enough cows.

Today, the Grant-Kohrs Ranch is a National Historic Site, preserved by the government to show us how the West was won. You can walk through Grant's log house, admire Kohrs's Victorian additions, and marvel at the sheer scale of the operation. It is a monument to two immigrants who shared an American dream: one who built it and left when the neighbors got too pushy, and one who bought it and stayed until he owned the neighborhood.

See also

• Two Immigrants Shared an American Dream at Deer Lodge, Powell County (Erected by National Parks Service)
• Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, the working cattle ranch preserved by the National Park Service