Grant-Kohrs Ranch Kohrs and Bielenberg Home Ranch Historic Resource Study/Historic Structure Report/Historical Data

. . . The old ranch, once a vast area of wild grass, is now dotted with fattening pens, haystacks, sheds granaries, and small barns. It means that a shiny, new three-ton truck and a fleet of horse-drawn hay wagons rumble over the land-scape, hauling hay and grain to feeding pens adjacent to cultivated fields, carrying feed and supplies to farther winter ranges. It means a shedful of the latest styles in farm machinery, numerous gasoline and electric motors, a crew of cowboys who have learned to double as farm hands, veterinarians, milk maids, and nursemaid to mothering cows.

Charles Morrow Wilson [1]

April 1932 began a new era for the home ranch, which during the caretaker period, had remained static, neither shrinking nor growing, but maintaining the herds, buildings, and memories left from the greater days just past. But Con Warren's appointment as manager changed that, ushering in a new period of dynamism. Once again a cattle herd was built up and horses were brought in to form a foundation for a registered breeding herd. As at the height of the active years of Kohrs and Bielenberg cattle raising, the barns and pens again housed blooded stock.

But the old era had not been reborn nor the former ways reinstated. The rejuvenated ranch had a different orientation, and looked for its pastures close at hand, not in the millions of acres of open rangeland east of the mountains. The ranch remained that of Kohrs and Bielenberg, property of the Conrad Kohrs Company, but no longer served as the base of operations for a range cattle, mining, and investment empire. The lands immediately at hand would now have to serve to graze all the cattle and horses that would provide the economic base of the stock-raising venture. So while the facade remained, the purpose changed.

The new manager, Conrad Kohrs Warren, did, indeed, link the present with the past. The grandson of Con and Augusta, he had been virtually raised on the ranch, with time out for schooling in Helena and at the University of Virginia. Among the members of the third generation of the Kohrs-Bielenberg family he remained the most interested in the ranch. Yet Con Warren's link to the former days of glory of the home ranch can be overstated. In 1932 the same assumptions, the same economic options and choices that Con Kohrs and John Bielenberg had exercised, no longer existed. Con Warren's choices would be quite different. Con Kohrs began his cattle growing business amidst a boom when the demand for beef was almost unlimited. Con Warren began his stock-growing career at the depth of the nation's worst depression and with cattle prices almost negligible. So while the buildings and some of the land and even a few of the cattle and horses remained the same as when John and Con had been alive, the new manager would approach the whole exercise of raising cattle from an entirely new perspective. The Warren era, then, began with the heritage of the old days intact, but with the challenges of the new age requiring new approaches.

Con Warren had grown up spending much of his time at the ranch, and after working there for about two years prior to assuming the manager's position, took up his duties with a clear understanding of what was needed for efficient operation. Certainly one major change needed to be made immediately, that of attitude. The "caretaker" approach had to go now that Warren was in control and, recently married, faced the necessity of supporting a family. The ranch would have to become a functioning cattle growing operation once again.

The ranch at this time contained a little less than one thousand acres. [2] But Con Warren knew that "with less than a thousand acres we couldn't live with thirty five cows. It took one hundred cows to support a family, even then." So the new manager convinced the Conrad Kohrs Company to begin buying some contiguous lands and other pastures to bring the ranch to an efficient size. The initial purchase proved to be the Keating Ranch, west of the ranch house complex, about a section of land. Not long afterward, the Conrad Kohrs Company, at Warren's request, picked up two parcels of land from the Larabie family in Deer Lodge (between the ranch house and east to the present site of Interstate 90). To the northeast of the ranch house about four or five quarter sections of pasture near the old Kohrs and Bielenberg Dog Creek Pasture were added. A final purchase early in Warren's tenure as manager put another half section, the Evans Place, into the holdings. With these accretions to the diminutive acreage of 1932, Con Warren felt that he had a "self-sustaining unit without the upper ranch." [3]

In this chapter a detailed examination of the growth of the ranch under Con Warren will not he attempted as it was in the chapters dealing with Kohrs and Bielenberg. While the limited time available is one reason for this, another is that many of the principals involved are still residents of Deer Lodge and nearby communities and cities. Disclosure of their real estate and financial dealings in detail might prove to be an unnecessary invasion of their privacy and, in addition, would serve little purpose in this chapter. The story is told, but in less than exact detail concerning acreages involved and financing—except for those figures already in public print. The appendices in this report, especially Appendix 5, list most of the entries in the public records at the county courthouse. These, of course, can be utilized whenever desired, and when compiled will provide detail for the Warren era matching that of the Kohrs period.

In addition to the problem of overall size, Warren faced the need to stock the ranch. A few animals of the Helena herd of Herefords remained along with some old draft horses, Belgians, and a few dairy cattle. By about late 1933, Warren began to build the Hereford herd back up. He held back most of the heifers, and, with "Dandy Perfect the Second" as one of two herd bulls, began to rebuild the Helena herd. Soon it numbered about 150 animals and the two bulls available reached the straining point in providing their essential services. At this juncture Con Warren reasoned that "we're putting out six, seven, eight hundred dollars apiece for these bulls—why not raise some?" He proceeded to buy cattle to build his own registered herd. It was late 1933 or 1934 when he began to buy, and, with the depression bottoming out then, cattle prices stood as low as they had been or would be for years. So "Prince Blanchard the Fifth," to serve as a herd bull, and ten registered heifers came to the ranch from one owner, and eleven heifers at $75.00 a head from another. Con Warren had then brought a registered herd of cattle back to the old Kohrs and Bielenberg Ranch. By the late 1930s another bull "Domino the Twentieth," son of "Prince Domino," had joined the herd, and as the registered animals grew, sired numerous registered and nonregistered calves. "Domino the Twentieth" was joined in the early 1940s by "D Blanchard," son of "Prince Blanchard the Fifth." [4] The Helena herd grew and became the base of Con Warren's commercial operations.

As the group of registered Herefords grew in numbers, quality, and renown, Con built up the draft horse herd. His reasons for working with draft horses paralleled those for his interest in the cattle. Con saw that the few hold overs from the Kohrs and Bielenberg era, the old "Dutch K" branded horses, were getting old. Rather than replace the herd of workhorses in a piecemeal fashion— and he needed them for the ranch—he decided to raise them there, using draft horse teams as needed around the ranch and selling the others to fellow ranchers. The major difference in his building of the Hereford registered herd and of the draft horse herd was that of financing. He built the herd of Herefords with Conrad Kohrs Company financing. But the bulk of the Belgian draft horse herd financing came from Con Warren.

He began in 1933, about the same time the Hereford development started. Con had decided that "if we're going to raise some horses, let's raise good horses." And he proceeded to do so systematically. First he visited horse shows in Iowa. Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. After viewing the available stock he ranged east to Ohio and picked up his first two brood mares from the State university and then added a third from Earl Brown's herd in Wisconsin. The next year more mares and colts came from Brown's stock farm. [5] By 1936 Warren's herd of Belgians totalled about fifty brood mares, three stallions, and four draft horse teams. [6] Many of the horses carried names still remembered at the home ranch and in Deer Lodge for their fine quality descendants and their own grace and stature. Mares named "Sarah De Chorise," and "Re Coninsante" (all showing their geographic origins within Belgium) were some of the earliest and [7] most fondly recalled animals in the new herd at Deer Lodge. One of the prize stallions, "Bloc II de Nederswalm of Antwerp," sired many colts, [8] as did "Brooklyne De Uccle."

The two herds grew during the 1930s and rose to greater fame in the next decade. And as Warren guided their development, the ranch buildings themselves began to experience some modifications. Numerous old and rotting structures— usually stock shelters made to last only a limited time—were torn down, as were some rotted fences. Useable feed bunkers received new portions of logs, and countless wood in the miles of wooden fence at the ranch were replaced. Most of the buildings received fresh coats of whitewash for the first time in many years. [9]

Among the buildings that came down was a shed, about fifty by sixteen feet with a thatched sod roof, in the corral west of the large barn. Warren directed the removal of that structure, four small feed bunks, and some of the other log structures that no longer served a useful purpose and had not remained in good condition. [10]

Other buildings received new siding, such as the horsebarn (Historic Structure 11) north of the bunkhouse row. Warren erected new structures, too, as needed. A dairy barn (Historic Structure 9) to house the small herd of milk cows he maintained went up about 1932, as did a new wood frame granary (Historic Structure 6) on the site of the Kohrs-Bielenberg chicken house.

In 1935 Warren put up a white wood frame building just to the rear of the main ranch house to house a blacksmith shop and serve as a garage (Historic Structure 3). It, the new granary, and the dairy building were Warren's major additions to the ranch service buildings in the 1930s.

But Warren also added corrals and feedlots west of the main ranch house. He placed corrals on each side of Johnson Creek and erected sheds (Historic Structures 26, 27, 28, 29), feed racks (Historic Structures 45 and 46), and squeeze chutes (Historic Structures 47 and 53) to feed and work the calves and other cattle fed and housed there.

To house the poultry raised on the ranch for use by the family and crew, Con ordered the erection of a frame chicken house and brooder house (Historic Structures 21 and 22 respectively) west of the main ranch house and near the two new feedlots and corrals. [11] As he modernized the facilities, Warren did mot neglect the water supply critical to growing feed and watering his expanding herds. Using long-neglected irrigation ditches and under-used water to which he retained rights, Con soon had pastures producing feed in much larger quantities than before. [12]

The new buildings, the growing herds of Herefords and Belgian draft horses, the paint, and repaired fences, combined to give a new freshness to the ranch and a new vigorous purpose to the establishment. The routine and the appearance of the place, now a busy breeding and feeding ranch, received some journalistic scrutiny in 1937 in Scribner's Magazine. The article describes the ranch as it looked and operated in 1937 and graphically conveys the impact that Con Warren had made on it.

A. The Ranch in 1937 [13]

Charles M. Wilson, the writer from Scribner's Magazine (his work, at least, appeared there), spotted that combination of old and new that characterized the ranch in 1937 when he visited it. He reported that upon his arrival he "found Con Warren working at mechanical impregnation of mares; insurance of colt crops by means of impersonal gadgets," [14] and noted further that Warren kept a microscope in the instrument cabinet in his shed. However, modernity and impersonality had not taken complete command of the Warren breeding operation, for

though ultramodern cattle breeders are beginning to use mechanical impregnation to multiply progeny of highly valuable herd bulls, Con Warren finds that healthy purebred cattle usually breed readily enough when left to their own devices. [15]

Warren obviously could work well with both new and traditional methods at the same time.

The physical appearance of the ranch reflected this as well. The article noted a "multitude of spick-and-span corrals down to the horsesheds," [16] and one of the illustrations showed freshly-painted barns, new fence posts, and a neat, almost military-like order to the area. Yet none of the older but still functional buildings had been torn down; nothing new for the sake of newness alone had been erected. The image was functional, with a blend of the old and new, but utility was the paramount concern.

Wilson remarked on Warren's activity as a whole:

The ranch is broadly typical of the cattle-country West. Here are 6200 acres of which 500 are put to crops. Thus about 90 per cent of the entire ranch is range, and at least half of this is valid range [range not requiring irrigation] in normal seasons [17]

Continuing, Wilson describes Con Warren's crops, grown to supplement the grasses available to his four types of operations—Belgian horses, registered Herefords, feeder (commercial) cattle, and the thirty or so Durhams and Guernseys he maintained to supply the Deer Lodge dairy with milk. [18] The breakdown listed about 200 acres of irrigated land in feed grains—oats, barley, and wheat. Twenty acres were in mangels, or mangel-wurzel, "a root crop similar to sugar beets which makes an excellent sweet feed for cattle." The remainder of the irrigated acreage was in Timothy and native hay. The crops grew in the irrigated fields on the west side of the ranch. [19]

The yearly routine of the ranch had changed somewhat from the older days of Kohrs and Bielenberg, but not that much. "As soon as the late snows thaw," [20] Warren's crew, no longer strictly cowboys but now better entitled "cowboy-farmer-utility man," began spring planting for the feed crops. Then the cattle were moved from the pastures they had grazed in during the long Montana winter to new ones. Cows about to calve went into a calving pasture close to facilities such as barns and sheds where they could be taken should the need arise. The mares about to foal, too, would be moved into pastures or holding areas where they would be nearer help, if needed. The commercial cattle had to be driven to corrals or pastures to be ready for sale.

With the arrival of the new generation of registered calves and colts, the needs of each of the valuable additions to the registered herds had to be met. Hand feeding was undertaken if needed, papers were filled out recording breed, strain, and heritage, and other myriad administrative tasks that registered animals demand were attended to. And all the while the routine feeding and animal husbandry continued. With the onset of the warmer spring weather, the painting, hammering, sawing, plumbing, and electrical work so endemic to ranching began.

In mid-summer came the cutting of hay, and depending on weather and moisture, the harvesting, transportation, and storage of feed crops. The hay had to be set up, the feeds mixed, and the barns, pens, and sheds made ready for the cold weather that would usually hit by early October. When time or circumstance permitted during the year, the animals had to be tested for disease and vaccinated to prevent the various medical problems common to horses and cattle. In late summer, as the time approached to transport and sell the feeder (commercial) cattle at market, and when the registered calves had grown old enough, branding would occur.

Wilson described the process:

Finally, there is branding, intermittently the gayest and most gruesome of cowboy chores. The ranch uses the same old CK (Con Kohrs) a brand which has ornamented Montana cowbrutes for three-quarters of a century. But branding is rid of most of its former brutality. In place of the old-time branding round-ups, . . . workmen lead the calves from the corral to the branding chutes. While the calf stands imprisoned in a narrow board-built cell, the brand is heated . . . then applied to the flank lightly enough to prevent damaging the leather. The calf bellows, plunges out to a snack of hay. [21]

Wilson also discussed the economic aspects of the ranch in 1937, noting that cattle then sold for about seventy or eighty dollars a head, while in 1932 they had sold for thirty to forty. The difference was not all profit, however, because feed prices and the cost of overhead, such as lumber, building materials, farm equipment, and livestock medicines, had about doubled since Warren took control of the ranch. Wages, too, had increased about twenty to forty percent. Placing an estimated $200,000 evaluation on the ranch then (1937), Wilson estimated gross profits at about $25,000, with a resulting net gain of about three percent of evaluation. His economic picture of the Conrad Kohrs Company ranch suggested that profits were not particularly large, but that the buildup from scratch that Warren had accomplished boded well for the future.

The article contained a statement outlining what Warren had done. Noting that, as manager for the company, Warren had enjoyed strong resources to draw upon, Wilson wrote:

He had made extensive sale of pure-bred strain bulls and heifers to ranches throughout Montana and other western states. He has become a significant pioneer in introducing a utility breed of thoroughbred horses (Belgians) in the West. He has, through extensive sale of those Belgians, supplied Montana with a creditable foundation of good horseflesh. He has maintained a modern livestock establishment, from a standpoint of equipment as well as management—one visited by livestock breeders and growers from all parts of the West. And he has instituted an active and well-managed farm as part of a landholding which had never been seriously farmed. Raised as a cattleman, he has actually become a practical farmer, and it is a transition of practical and timely significance. [22]

The tradition passed to Con Warren from his grandfather (and granduncle John Bielenberg) comprised in equal parts hard work and quality stock. He had kept the tradition alive, and had simultaneously maintained contact with the foremost elements of contemporary stock-raising as well.

B. The Warren Hereford Ranch: 1937 to 1972

Cattle prices crept slowly upward as Con continued to improve the quality of his herds. And the cattle and horses continued to gain in national and especially in regional repute. During these busy years of the late 1930s he kept a crew of four to six cowboys (utility workers, really) who lived and ate in the bunkhouse and worked for $50 to $100 a month. [23] The ranch continued the careful management and measured growth approach that Warren had used since 1932.

By 1940, as the Conrad Kohrs Company manager at the ranch in Deer Lodge, Warren had constructed a functioning and profitable commercial cattle operation as well as a ranch stocked with purebred Herefords and Belgians. That year he purchased the home ranch from the Conrad Kohrs Company. (The ranch was part of the capital assets of the Conrad Kohrs Company and could not be given away—not even to Con Kohrs's grandson.) [24] The improvements Warren had made as manager now became costly to him, for they increased the value of the ranch considerably. The ranch he had lived at during summers as a boy, had worked at as a ranch hand, and then managed successfully and dynamically for eight years now was his— or would be once he paid off the debt he had signed for. He had inherited the great tradition and the spirit of Con Kohrs and John Bielenberg, but the ranch had come to him through hard work, heavy investment, and only after he had been able to show his ability to pay off the considerable figure the Conrad Kohrs Company charged him for the establishment. One small part of the ranch, however, had been a gift, a most gracious one. It had come in 1934 from his Grandmother Kohrs, a wedding gift for Con and his bride Nell, the cost of a new house on "71/100 acre of land." [25] Con and his men had built the cottage just east of the main ranch house, and across the railroad tracks. The design of the structure had come from a magazine featuring "a country home for apartment living." [26]

The upper ranch had been repossessed by the company in the mid-1930s, and in 1940 Con bought that too. So Warren had carved out a complex about half the size of the original home ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg. Having started under entirely different circumstances, ones as unfavorable as Con Kohrs's had been favorable, this was not an insignificant accomplishment.

But things could not remain static, and the same year that Con signed on the dotted line for the ranch—now, incidentally the Warren Hereford Ranch, but still carrying the old CK brand—he sold the beautiful and renowned herd of Belgian draft horses. The satisfactions of raising them had to yield to practical economics as the nation began rising rapidly out of depression and into the bustling economy of the early war years. During the depression few American farmers had been able to buy new tractors, at least up until about 1937 or so, and the demand for horses remained steady. Warren even recalled, when questioned about the draft horse venture, "the horse business kind of saved us during the depression." [27] But America's farms became more and more mechanized during the last few years of the 1930s. The draft horse business tapered off then, so when the Holbert Horse Importing Company of Greely, Iowa. approached Con on the matter, he sold the entire herd. They soon became a prize of the Rockerfeller Estate. The Warren Ranch dropped both the horse operation and the dairy business as World War II brought rather austere days to the ranch.

While austere, the war years remained busy and productive. Although the government put ceilings on cattle prices, they levelled off high enough to warrant the effort but not high enough to produce significant profits. In a word, things remained static. Con fed steers and maintained the registered Hereford herd, which was supported, in part, by feed made possible by a new water pump that made formerly dry pastures productive. [28] Ninety to a hundred steers formed the commercial operation, which, in addition to bull sales of the registered Herefords and grain farming on the upper ranch and on the lands around the ranch house, kept the whole business going. But with little or no help available, there would be little or no expansion. Warren recalled the frustrations that faced stockgrowers and farmers during the war years, when "you couldn't develop very much. You couldn't get equipment. I had one F-20 Tractor that was down two years during the war for the lack of a thirty-five cent magneto cap." [29]

With the moderate profits during the war going toward the interest on the contract to purchase the ranch, the operational debt—normally a heavy burden on most modern ranchers—was a tremendous weight on Warren. In 1945, anticipating a drop in cattle prices (an erroneous assumption, he ruefully discovered), he sold the upper ranch and paid off a great part of this debt. [30] He now operated with freer capital but with smaller territory to carry cattle.

Quality continued to be as important as it had been before. To make things pay well, the herd's characteristic excellent quality would have to be maintained. It was, and continued to develop. Beginning in 1946, the Warren Hereford Ranch began to take bulls to consignment sales [30] throughout the northwest: to Dillon and Billings (the Tri-State Futurity), Montana, and annually to Ogden, Utah, among many other places. The Warren Ranch itself became the center of numerous sales as hundreds of buyers and spectators gathered in the tent erected on the south edge of the thoroughbred barn to watch and bid as the heifers and bulls came out, led by handlers, onto the fresh straw of the ring. The Warren Herefords gained and maintained national prominence.

The big barn west of the ranch house served for the sales until 1954, when Con built the large sales barn on the higher ground just east of the railroad tracks. Smaller sheds and attendant corrals had been built earlier (about 1950), and with the erection of the large barn, active operations at the old place ceased. By 1954, "we'd kind of abandoned the old place. The mud was so deep over there in the spring that you would have to take some buyer out to show him the bulls and would have to give him a pair of hip boots to wade out into the mud." [32]

The move to the newer buildings across the tracks spelled the end of the active history of the group of structures that had been known for seventy-two years as the Home Ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg, and that since 1940 had been the Warren Hereford Ranch. The cattle business was now carried on across the tracks, while these buildings remained in use for storage and for limited occupation by the Warren Hereford Ranch stock.

Con dispersed his registered herd in 1958 and entered the business of feeding and selling feeder cattle working a herd of about 350 animals. Then in 1963 he went into the yearling cattle business for another three years; following that, he worked raising cows and calves. [33]

By 1972 Warren's efforts to interest the National Park Service in obtaining the home ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg at last bore fruit, and the buildings and the field immediately around the home ranch house, and that large structure and its furnishings, came into the possession of the government.

The Conrad Kohrs-John Bielenberg period at the home ranch had lasted fifty-six years, from 1866 to 1922, the year of Bielenberg's death. Then had come the ten-year caretaker period, followed by the Warren era, 1932 to 1972, with Warren as manager the first eight years and as owner during the succeeding thirty-two.

While Con Warren's tenure with the ranch continued the Kohrs family association, unbroken from 1866 to 1972, the imprint of Warren's style of ranching and of modern techniques lay heavily on it. Under Warren's ownership, the place had its own identity—highly individual and dynamic. In the continuities shared and in the differences between the home ranch of Kohrs and Bielenberg and the Warren Hereford Ranch lay the story of the open-range days of the late nineteenth century, of the transition that began following the hard winter of 1887 and the influx of homesteaders who followed close on its heels, and of the ever-developing changes of the twentieth century. Conrad Kohrs began the story in 1866; 106 years later Conrad Kohrs Warren closed it.