{"id":1881,"slug":"grant-kohrs-ranch-deer-lodge-montana","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Conrad Kohrs went to sea at fifteen as a cabin boy and ended up owning ten million acres' worth of empire. Born in Holstein, he sold sausages in New Orleans, rafted logs down the Mississippi, and butchered meat in the Montana gold camps before he found his real gold — beef. In 1866 he bought Johnny Grant's ranch in the Deer Lodge Valley for $19,200, and from that headquarters he built a cattle empire that sprawled over four states and two Canadian provinces.","Kohrs was the cattle king of the open range. He shipped ten thousand head a year to Chicago — the first Montana shipper to send cattle east by rail, in 1874 — and upgraded his herds with Shorthorn and Hereford blood when everyone else ran longhorns. He watched the whole industry rise and die in one lifetime: 'The range cattle industry,' he wrote in 1913, 'has seen its inception, zenith, and partial extinction all within a half-century.'"]},{"heading":"The house the empire built","paragraphs":["The ranch house itself is Augusta's legacy — Kohrs's wife furnished it like a mansion, a Victorian showpiece on a working ranch that covered the valley. The terrible winter of 1886-87 — the 'Great Die-Up' — killed the open range for everyone, and the homesteaders' barbed wire finished it. Kohrs survived because he had prepared; the ranch survived because it stayed in the family.","Today Grant-Kohrs is a National Historic Site and still a working ranch — cattle on the same grass, the house furnished as Augusta left it, the only place in the national park system where the cattle era never actually ended."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Grant-Kohrs is the archive's cattle-king file — the ranch of the man who saw the whole open-range era from cabin boy to cattle baron, and wrote its epitaph himself. The documented empire is the record; the still-working ranch is the lore of a West that ended in one man's lifetime.","A ranch that never stopped ranching keeps its range — the file's suggestion being that Kohrs's fifty-year empire is still grazing in the Deer Lodge Valley."]}],"name":"Grant-Kohrs Ranch","aliases":["Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site"],"type":"RANCH","type_label":"Ranch","cats":["HAUNTED_LOCATION"],"groups":["hauntings","historic-sites"],"desc":"Preserved ranch with attributed ranger experiences.","full_desc":"A ranch in Deer Lodge, Montana, Grant-Kohrs Ranch is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Preserved ranch with attributed ranger experiences. The archive files it under haunted locations. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 2 documented facts, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors.","address":null,"city":"Deer Lodge","county":null,"state":"Montana","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":46.398301,"lon":-112.733226,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":"Follow NPS visitor rules; individual structures may require guided entry.","ownership":null,"website":"https://www.nps.gov/grko/","phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Named-ranger story is secondhand in tourism narrative, not an NPS paranormal conclusion. Tourism’s park-establishment date requires official history check; not adopted.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":69.4,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.85,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":1,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":971,"type":"VOICES","description":"Southwest Montana recounts ranger Matt Connor’s account of unseen voices in grain storage. Grant-Kohrs Ranch's file is thin on proof and long on persistence — the standard profile of American place-lore. Witnesses report it; the record leaves it there. The account appears in 'Grant-Kohrs Ranch ghost stories'. Heard rather than seen: the report that keeps the file open.","evidence":"REPORTED_EXPERIENCE","evidence_label":"Reported experience","entity":null,"where":"Grain storage","first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.6,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Grant-Kohrs Ranch ghost stories","url":"https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/ghost-stories/grant-kohrs-ranch/","publisher":"Southwest Montana","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Conrad Kohrs purchased the Grant ranch in August 1866. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. It enters the file through media reporting — documented coverage, not folklore. 'Grant-Kohrs Ranch ghost stories' documents the entry. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Grant-Kohrs Ranch ghost stories","url":"https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/ghost-stories/grant-kohrs-ranch/","publisher":"Southwest Montana","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}},{"description":"NPS preserves a working cattle ranch with historic ranch-house tours. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. The record appears in 'Basic Information'. The record keeps it — history, not lore.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Basic Information","url":"https://www.nps.gov/grko/planyourvisit/basicinfo.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[{"name":"Conrad Kohrs","role":"Ranch owner","birth":null,"death":null,"bio":"Acquired the ranch from Grant in 1866. The dossier ties Conrad Kohrs to Grant-Kohrs Ranch as ranch owner. The entry is documented through 'Grant-Kohrs Ranch ghost stories'. Conrad Kohrs is filed as a documented person — part of the record the place’s stories hang on."}],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Historic ranch-house tours","last_verified_at":"2026-09-14T10:36:21+00:00","source":{"name":"Basic Information","url":"https://www.nps.gov/grko/planyourvisit/basicinfo.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}},"sources":[{"name":"Grant-Kohrs Ranch ghost stories","url":"https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/ghost-stories/grant-kohrs-ranch/","publisher":"Southwest Montana","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},{"name":"Basic Information","url":"https://www.nps.gov/grko/planyourvisit/basicinfo.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Grant–Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant%E2%80%93Kohrs_Ranch_National_Historic_Site","desc":"National Historic Site of the United States","extract":"The Grant–Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, created in 1972, commemorates the Western cattle industry from its 1850s inception through recent times. The original ranch was established in 1862 by a Canadian fur trader, Johnny Grant, at Cottonwood Creek, Montana, along the banks of the Clark Fork river. The ranch was later expanded by a cattle baron, Conrad Kohrs (1866–1920). The 1,618 acres (6.55 km2) historic site is maintained today as a working ranch by the National Park Service.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Grant-Kohrs_Ranch.jpg/330px-Grant-Kohrs_Ranch.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":78,"lat":46.40833333,"lon":-112.73944444},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":2,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":2}}