Conrad, Campbell, and Stanford Family Papers, 1818-1968

In 1868 two youthful Civil War veterans, William G. and Charles E. Conrad, first stepped ashore at Fort Benton, Montana Territory, headwaters of navigation on the Missouri River. Their enterprise quickly lead to employment by I. G. Baker, owner of one of two trading companies then dominating transportation and commerce in the American and Canadian northwest. Four years later the brothers became partners in I. G. Baker and Company; in 1874 they bought the company. Expanding this virtual empire of riverboat and overland trade and diversifying into banking, ranching, mining, real estate, diplomacy and environmental concerns for the next twenty-eight years, the Conrad brothers played a vital part in the development of the West and of Montana in particular.

Born on August 3, 1848 to Maria S. (Ashby) Conrad and Colonel James Warren Conrad, William was the eldest of thirteen children. Charles was born on May 20, 1850, also on “Wapping,” the family’s plantation in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The Civil War of 1861-1865 took Colonel Warren to his Virginia militia regiment, while William and Charles grew up riding for the final two years of the conflict as volunteers with the 43rd Partisan Rangers and their legendary commander John Singleton Mosby.

Their home devastated by the war, William and Charles first headed north to New York and then over 3,000 miles [66 days] up the Missouri River to find opportunity in the burgeoning U.S. and Canadian west. With I. G. Baker, they soon owned much of the riverboat and ox-drawn freight wagon transportation system then opening the regions which would become Montana and Alberta, including all logistic support for the initial Northwest Mounted Police. In 1877, the same year as the Nez Perce War and other disastrous massacres on the U. S. side of the border, Charles was a successful negotiator for the peace treaty, Treaty No. 7, which ended warfare between the British government of Canada and the five tribes of the high plains.

Out of these connections, a young mounted policeman named James T. Stanford, then serving as administrative assistant to their famous commandant at the eponymous Fort Macleod, Alberta, and on diplomatic missions to Helena, Montana, met the Conrads. At the end of his Canadian enlistment, Stanford emigrated to Ft. Benton, accepted employment with the Conrad’s bank there, brought the rest of his family west from Nova Scotia, introduced his younger sister to Charles Conrad, and in 1881 became brother-in-law to the family. James continued his life as a banker, business leader and entrepreneur. In 1898, the Governor of Montana appointed Stanford Inspector General, with the rank of Colonel, on his General Staff of the Montana National Guard.

Understanding the coming impact of transcontinental railroads, in 1888-1891 the brothers sold their I. G. Baker & Co. interests in Canada and left Ft. Benton and found numerous businesses including Conrad Brothers, Inc., the Conrad Banking Company of Great Falls, Kalispell Townsite Company, Conrad National Bank of Kalispell, Conrad Price Cattle Company, Conrad Circle Cattle Company, and Queen of the Hills Mining Company, as well as the Montana towns of Conrad and Kalispell (where Charles built the home which is now a national historical site). Charles E. played an important role in preventing a threatened extinction of the great western buffalo herds by providing sheltered ranges for a select group on his Kalispell and other Flathead Valley lands. This breeding stock would later form a basis for 20th and 21st century herds in both Canada and the United States.

The Conrad brothers were also a presence in Montana politics. After serving as the first mayor of Fort Benton, and Choteau County’s delegate to the 1878 Montana Constitutional Convention, W. G. culminated his political career with an 1899 bid for the United States Senate, though he lost the nomination to “Copper King” William Clark. C. E., having reluctantly served as County Commissioner at Fort Benton in 1883, avoided the political limelight in favor of regional, national and international business interests.

After purchasing I. G. Baker & Co., the Conrad brothers invited their parents to join them at their western home, which Colonel and Mrs. Conrad soon accepted. They lived near their boys in Fort Benton from 1874 until their 1891 relocation (along with the families of their son, W. G., and son-in-law James T. Stanford) to Great Falls. There they continued to reside until the Colonel’s passing in 1894 at the age of eighty-two years, and Maria’s death ten years later.

William G. Conrad married Fannie Bowen of Virginia in 1876. The couple had five children: William Lee (who died at one year of age in 1878), Maria Josephine, Minnie Atkinson, George Harfield, and Arthur Franklin. They maintained homes in Great Falls, Helena, and in the area of the Conrad family’s original plantation near Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Sometime before 1876, Charles E. Conrad married Sings-in-the-Middle, daughter of a Blackfoot leader of the North Peigan. The couple established their home in Fort Benton where their son, Charles Edward Conrad, Jr. was born in 1876. In 1878 Sings-in-the-Middle returned to her father’s tribe in Canada, where she died prior to 1881. C. E. Jr. remained in the care of his father to be educated in Canadian schools and at University in Montreal, where he married and remained until 1905 when he followed his father’s death by just three years.

Catherine Elizabeth Coggan Stanford had first immigrated to the U.S. from England to live with relatives in Boston where, in 1853, she’d met a widowed Nova Scotia businessman named James T. Stanford who pursued Catherine with long, passionate letters until their marriage two years later. The couple had four children: James T. Jr., Alicia D., George, and Harry P.. In mid-1879, Catherine travelled from Nova Scotia on the Steamer ‘Dacotah’ with her children, Alicia Davenport Stanford and Harry Penn Stanford, to Ft. Benton, Montana Territory, to join her eldest son, James T. Stanford, Jr.

After his father’s death in 1872, James T. Stanford enlisted in the then-newly-recruited Northwest Mounted Police, where his small income could help the family survive. At the end of his enlistment in Alberta, the stalwart James, now a trusted employee of the Conrad brothers’ I.G. Baker & Co., was able to bring his family to Fort Benton. There he introduced his sister Alicia “Lettie” to his patron-employer, Charles Edward Conrad, and saw them married two years later. Stanford’s brother George became an expert gunsmith and intrepid trans-Pacific sailor who traveled throughout the American West, Australia, and Asia before settling the rocky point named after him on the shores of Flathead Lake near Kalispell. Youngest brother Harry moved to Kalispell in 1891 and was soon chosen to be the new town’s first Chief of Police. He built a frontier home and large taxidermy studio and lived the rest of his active life as a naturalist, writer and historian.

Alicia D. Stanford ran a school for children and young ladies in Fort Benton until her marriage to Charles E. Conrad in 1881. Charles E. and Alicia D. Conrad had three children, Charles Davenport “Charlie” (born in Ft. Benton in 1882), Catherine “Kate” Conrad (born in Fort Benton in 1885), and Alicia Conrad (born in Kalispell in 1892). Charles E. Conrad died in 1902.

Alicia Conrad married Walter McCutcheon, an employee of the Kalispell Mercantile Company, in 1914. They had one daughter, Alicia Ann “Timmie,” in 1921. The marriage ended in divorce in 1924. Alicia’s second marriage was to George Henry Campbell of Great Falls. George Henry Campbell was born in 1890 to Mary L. Wardwell and Charles Henry Campbell of Westminster West, Vermont. Growing up on their ranch near Malta and moving into Great Falls for high school, George graduated from Yale’s Sheffield School of Engineering in 1910 and joined with his father as C. H. Campbell and Son, a central Montana land management firm. Volunteering in 1917-1918 he flew as a pursuit (fighter) pilot in the World War I Nieuport and Spad biplanes of the U. S. Army Signal Corps, Army Air Corps and American Expeditionary Force in France, earning charter membership in the Order of Daedalians and its Montana Chapter. After the war, he returned to the partnership with his father. Alicia Conrad and George Henry Campbell had one son, Charles Conrad Campbell, born in 1928. In 1933 the family moved back to Kalispell where Alicia’s hereditary Conrad home was her primary residence until her donation of it to the city as a National Historical Site in 1974, seven years prior to her death at the age of eighty-eight in 1981. George Campbell died in 1973.