Conrad Mansion

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During his early years in Fort Benton, Charles met and married a Blackfeet Indian woman whose name was Sings-in-the-Middle. While Sings-in-the-Middle eventually returned to her father's tribe in Canada, where she died of influenza, her union with Charles produced a son: Charles Edward Conrad Jr. Charles Jr. remained with his father in Fort Benton, eventually attending Canadian boarding schools and Canadian institutions of higher learning. He settled in the Montreal area, and though he never came to live in his father's Kalispell home, he was supported by his father and was also named in his father's will. When the Great Northern Railroad was built across the United States, the Conrad brothers could see that land transportation would soon supersede that of the river, so they sold their river freighting business to the Hudson's Bay Company, their main competition. William moved to Great Falls, and Charles came to the Flathead Valley and founded the city of Kalispell in 1891. He and William continued to be partners in cattle raising, real estate, banking and mining. One of Mr. Conrad's projects when he arrived in the Flathead Valley was establishing the Conrad buffalo herd. As a Missouri River freighter and trader, Charles Conrad saw millions of buffalo hides being shipped down river to St. Louis. It concerned him that the buffalo were fast-disappearing from the American plains, so when he moved to the Flathead, he purchased about 50 animals and pastured them on what is now...

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