Charles Conrad: The Man Who Founded Kalispell

Charles E. Conrad arrived in Montana Territory in eighteen sixty-eight, eighteen years old and, by his own account, nearly broke. He had come from Virginia in the aftermath of the Civil War, which had stripped his family of its antebellum wealth. What he found at Fort Benton, the Missouri River's farthest inland port, was opportunity. He and his brother William eventually acquired the I.G. Baker Company freighting business, expanded it across the region, and added banking.

When the Great Northern Railway approached the Flathead Valley in eighteen ninety-one, Conrad owned land on the benchland north of the existing settlement at Demersville. His friendship with James J. Hill was not incidental: Hill routed the division point through Conrad's land, and Conrad Brothers Bank opened in eighteen ninety-two a year after the new town was platted. Conrad died in nineteen oh two at the age of fifty-two, young enough that his twenty-three-room mansion still stood essentially new. He had arrived with nothing and, in thirty-four years, built a city.