Approximately ten miles south of Carcross along the South Klondike highway lies the site of the former community of Conrad City. Conrad was a once thriving silver mining “camp” built in 1905-6 to supply the Venus, Montana and other nearby silver mines being developed at the time by mining man “Colonel” John Howard Conrad. Conrad City’s “heyday” was rather brief however, and within a few short years the place was all but abandoned.

The city’s founding father, John Howard Conrad’s heyday, on the other hand, was far from brief. The Conrad mines were just one of this pioneers’ dozens of business and mining interests in the west and north west during a career that spanned six busy, colourful and adventuresome decades.

J. H. Conrad was born in 1855 on the “Front Royal” plantation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia; one of thirteen children of aristocratic parentage. The Conrad’s were among the elite of Virginian society, gaining their fortune and position primarily through farming, slave trading, general merchandising and land speculation.

In 1861 the first battles of the civil war were being fought, literally in six year old John’s front yard. His father, James Conrad serving as a Colonel in the Virginia Militia and his two eldest brothers Charles and William, while still in their teens, served alongside their father in a Guerilla cavalry unit known as the Mosby’s Raiders. Despite their “heroic efforts”, four years later with the Yankee defeat of the south, the family’s empire was in shambles.

Seeking a fresh start, in 1868 Charles and William went west and set up a trading post at Fort Benton Montana and two years later, at the age of fifteen, John Howard joined them. It was then when young Conrad, big and strong for his years, cast his lot with the rough and tumble wild west. Even before arriving at Ft. Benton Conrad had already demonstrated his masculine virility when he shot his first buffalo while en-route. The act of shooting a defenceless animal may not be considered the ultimate act of manhood, but the performance that followed was perhaps a step closer: Conrad skinned the buffalo out and then “consumed” the animals liver raw while it was still warm. Apparently the ritual was customary to a certain strain of hard bitten pioneers of the day.

Within a few years of arriving at Ft. Benton the Conrad boy’s business ventures proved successful and the rest of the Conrad family came west too. Soon the Conrad’s had built up another massive empire with interests ranging from general merchandising, shipping, ranching and mining, to real estate and banking.

By the late 1870's John Howard began to venture out on his own. First he organised the Conrad Trading Company which established trading posts at intervals on the waggon trail between Ft. Benton and Calgary Alberta. In 1879 he established two more posts and a bank in Wyoming, and by the early1880's he had added several coal mines to his growing network of holdings. About this time Conrad also became heavily involved in cattle ranching.

In the company of Phil Armour he drove 20,000 head north from Texas to Montana and shortly thereafter, became one of the biggest cattlemen in the state. Among Conrad’s contracts included the supply of beef to the R.N.W.M.P., to reserve Indians and to crews building the Canadian Pacific Railway north of the border, and to various mining camps and the U.S. Cavalry south of the border. It was during these days on the wild western frontier when Conrad won the friendship of General Sherman, General Custer and the great Indian Chief Sitting Bull. In Canada his friends and allies included Lord Strathcona, head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and railway magnates Sir Donald Mann and Sir Alexander Mackenzie.

With the financial depression of the 1890's many of Conrad’s business ventures failed one by one as did his marriage. His wife blamed their failed marriage on Conrad’s “Habitual drunkenness and gambling”.

Undaunted, in 1898 Conrad went north to Alaska to recoup his fortune, investing in mining properties at Ketchikan in the southern pan handle. Then in 1900 he joined the stampede to Nome where he “remained a year”. From there Conrad went to Dawson but only for a brief period before returning to Alaska where he established another mining company in the Porcupine gold district near Haines. By 1903 however, Conrad was back in the Yukon looking of course, for more mines to add to his growing collection. Tours of the Kluane gold fields and the Whitehorse Copper Belt tickled his fancy but it was the Windy Arm silver-gold properties that captivated his full attention. Within a year Conrad had, through staking, option or all out purchase, acquired control of the entire Windy Arm District, which was subsequently named the Conrad Mining District.

Thus began the Yukon chapter in Conrad’s long and colourful career. A chapter that would last close to ten years. Ten long and trying years of dealing with the aspirations, the realities and the pitfalls of hardrock mining in the Yukon.

Conrad was a man not easily dissuade from his set out goal however, nor was he afraid of a challenge. He knew how to get the ball rolling and keep it rolling, and most of all Conrad possessed a most important ingredient of success: money, and the ability to use other peoples money to his (and others) advantage. And Conrad was not afraid to spread that money around either. In fact, it can be claimed with justification that, with his investment of upwards to $1,000,000, Conrad singlehandedly thrust the southern Yukon out of a stagnating post Klondike depression.

By 1907 Conrad was employing over 350 men in the mines and concentrator while he had another 150 men under grubstake scouring the hills in search of further rich mineral deposits. Meanwhile the town of Conrad City had a population of 500 people, six hotels, hardware and grocery stores, butcher, barber and blacksmith shops, several churches, a hospital, a newspaper, a telegraph office, a District mining recorder and a Mountie detachment.

By 1909 several thousand tons of ore, most coming from the Venus, Montana and Big Thing Mines, had been shipped off to southern smelter. Although some of the ore graded as high as $5,000 per ton, in general the ore shoots proved to be discontinuous, patchy and of a considerably lower grade. A fact that even Conrad’s bounding enthusiasm, determination and fastly depleting money supply could not over come. Another factor which contributed to the districts demise was the cost of transporting the thousands of tons of mining machinery out to the mines and the outgoing ore to market. White Pass, the local railroad, took the brunt of the blame. And Conrad singlehandedly took the multi national corporation to court over it. Charging that the carrier’s rates were five times that of any other on the continent. A sentiment echoed by each and every non White Pass employee in the southern Yukon. Fact is, that Conrad was the only one who possessed enough courage and money to say it out loud and in court.

In a well prepared case Conrad fought it out with the corporation, not only on behalf of the Conrad District mines, but on behalf of all of the mines and citizens of the southern Yukon. The court case dragged on for years during which time Conrad’s main financial backer McKenzie & Mann dropped out of the picture. In the end the International Railway Commission decided that if White Pass were to reduce their rates the corporation would slip into bankruptcy. Instead, Conrad Consolidated Mines slipped into bankruptcy and in April of 1912, after having fought a long, hard and honourable fight, “Colonel” Conrad left the Yukon. Never to return.

Conrad subsequently moved to Seattle where he lived out his old age playing the stock market, “sometimes winning it big but always losing it all on his next investment”. No biggy for a man who organised more companies and had won and lost more fortunes than ladies of the day had tea parties. On November 27th 1928 John Howard Conrad died of heart failure in Seattle. He was survived by a son Barnaby and a daughter Florence both of San Francisco.

Murray Lundberg’s book Fractured Veins and Broken Dreams, provides some interesting detail about Conrad and his time in the Yukon. A quick search on the web should provide information and ordering information.

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