NONFICTION - Jan. 7, 1996

GHOST HUNTING IN MONTANA: A Search for Roots in the Old West by Barnaby Conrad III (Harper Collins West: $20; 333 pp.). In 1989, Montana’s centennial year of statehood, Barnaby Conrad III set out with a used Jeep, a tent, a pistol and a fly rod to explore the land some of his ancestors had helped civilize and exploit. He traveled 9,000 miles, “wherever possible by horse or canoe,” encountering ghost towns, environmental woes, resurgent buffalo, Native Americans, wolf biologists, Hutterites, barflies, latter-day mountain men, novelist Thomas McGuane and grizzly bears drunk on fermented corn. Conrad’s amiable meandering links the stories of his great-grandfathers--the upright Judge William Hunt, Montana’s first district attorney and a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt; and the alcoholic, adulterous cattle baron and mining tycoon John Conrad--with the author’s own quest to “find the American inside me.”