Lovely little Gretchen came with her tall husband Wilhelm on the boat from Germany in 1876.  They lived on the top floor at 520 Park Avenue in New York City for a while.  The ground floor housed their import business, Miessen silver, Dresden china, and German Bibles.  Then Wilhelm’s partner absconded with all the profits from the business, and they had to go live with relatives in Michigan.  They had a baby boy in Michigan, and when he was about eight months old, they went to Clay County, Texas on a train. George, the little baby, cried all the way from Michigan to Texas.  His older brother Charles and older sister, Katie tried to sing to him, but he only wanted to cry.  In Texas Wilhelm bought a big ranch with what he got from selling the import business in New York.  Little Gretchen had three more babies in Texas, a boy named Henry and two little girls named Emma and Addie.  She never regained her health after Addie was born, and died when the little girl was only two.  She’s buried there, on the lonely Texas prairie where the dry grass waves like a brown ocean in the ceaseless wind.  Wilhelm became very fierce and angry.  Gretchen had been his gentling influence, his touchstone to love.  He tried to run the large ranch and control the children by shouting at them in German when they misbehaved.  It didn’t work very well.  The children ran wild.  When Charlie was 16 and Katie was 14, they would drive two wagons down to the river loaded with empty barrels to fetch the family’s water.  They fell in the habit of racing back.  Katie would stand in the front of the wagon, whipping the air above her team’s backs furiously, long brown hair flying in the wind, cursing in German to make the horses go faster.  Wild Katie, the boys called her.  She was as likely to take the whip to them as the horses.  Finally one day, Papa came back to the ranch house just as the water barrel race was concluding.  Wild Katie was winning, but the barrels were half empty from the jouncing ride.  Papa didn’t like what he saw.  Papa didn’t like what he heard. Wild Katie was sent back to Michigan to live with Papa’s sister.  When she was sixteen, she married a young man and never left Michigan again.  Papa went to Chicago on a cattle-selling trip.  He came home married to a German lady named Augusta.  The children didn’t like her, especially the boys.  Charlie went first.  Being 17, he could venture out and get a job.  In fact, it was expected.  Henry was smaller than George, and he took to the new lady to replace the mother he missed so much.  Emma and Addie were so little they didn’t know the difference.  When George was 12, he accidentally burned down Papa’s barn while smoking grapevine “seegars.”  He lit a shuck before the fire was out and never looked back.  He had no trouble getting a job with Charlie’s outfit as Little Mary, the cook’s helper.  In no time he graduated to horse wrangler, then a full-fledged cowboy.  He was so good at the job, he was foreman of the ranch by the time he was seventeen.  Some time in those years, George and Charlie went back to the ranch one night and took Emma and Addie.  They put them on a train to Michigan with tags hung around their necks.  Wild Katie met them at the train station, raised them to be proper German ladies, and married them off to a couple of good German farm boys when they were old enough.  Like Wild Katie, they never went back to Texas.