Sept. 01--
Maximillian Gustav Michaelis III died on the job. And in the Michaelis family, the job is ranching -- even at 76 years old.
Michaelis died Aug. 9 when he was injured by a bull on his ranch in Coahuila, Mexico, but initially declined to make the six-hour ride to town for treatment of his cracked ribs, his son said.
Finally, a ranch employee decided to take him, but Michaelis died on the way, according to a Mexican official quoted in the Zócalo Saltillo newspaper.
For those who knew him and the Michaelis family -- a storied line of notable ranchers who called Kyle home -- it was a fitting ending.
"He died doing what he loved, and I don't think he would have wanted to go any other way," said his son Max Michaelis IV. "The way he put it, he was in the saddle before he could walk."
He said his father was injured while working with a bull in a pen, but it's unclear exactly how the accident occurred.
RANCHING IN HIS BLOOD
The first Michaelis in Texas was Theodore, who came in the 1830s from what is now Germany to Round Top, according to a family history on the Michaelis Ranch website. A blacksmith who lost an eye while serving as a colonel in the Confederate Army, Theodore dabbled in the ranching business and planted the family's first seeds in Mexico. He lived there during Reconstruction after being accused of killing a U.S. officer, according to the ranch's nomination for the National Register of Historic Places.
It was his son Max who set up shop in Central Texas and made the ranching business an empire. Family lore has it that Max won the tract of land that would form the basis of their Kyle ranch on a horse-racing bet with Fergus Kyle, the town's namesake.
Mules and donkeys were his primary trade, and he advertised that he had more jennets than all other Texas ranchers combined. Thanks to him, Kyle was called the "Jackass Capital of the World," the ranch website says.
In 1934, he began experimenting with French Charolais cattle brought from Mexico, marking the introduction of the now-prized breed to America.
