Across the Grain of Time

Across the Grain of Time: From Homeland to Horizon

Two fifteen-year-old Prussian brothers stepped off a ship in America in 1836 carrying little more than determination, impossible surnames, and a dream of land of their own.

They found the land. What followed was considerably more complicated.

Across the next century, their descendants became farmers, laborers, hunters, soldiers, wanderers, and storytellers, building lives across a changing America. At the center of their story is Joe Rietman, a boy growing up on an Indiana farm during the Great Depression, where poverty, family turmoil, and hard work were simply part of the landscape.

Joe learned early that when circumstances became difficult, the sensible response was usually to keep moving.

And move he did.

He worked neighboring farms, hitch-hiked in search of opportunity, headed west to the mountains of Oregon, hunted remote country few people ever saw, and collected an assortment of friends, characters, close calls, and misadventures along the way. World War II eventually carried him into the Army and into a world far removed from the Indiana farm where his journey began.

But Joe's story is only part of a much larger one.

Drawing on family records, oral histories, photographs, letters, and stories passed from one generation to the next, Across the Grain of Time follows the Rietman family from nineteenth-century Prussia through immigration, settlement, the Great Depression, World War II, and the changing American West.

Some of the stories are poignant. Some are improbable. Quite a few are funny. Most happened to ordinary people who never imagined anyone would someday write a book about them.

This is not a genealogy of names and dates. It is the story behind them: the farms they built, the families they raised, the mistakes they made, the hardships they endured, and the adventures that somehow became family legend.

For readers who enjoy true family sagas, immigrant stories, Depression-era America, World War II history, rural life, and the American West, Across the Grain of Time is a journey through nearly two centuries of one family's search for whatever might lie beyond the next horizon.

John Rietman is a retired geologist, surveyor, and lifelong storyteller whose career carried him from the mountains of the American West to remote corners of the world. Drawing on decades of family research, personal recollections, historical records, and oral histories, he brings the past to life through engaging narratives that blend history, humor, and human experience. He lives in Missoula, Montana with his wife, Naty.