credited with working "corners" in coffee; but
he would never admit that a corner was possible in anything that came
out of the ground; and to the end, he was insistent in his denials of
ever having cornered coffee. As a daring trader, he won his spurs in a
sensational tilt with the Arbuckles in the bull campaign of 1887.
Because of this, he became one of the most feared and hated men in the
Coffee Exchange. For a while, coffee did not offer enough play for his
tremendous energy and ambition. He embarked in various
enterprises--among them, the steel industry and railroads. No one was
too big for Sielcken to cross lances with. He bested John W. Gates in a
titanic fight, in American Steel and Wire. He quarreled with E.H.
Harriman and George J. Gould over the possession of the Kansas City,
Pittsburgh, and Gulf Railroad, now known as the Kansas City Southern,
and, backed by a syndicate of Hollanders, obtained control.

While still busy with the Kansas City Southern enterprise Sielcken began
work on the coffee valorization scheme that he carried to a successful
conclusion in spite of the law of supply and demand and the interference
of the Congress of the United States. Valorization by the Sao Paulo
government, and by coffee merchants, having proved a failure; Sielcken
showed how it could be done with all the American coffee merchants
eliminated--except himself. In this way, he secured for himself the
opportunity he had long been seeking--the chance to bestride the coffee
trade like a colossus. The story is told farther along in this chapter.

When his partner, George W. Crossman, died in 1913, it was discovered
that the two men had a remarkable contract. Each had made a will giving
one million dollars to the other. Then Sielcken bought his late
partner's interest in the firm for $5,166,991.

His first wife having died at Mariahalden, his home in Baden-Baden,
seven years before, Sielcken married at Tessin, Germany, in 1913, Mrs.
Clara Wendroth, a widow with two children, and the daughter of the late
Paul Isenberg, a wealthy sugar planter of the Hawaiian Islands. At that
time the coffee king was dividing his time between the Waldorf-Astoria,
New York, which he called his American home, and his wonderful estate in
the fatherland. This latter was a two-hundred-acre private park
containing four villas and a marvelous bath-house for guests besides the
main villa; a rose-garden in which were cultivated one hundred
sixty-eight v