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who married young, went to Chicago, where she became at best a kept woman, at worst a prostitute. “This was the great family secret. Pure Dreiser,” Gore Vidal recalled. At the age of eighteen the patronymic heir was a laborer. Five years later, in 1885, still living with his mother in La Crosse, Felix Vidal became a machinist, the year after that a fireman for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway. Living at a boardinghouse in La Crosse, he presumably now stoked coal on trains in the upper Midwest. Caroline Traxler von Hartman died in 1883, as many years old as the century. Her daughter, sixty-three-year-old Emma, died eight years later in Hokah, Minnesota, across the river from La Crosse, where she had moved to live with her daughter Hermania.
    The attending physician at Emma’s death was Dr. Luther Lazarus Rewalt, Gore Vidal’s great-grandfather. A capable doctor and a man of verve and talent, Rewalt had been born in Pennsylvania in 1838, one of three children of William Rewalt and Catherine McKinley. The Rewalts were of Dutch origin, probably Catholics. Luther had attended the University of Pennsylvania medical school and served four years as an assistant surgeon in the Civil War. In 1862 he married a fellow Pennsylvanian, Mary Jane McGee. The twenty-five-year-old Irish-Catholic girl had decided to become a nun, but the handsome doctor, three years younger, persuaded her to become
his
bride. Later, they became Methodists and then Episcopalians. In1863 Mary Jane became locally famous as the “Heroine of the Susquehanna.” When a fire set by retreating Union troops spread, Confederate soldiers worked with the townspeople to save Wrightsville from destruction. In appreciation, Mary Jane Rewalt, who had labored valiantly during the crisis, hosted a dinner for the Confederate general and his staff. So gracious was she that they suspected she might be a Confederate sympathizer. A strong Union partisan, she explained that even enemies should show appreciation for humanitarian deeds. The Confederate soldiers left that same day for Gettysburg.
    Sometime after 1872 the Rewalts moved to the northwest-frontier state of Minnesota, but why they left Pennsylvania is unclear. At least four of their five children were born in Wrightsville, including their third child, a daughter named Margaret Ann, born in 1870, who brought with her to Minnesota as a small child no memory of her Pennsylvania birthplace. Like all but one of her siblings, she became a Midwesterner. And why the Rewalts settled in Fulda, Minnesota, about two hundred and fifty miles due west of La Crosse, a little north of the Iowa border and only about fifty miles from South Dakota, is a mystery. The nearest city was Sioux Falls, South Dakota. What did Dr. Luther Lazarus Rewalt, a man of some sophistication and medical skill, who enjoyed eating and drinking well, who had a strong sense of personal style,
do
in Fulda, a town with fewer than a thousand people and great distances from any place he might have enjoyed visiting? Like many nineteenth-century rural doctors, he also owned a drugstore. Perhaps his work was enough to sustain his spirit as well as his pocketbook. In 1891 he was in Hokah, Minnesota, near La Crosse, where he attended the dying Emma Hartman. One of his granddaughters believes that her father and mother “became acquainted through [his] treating my grandmother.” At any rate, Dr. Rewalt’s daughter, Margaret Ann, soon married Emma’s son, Felix Vidal. By the early 1890s Felix, now in his thirties, had settled with his wife in the small city of Madison in eastern South Dakota, about fifty miles northwest of Sioux Falls and about a hundred miles from Fulda. They were to live there the rest of their lives.

    Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, the weather in eastern South Dakota was more bracing than the culture. But the culture was real, specific, estimable in the Midwestern American sense. As with the weather,