Tarbell, Ida Minerva (1875-1944). American “muckraking” journalist and biographer. Ida Tarbell was born on a farm in Erie County, PA. When her father entered the oil business the family moved to the rough Pennsylvania oil region city of Rouseville for several years before settling in Titusville. Tarbell graduated from Alleghany College in 1880 and briefly taught in Ohio before earning an MA from Alleghany and going to work for the Chautaquan magazine. After three years editing and writing for the magazine, she spent three years in Paris, France, studying history at the Sorbonne. On her 1893 return to the U.S., she was hired by McClure’s to write a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, then moving on to Abraham Lincoln as a subject, about whom she would write periodically for decades. She is best known for her next work for McClure’s, The History of the Standard Oil Company (serialized 1902-1904). Conflicts with S. S. McClure led her to depart McClure’s in 1906 with fellow writers Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker to found the competing American Magazine, where she worked until 1915. Thereafter, she made her living as a free-lance writer. When Cather arrived at McClure’s in spring 1906, Tarbell was still working there. Despite Tarbell’s imminent planned departure, the two women became friendly enough that Tarbell invited Cather to visit the farm she had recently bought in Connecticut and where her mother and sister lived with her. It is not clear how frequently Cather and Tarbell saw each other in subsequent years but they kept in touch, and Cather contributed to Tarbell’s efforts to support S. S. McClure financially. Tarbell died in Bridgeport, CT, and is buried in Titusville.

Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father. Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War. He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters, in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932).