The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In Faulkner's account, the local tribe of Chickasaw Indians create a large plantation in imitation of the white planters in Yoknapatawpha.

Near Doom's family's plantation is a landing point on the Tallahatchie River, a real river at the northern edge of the real Lafayette County. Faulkner similarly locates the river at the northern boundary of Yoknapatawpha on the maps of the county that are the basis for our representation of it. In his stories about the Chickasaw Indians, this river serves to connect Yoknapatawpha with the Mississippi River and the larger world.

Doom runs away to New Orleans in his youth but returns to his family's plantation in north Mississippi seven years later. Lucius McCaslin buys a slave, Eunice N., at a slave market in the city. Faulkner lived in New Orleans in 1925 and 1926, and the city provides the setting for a number of his non-Yoknapatawpha novels, including Mosquitoes, Pylon, and The Wild Palms.

The "Big Bottom" is Faulkner's name for a large wilderness area on both sides of the Tallahatchie river in the northwestern corner of Yoknapatawpha County (166). In "The Old People" and "The Bear," Sam Fathers teaches Ike McCaslin to hunt there during the annual trips to Major de Spain's hunting camp. These "big woods" (167) are first described as primeval wilderness, a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe save that of the hunter had ever sounded" (168), interspersed with brakes of cane and brier, and paw-paw trees.

The hunting "stand" where young Isaac McCaslin waits with Sam Fathers for a shot at his first deer is in the middle of what Faulkner calls "the big woods" (167), a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe save that of the hunter had ever sounded" (168). In deer hunting a "stand" can mean an elevated platform attached to a tree. Ike's stand is "against a tremendous pin oak" (172). In this case, however, "stand" simply means the place in the woods allotted to Ike by the hunting party, "one of the poorer stands . . .

This is a "rambling shabby side-street boarding-house" (288) in Jefferson where, in The Hamlet, Mink Snopses's wife works while he is in jail.

Eck Snopes and his family live a short distance from the store. His house is "one-storey [and] paintless," but it is called a "house" rather than a cabin (220), and it is in better condition than the other Snopes' abodes, with a "new wire fence" around it (220). His cousin I.O. lives with him.

Turning trees into lumber is one of the staples of the Yoknapatawpha economy, so there are a number of sawmills in the various texts. Quick's sawmill is somewhere near the Bend, but the text does not give any specific location.