The place where Herman Basket and Crawford "overtake" and kill the three white men and talk with the ten unnamed slaves before returning to the wrecked steamboat is not described in any detail; it is far enough from the sand bar to hide the murder and close enough to the river to allow the Indians to hide the bodies.
In "A Courtship" the steamboat has to move slowly, and often gets aground, on its travels up and down the shallow waters of the river. The "People" watch it arriving "among the trees" (366), and walk beside it along the bank as it leaves. (See also Tallahatchie Steamboat Landing in the index.)
In "A Courtship" the five-day race between Ikkemotubbe and Hogganbeck over the 130 miles between the Chickasaw Plantation and the Cave follows a route that is well-known to Ikkemotubbe but left pretty vague for the story's readers. The land seems uninhabited, and to be broken up into woods and "open" country that the narrator labels as "prairies" (375). It is well-watered by "creeks," "springs" and "streams" (375).
"The Cave" in "A Courtship" where the competition between Ikkemotubbe and David Hogganbeck ends is described as "a black hole in [a] hill," "a hundred and thirty miles" from the Plantation, "over in the country of old David Colbert" (374). Because of the courage required to enter it, "the Cave" serves the Chickasaws as a place for "the boys" to go "to become men" (374).
The "race-course" on the Chickasaw plantation indicates how important horse racing is to the tribe - at least in Faulkner's representation of them in "A Courtship" (372). When the Indian boy "runs once around the race-track" (372), we learn that it is laid out as a circle or oval, like the kind of tracks built by white southern horse breeders and plantation owners. In the story it also serves as the site of an eating contest.
About the place where he lives, which he calls "my father's house," the narrator of "A Courtship" only says that it sits "between Ikkemotubbe's house and the steamboat" (369).
In the early days of Yoknapatawpha, outsiders often reached the area by traveling by steamboat up the Tallahatchie River to a "landing" where the boats picked up and put down passengers and freight. The river is shallow, and risky for steamboats to navigate. "A Courtship" describes how laboriously they had to travel even when the water was "tall enough" - i.e. deep enough (366). In the earliest 'Indian stories' - "Red Leaves" and "A Justice" - a relic of this mode of travel sits some distance from the water as part of the 'big house' of an Indian chief.
The house that Ikkemotubbe lives in in "A Courtship" is, according to him, "not very much house" (369). When David Hogganbeck "walks home" with him, we learn that it is "across the Plantation" from the landing (368), and also that it contains a "bed" big enough for the two men to share (369).
