Nashville was originally founded on the bank of the Ohio River in 1779. As "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun make clear, it is three hundred miles away from the settlement that becomes Jefferson (the real Oxford is about 250 miles from Nashville). Travel between Nashville and the nascent Jefferson was along the Natchez Trace, a 440-mile forest trail between the Mississippi and Cumberland Rivers created and used by the Indians before the coming of European settlers. In their turn, many of those settlers came to the Mississippi Territory along that same trail.
Originally established by French colonists at the beginning of the 18th century at the western end of the Indian path - the 'Natchez Trace' - that ran over four hundred miles between the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers, Natchez played an important role in the early history of Mississippi. It was a major port on the Mississippi River, and the capital of the Mississippi Territory. The first fact accounts for the fictional way in "A Courtship" Natchez is the the home port of Captain Studenmare's steamboat.
In "A Courtship" the "quiet place in the woods" where Ikkemotubbe and David Hogganbeck discuss in private how to resolve their rivalry could be anywhere around the Plantation (370). The text seems to distinguish it from both the place where the young men drink and the place where the rivals "lay down in the woods to sleep" (372). But even that is not definitely stated.
In "A Courtship," the spot in "the woods" (364) where the young men of the tribe take Log-in-the-Creek to get him drunk is as far from Herman Basket's gallery as they are willing to carry him and his harmonica. This might also be the spot in "the woods" (370) where Ikkemotubbe and David Hogganbeck have their drinking contest; in any case we are using the location for that event too.
"A Courtship" refers to the dwelling places of the Chickasaws as "houses," but does not describe any of them clearly enough to establish what that might mean in the context, i.e. a tribe of Indians in the early 19th century American wilderness. The Indians of Mississippi were among the groups referred to, before they were 'removed' westward, as the 'Five Civilized Tribes,' because of the extent to which they adopted elements of the culture of the European settlers.
In "A Courtship" the Chickasaw "girls and women" go to the river "to wash" themselves (362). It's a curious aspect of the landscape in the fictions that only female characters wash in the rivers or branches of Yoknapatawpha. When Caddy Compson (in The Sound and the Fury) and Narcissa Benbow Sartoris (in "There Was a Queen") go down to the water, they seem to be self-consciously performing a symbolic act, trying to purify themselves. There is no hint of such overtones in the reference to washing in "A Courtship."
