After it is cleaned up in 1886, Ballenbaugh's is owned by the "only child" of the second Ballenbaugh, a "fifty-year-old maiden" (74). She is described as a "prim fleshless severe iron-gray woman" who makes her living farming the land, and "running a small store" that has a loft which accommodates overnight guests (74). She may be "fleshless," but the food on "the table Miss Ballenbaugh sets" is well known for the pleasure it provides (74).
The people who live in the vicinity of Ballenbaugh's and seek to close it down include "sheriffs" (who campaign on the promise to run Ballenbaugh and his crew out of Yoknapatawpha), "angry farmers" (who know their livestock is being stolen by that crew), and "ministers and old ladies" (who object to the place on moral grounds, 73). On the other hand, Lucius tells his grandson that "sensible people" from further away were willing to allow the place to exist (74).
The "federal revenue agent" who went out to Ballenbaugh's to investigate the production and sale of moonshine whiskey and never returned worked for the Treasury Department (73). The presumption is that he was killed by the moonshiners. 'Revenuers' - as they were called - were charged with enforcing laws against making and distributing illegal liquor.
After Ballenbaugh takes over Wyott's store, it becomes a stop-over place for the "hard-mouthed hard-souled" men who carry merchandise to and from Memphis (72). But until the 1870s the people at Ballenbaugh's were "just tough men," i.e. no women (72). When the railroad took over the freight traffic in the 1880s, however, Ballenbaugh's becomes a destination point. The narrative enumerates the men and women who live at or patronize Ballenbaugh's between the 1870s and 1886 as "drunks and fiddlers and gamblers and girls" (74), and also as "brigands and murderers" (77).
The man who in 1886 "converts the entire settlement" at Ballenbaugh's "with his fists" is named Hiram Hightower (74). His description allows us to say for sure that he is "a giant of a man," and served during the Civil War as both a "trooper" and a "chaplain" in Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry unit (74).
Ballenbaugh's son, also known in the narrative simply as "Ballenbaugh," is, like his father, a "giant" (73). He claims to have served the Confederacy during the Civil War as a "partisan ranger" in Arkansas, but the narrative casts that story in doubt, suggesting instead that he acquired the pile of "uncut United States bank notes" he returns with in 1865 by more illegal means (73).
The first Ballenbaugh in Yoknapatawpha is as colorful as the place that bears his name. An "ancestryless giant," he arrived in the county "from nowhere" and by some means - the narrative implies a coercive one - took over the store and ferry run by a man named Wylie (72). Under his ownership, the place became a "roaring" one: a "grubbing station and saloon" for the wagon-drivers who passed through on the way to or from Memphis (72).
Moketubbe is one of what Lucius calls "our own petty Chickasaw kings," i.e. a chief of the Indian tribe that lived in the area of Yoknapatawpha before the white settlers came (71).
From other fictions we know that the Chickasaw chief whom the narrative refers to here only as "the regicide-usurper who called himself Doom" is Ikkemotubbe (71). As several of those other stories explain, "Doom" is a corruption of the French "de l'homme," the man. Faulkner tells the story of the regicide that allowed him to usurp the position of chief in several places, in particular "The Old People."
Lucius has heard that the place he knew as Ballenbaugh's "is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger" (71). (It was illegal to buy or sell alcohol in Mississippi until 1966.)
