The man whom Lucius refers to as the "first Wylie" seems to have played a major role in shaping Yoknapatawpha County (71). When he set up his store at a crossing over the Tallahatchie River, the Indians still lived in the area. Because his place was "the head of navigation" - the furthest "small steamboats" could travel upriver from the Mississippi - the "whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy" that Yoknapatawpha imported from Vicksburg and the "cotton and furs" that it shipped out to the world were loaded or unloaded at his place (72).
This "Mr Wylie" is a "family friend" of the Priests in 1905 (69). He lives on the place "eight miles from Jefferson" that "the first Wylie" in Yoknapatawpha moved to sometime before the Civil War (69, 73). (In earlier editions of the novel his and his ancestor's name was Wyott.)
By 1905, because of land development, Major de Spain had to build a "new camp" twenty miles further from Jefferson than his original one on the Tallahatchie River (19). Ironically, it is reached by the "narrow-gauge railroad" built by "the northern lumber company" that is cutting down the wilderness. By 1925, Lucius tells his grandson, "we could already see the doom" of this new hunting ground (19). They can hear it, too, in the "sound of axes and saws" around the camp, "where a year ago there had only been the voices of running hounds" (19).
After Sam Fathers' death, Major de Spain sells the "Big Bottom" - the camp and the hunting ground around it in northwest Yoknapatawpha that he purchased from Thomas Sutpen - to a lumber company. The next time the men from Jefferson put together a hunting party, they camp in a new place where they "live in tents"; it is "two days" by wagon "and almost forty miles" further than the old camp - this is according to Go Down, Moses (301), which makes it clear that De Spain never goes with them to the new camp.
"By 1940," Lucius tells his grandson, the Yoknapatawpha hunting party had to "drive two hundred miles over paved highways to find enough wilderness to pitch tents in" (19). He does not indicate what direction they drive in, but there is good reason to assume that Faulkner is thinking of the site in the Mississippi Delta where Ike McCaslin and the other men who originally hunted at de Spain's camp pitch their tents in the short story "Delta Autumn," which was published in 1942, and set on the eve of America's entrance into the Second World War.
The noise of the car arriving at the Edmonds place brings "Cousin Louisa and everybody else on the place" to see it (61). This icon assumes that "everybody else" is black, and belongs to one of the families of tenant farmers who work the Edmonds land. We assume that because Lucius adds that the group does not include "the ones Cousin Zack could actually see from his horse" (61). Here "the ones" clearly refers to the people whom the white land owner Zack expects to see working in the fields instead of taking time off to stare at a car.
Identified only as "a Negro," this man works for Mr. Rouncewell and pumps gasoline into the (few) cars that pull up to the tank beside the railroad tracks (46). He is not allowed to handle any money.
Mr. Rouncewell is an agent for a company that "supplies all the stores in Yoknapatawpha County" with oil (48). Either he or the oil company is also far-sighted enough recently to have added "a special tank of gasoline" to the tanks holding oil (48). His name suggests a connection to "Mrs. Rouncewell's boarding house" (26), where Boon lives, and there are men named Rouncewell in both The Town and The Mansion he could be, or be related to, but the novel does not make any of those connections explicit.
