Colonel John Sartoris is one of the major figures in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The brief mention of him in The Reivers gives a good idea of his almost mythic stature as a founding father: "the actual colonel, C.S.A. - soldier, statesman, politician, duelist . . . murderer" (72-73). Lucius' narrative also mentions the railroad he "built . . . in the mid-seventies," which still runs through the center of Yoknapatawpha (73).
This "Colonel" is Bayard Sartoris, the son of John Sartoris, who actually was a Confederate colonel. Referred to in The Reivers as "the banker with his courtesy title" (72), it is his role in passing an ordinance against cars in town that provokes Lucius' grandfather into buying a car. (Bayard Sartoris' antipathy to automobiles is first established in Flags in the Dust, where the date of his death is 1920.)
One of Jefferson's more colorful residents, and not just because of her "brassy" (or orange-red) hair (25). Coming "from nowhere" and staying only "briefly," during the 1930s she transforms the "Snopes Hotel" into a place known to "the police" as "Little Chicago" (254). Presumably Lucius' reference to her as a "gentlewoman" is ironic (25): given Chicago's association in the popular mind at that time with the underworld, her boarding house must have been a fairly wild place.
The other residents of the boarding house where Boon lives are described as "juries" who were in town "during court terms," "country litigants" also in town for court, and "horse- and mule-traders" (25).
The man identified in this novel only as the "mad kinsman" who murdered Flem Snopes "ten or twelve years ago" (25) is clearly Mink Snopes, a major character in The Mansion (1960). There he is Flem's cousin.
Flem Snopes is the central character in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, which tells in detail the story of how he "led his tribe out of the wilderness behind Frenchman's Bend, into town" and was ultimately "murdered" by a "mad kinsman" (25). In The Reivers he is the "banker" who at one point owned the hotel where Boon now lives (25).
The grandfather of Bobo Beauchamp, and one of the retainers who prepare the hunting camp for Major de Spain and his annual party. His mother, Tennie, is mentioned much later in the novel, in connection with Bobo. This novel never mentions the fact that (as established in Go Down, Moses) he is the grandson of Lucius McCaslin, and hence related to Lucius Priest.
"Aunt Tennie," as her second name suggests, is the mother of "Tennie's Jim" (223, 21). She became a Beauchamp by marrying Tomey's Turl, an illegitimate grandson of Carothers McCaslin. In this novel she is linked most explicitly to the grandson of Tennie's Jim, Bobo, whom she raised, but she is also the mother of Lucas Beauchamp and likely related somehow to Ned.
This is the only text in which the wife of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the slave-owning patriarch at the head of the McCaslin, Beauchamp, Edmonds and Priest families in Faulkner's late fictions, is mentioned. It is her Bible that Ned, the only one of her husband's illegitimate and biracial descendants who is named McCaslin rather than Beauchamp, carries in his bag - a symbolic gesture that is extremely interesting and opaque.
Although Lucius calls this man "old Carothers McCaslin" the first time he mentions him (21), he is the ancestor for whom Lucius himself is named. "Lucius Quintus Carothers" McCaslin (31) was one of Yoknapatawpha's earliest and wealthiest white settlers, and the patriarch of the family that the narrative refers to as "the McCaslins and Edmondses" (17) and with the phrase "McCaslin-Edmonds-Priest" (23). Note that those phrases omit the Beauchamp part of the family line.
