Chickasaw Settlement and Store (Location Key)

The Chickasaw settlement and store in "A Bear Hunt" is a good example of how the needs of Faulkner's imagination often take precedence over historical fact. Yoknapatawpha is located in the area that was once occupied by the Chickasaw Indians. According to the story's narrator, a "remnant" of this "once powerful" tribe still lives in the county in the 20th century, "under Government protection," in "their own settlement," a community that includes their own "store" as well (65). But very few Chickasaw and no organized or federally sanctioned "remnants" of their clans remained in the region after they were removed west of the Mississippi in the 1830s. In addition, the Chickasaw lived in Mississippi some time after the aboriginal people who constructed the mounds, although here the culture of Faulkner's Chickasaw seems to be organized around the story's large Indian mound.