Indian Agency in "Appendix: Compson" (Location)

The government Agent to the Chickasaw tribe operates from a "long rambling onestorey mud-chinked building" that includes a "tradingpost store" (325). The "Agency" is already there where the first Compson in Mississippi arrives in 1811. In both this story and the later Requiem for a Nun (1950), it is described as the beginning of "Jefferson Mississippi" (325), but the "Appendix" does not provide any clear way to locate it in relation to the boundaries of the eventual town. Later in this story he refers to it as "the Chickasaw Agency at Okatoba (which in 1860 was still called Old Jefferson)" (328). In two contemporaneous texts ("Hand upon the Waters" [1939] and Intruder in the Dust [1948]), "Okatoba" is the name of the county immediately south of Yoknapatawpha - but putting the agency there would put it, and the origins of Jefferson, entirely out of Yoknapatawpha. On the other hand, Requiem for a Nun, written five years after the "Appendix," is explicit about how the Jefferson Indian agency "postoffice-tradingpost-store" stood just north of the site of the courthouse and the square, and that is the basis for the place we give the agency on the map.