Whiteleaf Creek and Bridge in Intruder in the Dust (Location)

Display Label: 
Whiteleaf Creek
Map Icon: 
Event
Authority : 
Context (text, as interpreted)
Other Texts Location Appears In: 
X: 
1955
Y: 
790
Description: 

Vinson Gowrie's killer is caught when he is tricked into trying to ambush the sheriff as he travels through "a lonely midnight creek bottom" while taking Lucas to another jail in the town called Hollymount (227). The narrative refers to the place where the trap is sprung variously as "Whiteleaf bridge" (213), "Whiteleaf bottom" (215) and "the Whiteleaf fill" (216), and the road the sheriff is traveling as "the old Whiteleaf cutoff" (216). All this implies the presence of a Whiteleaf creek. There is also a Whiteleaf creek in As I Lay Dying, flowing into the Yoknapatawpha River from the south, and a hamlet named Whiteleaf due east of Jefferson in the Snopes trilogy. If the creek in this novel flows into the Yoknapatawpha it would have to be from the north, and it seems to be in a much emptier part of the county that the hamlet is in. There's no obvious way to see how these three locations might be put in any one place on a map. We also use Whiteleaf as a location in tracing Chick Mallison's fantasy about Miss Habersham's chaotic circumnavigation of Yoknapatawpha in Chapter 9, when he pictures her "going . . . east" away from Jefferson and toward Crossman County (183).

Role: 
Site of Event
Status: 
Continuous
Types: 
Branch

digyok:node/location/7937