Big Bottom in Go Down, Moses (Location)

The "Big Bottom" is Faulkner's name for a large wilderness area on both sides of the Tallahatchie river in the northwestern corner of Yoknapatawpha County (166). In "The Old People" and "The Bear," Sam Fathers teaches Ike McCaslin to hunt there during the annual trips to Major de Spain's hunting camp. These "big woods" (167) are first described as primeval wilderness, a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe save that of the hunter had ever sounded" (168), interspersed with brakes of cane and brier, and paw-paw trees. But at the end of "The Bear" this old growth forest is already threatened by the logging company that plans to turn the trees into lumber, and by "Delta Autumn" it is "gone now" (324).