The "forgotten aboriginals" of Mississippi as the ancestors of the Indians (324). According to the narrative, the mounds on which the Indians buried their dead were originally built by these aboriginals as a refuge from the annual flood water. These aboriginals were the first humans who entered the wilderness and altered it.
In the novel's stories about hunting in Yoknapatawpha, the Indians who once lived on the land are identified as Chickasaws. In the "Delta Autumn" chapter, however, the text refers more broadly to the "Indian successors" of the aboriginal peoples who first inhabited the larger area that includes places that still bear the names they left behind when they were removed across the Mississippi: "Aluschaskuna, Tillatoba, Homochitto, Yazoo" (325).
When slavery was abolished, planters and plantation owners in the Delta turned to "hired laborers" to produce the crops (323). These unnamed farm workers are described as "the negroes who worked" the land for "the white men who owned it" (324).
Before the Civil War these "gangs of slaves" provided the labor force which enabled the planters who owned them and the land to turn the wilderness into endless miles of cotton plantations (323).
As planters, the white men who own the land encroached upon the wilderness with their "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and their "hired labor" ever since, turning an "impenetrable jungle" of cane and cypress and other trees into endless fields of cotton (323).
