The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Shiloh, located in Southwestern Tennessee, was the location of a major battle in the Western theater during the Civil War. Known in the South as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, the fighting at Shiloh took place on April 6-7th, 1862, and saw 23,746 casualties. In The Unvanquished, Drusilla's fiancé, Gavin Breckbridge, is one of those who were killed.

A day's travel from Hawkhurst (since Granny and her party left at sunup), and probably in Tennessee, the Union army is camped on the northern bank of a river.

Rosa Millard and her party re-cross the river at a ford twenty miles downstream from the main Union camp. A Union troop of cavalry is camped at the bottom of the bluff protecting the ford.

This spring is located several miles north of Jefferson. It takes Granny's wagon several hours to get here after they crest the last hill out of town on their way to Memphis. It is also the place where they soak the roots of the rose cuttings from Mrs. Compson.

Cockrum, where John Sartoris has been recently seen and where a calvary officer tells Granny a fight occurred "yesterday" (57), is a real town in northwest Mississippi, about halfway between Jefferson and Memphis.

The focus of much of the novel Go Down, Moses, the McCaslin place in The Unvanquished is owned by twin brothers Amodeus and Theophilus McCaslin (Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy). It is a "big bottom-land plantation about fifteen miles from town" it has "a big colonial house on it which their father had built and which people said was still one of the finest houses in the country when they inherited it" (46-47).

The store where the boys buy a bag of salt is on the Square in Jefferson, since Buck McCaslin comes "hobbling across the square" (46) to address the boys.

There are two Yoknapatawpha roads that Granny could have taken from Jefferson to Memphis. Given the fact that Ringo says "Good-by" to the Sartoris plantation as they take the road into town (20), it seems most likely that Faulkner imagined that Granny's party took the other road from Jefferson northwest to Memphis. Much of the action of "Retreat" takes place along this road, outside Yoknapatawpha, so we imagine it continues in a generally northwesterly direction beyond the county line.

The location represents the events in the story after John Sartoris, Bayard, Ringo and the troop discover that Granny and the wagon have vanished. These events take place on one side or the other of the border between Tennessee and Mississippi. The most dramatic of these events occurs after a day and a night spent dodging Yankee troops: riding ahead of his men, John Sartoris rides into sixty Yankees eating beside a creek and captures them single-handed. This occurs a days' ride from the Sartoris place.

This location represents the events that occur as Granny and her party slowly move across northern Mississippi and southwestern Tennessee toward Memphis. The four days of this journey - the nights spent sleeping in the wagon in the woods along the road, the meals taken in houses they pass - are mainly summarized, and the most memorable detail of the landscape is the one burned house they see. But the location also includes the crossroads where, on the fourth day of their trip, they are attacked by a band of marauders while passing a deserted house with a stable behind it.