The "Appendix Compson,"mentions the "young men" in Ikkemotubbe's tribe of Chickasaws who race horses against Jason Compson I's mare in the 1810's (328).
In Faulkner's last book, The Reivers, the Chickasaws who once lived in Yoknapatawpha appear only in Lucius Priest's thoughts, as he lays in a bed at Ballenbaugh's and thinks about the history of the land around him, which includes "the old Chickasaws who named the land before the white men ever saw it" (77).
The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white traders and settlers arrived early in the 18th century. At that time they numbered perhaps 10,000 people. By the early 1830s, when they were 'removed' across the Mississippi River, that number had been reduced to less than 3,000 - many of whom had been assimilated from other tribes, and from mixed marriages with white men and black slaves.
The Chickasaw tribe occupied much of the area that became Yoknapatawpha County in the decades before 1830, when white settlers began to move onto the land. By the time of "The Bear" they are long gone, though "Sam Fathers' Chickasaw predecessors" are referred to at one point (285), and at another the boy's prowess as a hunter and woodsman is measured by his ability to ambush a buck as "the old Chickasaw fathers did" (290).
The Chickasaw were the tribe living in northern Mississippi when the white settlers began arriving. In "A Name for the City" their interactions with the story's white characters they are depicted as friendly. After "ceding" their lands to the newcomers (200), however, they will be 'removed' from the region by the Indian policy of President Jackson's administration - or, as the narrator puts it at the outset of the tale, these "dispossessed people" "emigrated to Oklahoma in the thirties" (202).
The Indians who lived in the area that became Yoknapatawpha in the early 19th century appear in a number of Faulkner's fictions, sometimes as Choctaws, more often as Chickasaws. The Indians in "A Bear Hunt" are in a separate category. They are "a remnant of a once powerful clan of the Chickasaw tribe" who still live in Yoknapatawpha in the 1930s, a century after a hostile federal government 'removed' all the Chickasaw beyond the Mississippi River (65). This remnant lives "under Government protection" on what must be a kind of reservation (65).
Readers meet Granny's sister Louisa Hawk, who lives in Alabama, but both "Retreat" and The Unvanquished refer to another sister, who is neither named nor described but only mentioned: Granny explains the trip she's taking by saying that "My sister lives in Memphis, we are going there" (24, 56). Since "Millard" is Granny's married name, we have no way of knowing the name of her sister; however, she may be the mother of Cousin Melisandre who appears in "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek."
This deeply devout and caring woman is a constant presence both in Rider's life and the story "Pantaloon in Black" in both its publications, as a short story and as a chapter in Go Down, Moses: "She was his aunt. She had raised him. He could not remember his parents at all" (238, 130). Several other characters, including her husband and members of Rider's mill gang, are referred to as her messengers, as she makes repeated efforts to rein in Rider's self-destructive bent by encouraging him to turn to family and to religion.
Rider, the protagonist of "Pantaloon in Black" as both a short story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, is one of Faulkner's most memorable black characters. We never learn his real name; "Rider" is a nickname, given to him by "the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken" before he became the devoted husband of Mannie (249, 144). He is depicted from two different perspectives in both texts.
"Whitfield's cabin" is the first "church" in Yoknapatawpha (213, 23), and presumably the Whitfield who lives there is an ancestor of the "Reverend Whitfield" who is an important character in As I Lay Dying and also appears in several other fictions. Although this original Whitfield is only mentioned in "A Name for the City" and Requiem for a Nun, it seems safe to say that he is not a full-time preacher, but a settler who holds lay services in his cabin.
