The main male line of the Sartoris family is represented in this novel by three generations and in two specific contexts. There is a brief account of one of Colonel John's Civil War exploits (a raid on a Union Army headquarters that recalls the derring-do of John's brother Bayard in Flags in the Dust). And "Mr Bayard Sartoris and his son" are among the townsmen who visit the hunting camp to witness the annual hunt for The Bear (223).
Three members of the Sartoris family - four, if we count Ringo, though the novel never names him - cross paths with the saga of the Snopes three decades before the main events of the novel. Ab Snopes' limp is apparently the result of being shot during the Civil War by Colonel John Sartoris "for trying to steal his clay-bank riding stallion during the [Civil] War" (18); however, later in the text the narrator says Ab was shot by "somebody that never even owned the horses" Ab was trying to steal (32).
"Colonel Sartoris" in this short story are the given names of its protagonist, Colonel Sartoris (Sarty) Snopes. What that incongruous name suggests to the Justice trying Sarty's father as a barn burner is actually ennobling: "I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in this country can't help but tell the truth" (4). That is a good reminder of the status "Sartoris" has in the collective Yoknapatawpha mind. What Faulkner intended by linking the aristocratic Sartorises whom he celebrated with the poor white Snopeses whom, as a quasi-species, he execrated, is a good question to ponder.
In the midst of his struggle to write Absalom! Faulkner returned to the Sartorises for a series of stories that he could sell to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post as a much needed source of income.
The meaning of "Sartoris" gets an ambiguous twist at the end of "Vendee," when Uncle Buck McCaslin triumphantly proclaims that Bayard "is John Sartoris' boy" (117). The proof of that is the way, as described in the rest of the story, Bayard hunts down and kills the outlaw Grumby, who had killed his Granny in the previous short story in the series.
The focus of this story is on Rosa Millard's own method of engaging the Union Army in order to take care of the plantation and the people of Yoknapatawpha while her son-in-law, John Sartoris, is fighting the Yankees in a more conventional way. Her campaign relies heavily on Ringo's intelligence and initiative, and Bayard's narrative implicitly acknowledges how the breakdown of the traditional social order and the absence of white males as a consequence of the war creates a space for a woman and even a slave to grow into new positions of authority.
The Sartoris family appears in this novel about the Sutpens only in the context of the Confederate regiment that "Colonel Sartoris and Sutpen" organize at the start of the Civil War (63). As second in command, Sutpen rides off to war "at Colonel Sartoris' left hand," "beneath the regimental colors which he and Sartoris had designed and which Sartoris' womenfolks had sewed together out of silk dresses" (63). These "womenfolks" may be the Colonel's daughters or maybe also his mother-in-law, but that reference is too vague to allow us to locate them on a graph.
This is one of the nineteen fictions in which Colonel John Sartoris appears, but also one of the only two in which his wife is ever mentioned. And barely mentioned at that - when Drusilla refers to herself as "just a cousin of John's wife" (68). As far as we can tell from her elusive appearances, the first Mrs. John Sartoris died in childbirth. "Skirmish at Sartoris" is organized around John's second marriage, to Drusilla, although that hasn't quite happened when the story ends. There is little attempt to treat the marriage as a family matter.
Only Granny and Bayard appear in this third story in the series that began with "Ambuscade," though Colonel John is mentioned by Granny as if the name Sartoris itself were a password.
In this sequel to "Ambuscade," Bayard describes both the grit displayed by his Granny (Rosa Millard) and the valor of his father (Colonel John Sartoris) in unambiguous terms. She is determined to get to Memphis even if it means encountering Yankee troops. The Colonel does encounter a troop of Yankees, and while Bayard watches, captures them single-handedly.
