The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The sergeant who commands the militia was said by some to have "recognised one of the bandits as a deserter from his corps" (5).

This group had "been part of a general muster at the settlement two days ago for a Fourth of July barbeque" (5). After capturing the bandits, they demand the reward, but are eventually locked up with those they had captured (5-6). Later, "the eleven militia men" participate in the construction of the new courthouse (26).

John Murrell and his "organization" were criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 through Murrell's capture in 1834, when he was incarcerated. His activity at this period makes him a more likely historical figure to associate with the unnamed bandits of Requiem, rather than the Harpes or Samuel Mason.

Led by Samuel Ross Mason, a militia captain during the Revolutionary War, "Mason's ruffians" were a gang of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in the Mississippi Valley frontier in the late 18th century. The narrative rejects the speculation that the unnamed bandits who were captured and briefly held in the settlement jail were part of this gang, because "even the last of Mason's ruffians were dead or scattered by this time" (5).

Wiley ("Little") Harpe and his brother, "Big Harpe," were notorious for the many crimes they committed during the late 18th century in the area of the frontier that included northern Mississippi; it is possible that they killed as many as fifty people before they were separately executed in 1799 and 1804. In the prose section of Act I, the narrative rejects the idea that the Harpes were among the unnamed bandits who were captured and held briefly in the settlement jail, because "the Harpes . . .

These men are "a gang - three or four - of Natchez Trace bandits . . . captured by chance by a band of militia and brought in to the settlement jail because it was the nearest" (4-5).

At various points in its prose history of Yoknapatawpha and Jefferson, the narrative refers to the settlers who followed the frontier pioneers into the new land. There is some overlap in its representation of this group, and in the terms - frontier, pioneer - used to categorize them. For example, the earliest reference to the group who settle in the place that becomes Jefferson and begin clearing the land, says "now it was frontier, the men and women pioneers, tough, simple, and durable, seeking money or adventure or freedom or simple escape, and not too particular how they did it" (4).

In the first part of the novel, in its narrative of the 19th century origins of Jefferson, the story refers to the future inhabitants of the 'city.' At mid-20th century, such organizations as " "Rotary and Lions Clubs and Chambers of Commerce and City Beautifuls" undertake "a furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere, but merely to sound louder than the next little human clotting to its north or south or east or west, dubbing itself city as Napoleon dubbed himself emperor" (4). These city leaders strongly advocate building development and economic growth of their town.

According to the novel, Abraham DeFrance advised the men who founded Jackson on how to "lay out the city" (85). Faulkner got the name "Abraham DeFrance" (along with a lot of the other names and historical details in "The Golden Dome" introduction to Act II of Requiem) from Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, a product of the Depression era's Federal Writers' Project (New York: Hastings House, 1938).