The narrative's history of Mississippi includes "the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer" who came into the area after it became part of the U.S. (81), also referred to as "the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men with rifles" (171). The narrator identifies "the pioneer" as male - "the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey" (81) - but with him comes his and his wife's family. We include in this group the "brawling teamsters and trappers and flatboatmen" who often are held in the jail (180).
There were eighteen Indians in the party led by La Salle on the voyage of discovery down the Mississippi. Some of them, and the canoes they traveled in, could have been Chippewa (or as the narrator refers to them, "Chippeway," 81): the Chippewa were part of the Ojibwe language group that lived along and near the St. Lawrence River in Canada.
The narrative lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising.
One of the "three Frenchmen" who travels down the Mississippi River in "a Chippeway canoe" is almost certainly René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the 17th-century French explorer credited with discovering the river and claiming it and all the territory it drained for France (81). But it's not clear why Faulkner associates him specifically with two other Frenchmen. The actual party of Frenchmen and French-Canadians who, along with a group of Canadian Indians, traveled downriver to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682-1683 was much larger.
The narrator begins his history of the city of Jackson in the distant past, which includes the "nameless though recorded predecessors [of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples] who built the mounds" (81). Conventionally referred to by historians and anthropologists as 'the mound builders,' these prehistoric peoples may have inhabited the continent for upwards of five thousand years. Many of their mounds still remain on the landscape of Mississippi.
Greenwood Leflore (or LeFlore, the more historically accurate name) was the son of Rebecca Cravatt, the daughter of a Choctaw chief, and Louis LeFleur, a French Canadian fur trader. He was educated by white Americans in Nashville. Elected "first [or principal] chief of the Choctaw nation" in 1830 (84), he signed the treaty ceding the tribe's lands to the U.S., but when most of the tribe 'removed' west of the Mississippi River, he remained in Mississippi, where he became a large slave-owner and planter and served several terms in the state legislature.
Louis LeFleur was a French Canadian voyageur, or explorer, whose "trading-post store" on the bluffs above the Pearl River became the seed for the city of Jackson (84). He married a local Choctaw, the daughter of a chief, and had a son named Greenwood Le Flore, who also appears in the novel's cast of characters.
The "President of the United States" referred to in "The Courthouse" is Andrew Jackson (7), who served two terms as President (1829-1837) after achieving fame in wars against Great Britain and American Indians. His 1830 Indian Removal Act relegated Native Americans to land west of the Mississippi River; their 'removal' claimed thousands of lives. The novel comes closer to naming him in "The Golden Dome," when it refers to him as the "old hero" after whom Mississippi's capital is named, and describes him as "the old duellist, the brawling lean fierce mangy durable old lion" (85).
A soldier during the days of the Mississippi Territory, he became active in politics when Mississippi achieved statehood in 1817. In 1821, along with Thomas Hicks and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).
A physician by training, William Lattimore was politically active during the years in which the Mississippi Territory became the State of Mississippi. In 1821, along with James Patton and Thomas Hinds, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).
