The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

One of the Chickasaws wears a "foxhorn" around his neck which Compson blows to call in "his men" from the search for the missing lock (210). (It seems very anachronistic to associate Indians on the American frontier in the 1820s or 30s with the imported conventions of fox hunting, but in the earlier Indian tale "Red Leaves" Faulkner describes the way Mississippi Indians adopted elements of European civilization.)

"A party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trail the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).

This man, the "waiter-groom-hostler" at Holston's tavern and the husband of the cook there, delivers Holston's demand for the lost lock after the bandits and the imprisoned militia have taken apart the jail and escaped (208).

Ratcliffe, identified as "the post trader" - i.e. the person in charge of the Indian agency's trading post (206) - is the first Yoknapatawpha member of a family that would eventually produce V.K. Ratliff, a major character in the Snopes trilogy. He works with Peabody and Compson to bring about the naming of Jefferson. (In The Town, the first member of the Ratliff family in Mississippi is named Vladimir Kyrilytch Ratcliffe.)

"Doctor Peabody" is one of the "new faces" that arrive in Yoknapatawpha after the first group of pioneers and becomes "old Doctor Habersham's successor" as the community's physician (206). He is presumably an ancestor of the Doctor Peabody who in other fictions takes care of Yoknapatawpha's sick and wounded until well into the twentieth century, but the text never specifies the relationship between the two men. This earlier Peabody provides laudanum to add to the whiskey given to the militia for their celebration.

This courier is sent with "the two best horses in the settlement" to Natchez to inform authorities of the capture of the bandits and to negotiate for any reward for their capture (206).

This one-named Compson in this story is the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha: he "came to the settlement a few years ago with a race horse," which he swapped to a Chickasaw chief "a square mile of what was to be the most valuable land in the future town of Jefferson" (206). Although not among the settlement's earliest white inhabitants, he becomes the community's unofficial leader: preventing the bandits from being lynched and heading up the committee that confronts Pettigrew over the naming of Jefferson.

When the bandits are brought to the settlement by their militia captors, the white population of the settlement splits into at least two camps: one "small but determined gang" is a "faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without preliminary" (206).

These "Natchez Trace bandits" threaten all who pass through the wilderness between Nashville and the Mississippi settlement (200). Pettigrew's bravery is demonstrated as he carries the mail pouch without firearms through "a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (204).

Named by his mother Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew, the "special horseman" who delivers the mail from Nashville to the Mississippi settlement is a "fragile wisp of a man ageless, hairless, and toothless, who looked too frail even to approach a horse, let alone ride one six hundred miles every two weeks, yet who did so" (208). Pettigrew becomes deeply involved in the dispute over the lost lock. He then becomes central to the naming of Jefferson.