The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The Chickasaw were the tribe living in northern Mississippi when the white settlers began arriving. In 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).

This unnamed granddaughter of Issetibbeha marries Doctor Habersham's son, and "in the thirties" the couple "emigrated to Oklahoma" along with the rest of the Chickasaws (202). (In the novel Requiem for a Nun, which Faulkner was writing at the same time as this story, the Chickasaw woman who marries Habersham's son is identified first as Issetibbeha's granddaughter, but later as Mohataha's.)

A hundred years after the naming of Jefferson, "during a schism between two ladies' clubs over the naming of the streets in order to get free mail delivery," the clubs' members argue over whether "to change the [town's] name back to Habersham" (202).

The slaves brought into the settlement by Louis Grenier are the first slaves to come "into the country" (202). None of them appear in the story.

Grenier is a "Huguenot younger son who brings the first slaves into the country and is granted the first big land patent and so became the first cotton planter" (202). Even after he and his name are almost entirely forgotten, he remains a part of the landscape of Yoknapatawpha: he is the 'Old Frenchman' from whom the locality of Frenchman's Bend derives its name, and the decaying big house of his antebellum plantation (the Old Frenchman's place) plays important roles in several fictions.

The "half orphan" Habersham boy first arrives at the Mississippi settlement with his widowed father (202). As a grown man, he becomes the region's Indian agent; either before or after this, he marries a Chickasaw, one of Issetibbeha's granddaughters. To protest the Indian removal policy, he resigns his government job "in a letter of furious denunciation addressed to the President of the United States himself" (Andrew Jackson), and moves to Oklahoma "with his wife's dispossessed people" (202).

Dr. Habersham, one of Yoknapatawpha's three original white inhabitants, comes to Mississippi "riding horseback across Tennessee from the Cumberland Gap" (202). With his "worn black bag of pills and knives," he was so important to the settlement that for a time the place that will become Jefferson was known as "Doctor Habersham's" (202).

Alec Holston is one of the three earliest white settlers in the history of Yoknapatawpha. He arrives as a servant to Dr. Habersham, and eventually becomes the innkeeper of the settlement. As the original owner of the mammoth lock around which the story revolves, he insists on its return after the escape of the bandits and their captors. His name - and a much refurbished and renovated version of the tavern he founded several decades before the Civil War - survive in 20th century Jefferson in the Holston House.

One of the men of the settlement, he is sent to the "post-office-store" to "fetch the old Carolina lock from the latest Nashville mail-pouch" (202).

Among the various kinds of people confined in the original jail are "runaway slaves who were captured in the settlement" (202). Runaway slaves in the period before the Civil War are very rare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The story does not say where these slaves escaped from. Instead, it notes that the "single wooden bar" across the door of the jail effectively keeps them from escaping again (202).