According to The Town, when Major de Spain returns from the Spanish-American War determined to modernize Jefferson, "nothing had happened in [the town] since the last carpetbagger had given up and gone home or been assimilated into another renegade Mississippian" (11). The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South.
According to Charles Mallison's account, Yoknapatawpha's Chickasaw Indians "departed for Oklahoma in 1820" (11). Historically, the Chickasaw were the Indians who inhabited northern Mississippi when the white settlers arrived, and they were 'removed' by government policy to Oklahoma, but not until the 1830s and 1840s.
