THE CONSTRUCTION OF FAULKNER’S INDIANS

Patricia Galloway

Faulkner’s Indians?

Everyone with a Mississippi background has a Faulkner story, and this is mine. My father’s Auntie Mag, Margaret Galloway Muckenfuss, was a faculty wife in Oxford married to a chemist. Like many others associated with the university, she knew Faulkner by sight and encountered him in the street from time to time. On one such occasion, so the family story goes, she took him to task for writing shocking books, and asked why he did it. He replied that he did it for the money, doubtless quite intentionally shocking her more by telling the unvarnished but ambivalent truth. Not a very original story, but it brings up the significant issue of context that I would like to discuss in this paper: not the context of Faulkner’s exposure to great minds and little magazines, but of his reception of popular ideas about Indians and their place in the Mississippi of Yoknapatawpha’s beginnings.

Faulkner’s Indians begin as the denizens of short stories, if they do not end that way. I think we have to ask, for example, whether Indians did not owe part of their early prominence to the fact that Indians were a popular subject in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Indians were certainly a popular magazine fiction staple in Faulkner’s day: during the lifetime he shared with the Post, it published more than 260 stories about Indians, although Faulkner’s five Post stories with Indian themes – ”Red Leaves,” “Mountain Victory,” “A Bear Hunt,” “The Bear,” and “Hell Creek Crossing” – are a clear minority of the 21 stories he published in the magazine.1

And did he actually make his Indians up, as he claimed, or was this another mask to hide his craft and his intent? As far as what is known about both the Indians he claims to portray in the stories (Chickasaws, nominally, but Choctaws figure more strongly; some characters shift from one to the other) and those who dwelt actually in and on the borders of the real Yoknapatawpha (Chickasaws and Choctaws were the only ones left by the end of the eighteenth century, though both Chickasaws and Choctaws had absorbed the more shadowy Yazoos, Chakchiumas, Ibitoupas, and Taposas), the ethnographer’s answer must be that he did pretty much make them up, in the sense that he assimilated the practices of several tribes into his alleged “Chickasaws” and was very far from presenting ethnographic accuracy.2 But he certainly did 1 The Post was published from 1897 to 1968. “Indian” stories in the Post were relatively more numerous in the years around World War I, the early 1930s, the 1940s just after the end of World War II, and the Cold War years of the latter 1950s. In 1930 “Red Leaves” was one of three Indian stories or story installments; in 1932 “Mountain Victory” one of thirteen; in 1934 “A Bear Hunt” one of fourteen; in 1942 “The Bear” one of two; and in 1962 “Hell Creek Crossing” was the only one. See the Post bibliography by Beidler et al.2 A detailed analysis of Faulkner’s ethnographic failings would make a nice book, perhaps not wholly relevant; but it would be salutary for Faulkner scholars to pay more attention to the rich ethnographic and ethnohistorical scholarship available when they investigate specific points. Faulkner was not writing history, but some of

not create “his” Indians without using any sources at all beyond his own imagination, nor did he create them in either a local or national cultural vacuum. Along with a measure of the old and contemporary scholarship that he claimed to ignore, and in spite of his very real claims to iconoclastic originality in other aspects of his work, Faulkner assimilated both local and national popular thinking about Indian people, and it shows.

Scholars’ Indians

In the 1930s there were few Chickasaws anywhere around north Mississippi who had not faded into métissage or moved to Oklahoma or Tennessee, but there were hundreds of Choctaws in east-central Mississippi, assisted by a Bureau of Indian Affairs agency in Philadelphia. Though they would not be recognized by the U.S. government as a self-governing tribe until 1945, efforts had been under way since 1918 to repurchase land for them around their traditional homeland. There was also a certain amount of scholarship available in Oxford and in the possession of people Faulkner knew, which he could have seen had he expressed the slightest interest.

Faulkner scholars have tracked down many of the sources written by the early colonizers and state-builders and reflective of their views. Original historical materials were available in new editions. James Adair’s 1775 History of the American Indians, which focused upon the Chickasaws with whom Adair spent most of his time as a trader for the English, was reprinted in 1930, and several volumes of colonial and territorial historical documents were edited and published (and the French sources translated) by Dunbar Rowland from 1905 to 1932.3 Secondary histories of Mississippi were also widely available and tended to be collected by old white families. The classic history was J. F. H. Claiborne’s Mississippi as a Province, Territory, and State, first published in 1880; it was widely respected in Mississippi as a nearly eyewitness source on early Mississippi history, and has a lengthy section on Indians dating from the claims hearings of the early statehood period, precisely the period Faulkner’s Indian stories cover (see Dabney 37n32). Robert Lowry and William McCardle published a popular history of Mississippi to the death of Jefferson Davis in 1891.4 The missionary Horatio Bardwell Cushman’s history and memoir of his life with the Indians in the early statehood period appeared

his commentators have written fiction when they have asserted what they perceive to be the historical truth about Mississippi Indians.3 Rowland was director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from 1902 to 1936. He never managed to have the Spanish materials translated and published, which may account for the absence of 1780s and 1790s Spanish characters in Faulkner’s Indian stories.4 Lowry and McCardle, both lawyers and politicians, drew upon the history of Louisiana by Charles Gayarré to begin their Indian chapter with descriptions of the Natchez government as “a perfect Oriental despotism” in which “it was customary to immolate [in honor of the death of the sovereign, the Great Sun] a considerable number of his subjects” (247). About the Choctaws they have these kind words: “They were proverbially filthy and stupid in the estimation of all who knew them, and they were exceedingly boastful, although notoriously less brave than any of the other of the red tribes” (251), while the Chickasaws are described as “a large, powerful and warlike nation. They were brave, cruel, implacable and bloodthirsty” (254). The largest part of their story of the Indians is devoted to the story of Choctaw chief Pushmataha, whom they compare to Napoleon (251).

in 1899.5 Early volumes of the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society attempted to register more serious considerations of Chickasaw history and lore.6

The relevant scholarship in Faulkner’s own time was dominated by the obsessive ethnographic work of John R. Swanton, who specialized in the study of the southeastern Indians, including the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Many of Swanton’s works were released during the time that Faulkner was working on his Indian foundations of Yoknapatawpha.7 One of Swanton’s correspondents in Mississippi was Calvin S. Brown, who was also Faulkner’s professor of French and literature at the University of Mississippi during his brief career as a student, and whose son maintained a friendship with the writer. Brown was also an antiquarian whose 1926 book, Archeology of Mississippi, still serves as a compendium of information about private collections of “relics” that were not commonly available for study then, many of which are now entirely lost.8 The Bureau of American Ethnology was assiduous in making sure that copies of its publications were distributed widely, especially to individuals who had been helpful in its inquiries, and these books in the BAE series were certainly available at the University of Mississippi library or through the connection with Brown. Had Faulkner wanted to talk about Indians with someone who was well informed on the best ethnographic scholarship of his generation, he could have done no better than to talk to Brown, so it is likely that he could have learned quite a lot at a high level without doing the research he allegedly despised.

In addition to Swanton’s vast œuvre, a variety of other works of rather dubious scholarly status were conveniently available, perhaps all the more interesting because they take us closer to the kind of oral history resources that Faulkner favored so much, to the talk, landscape, and names of the region. Local historians like J. H. Malone (Tennessee) and E. T. Winston (Pontotoc, Mississippi) wrote romanticized, boosterish histories of the Chickasaws and events in their homeland. The Works Progress Administration in Mississippi sponsored county projects to collect folklore, tradition, and local history from all over the state, including Lafayette County; at least one notable local legend confirmed by Faulkner’s friends and relatives also shows up in the WPA collection.9 School textbooks and works by local historians repeatedly stressed the “big three” Indian leaders: Pushmataha, the powerful and undefeated American ally; Greenwood LeFlore, the great planter and state legislator; and Levi Colbert, wise craftsman of the Chickasaw Removal treaty. Finally, although African-American traditions of their own relations with Indians have not received much study, many 5 An abridged version edited by Angie Debo has recently been reissued in paperback.6 The Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society volumes, from 1897 through 1914, contain multiple articles on local history relating to the Lafayette County area and Indians, notably by Henry S. Halbert, George J. Leftwich, and Harry Warren. See Dabney 37.7 Relevant publications by Swanton are listed chronologically in the Works Cited. 8 Faulkner owned a copy of Brown’s work, one chapter of which is devoted to the mounds of Lafayette County; see Dabney 19n1.9 This is the “Toby Tubby” story, described later, to be found in WPA Records, Lafayette County, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

African-American families in Mississippi have traditions of Indian family members that go far beyond the common “Cherokee princess” genre.10 A huge amount of original documentation, scholarship, popular history, anecdote, and custom was thus not only available to but hardly avoidable by Faulkner, even if he had never met an Indian.11

Much of this source material has already been reviewed bit by bit by Faulkner scholars, most notably by Lewis M. Dabney in his 1974 work, The Indians of Yoknapatawpha: A Study in Literature and History. But neither Dabney nor anyone to my knowledge who has written significantly about Faulkner’s Indians has been an anthropologist or a specialist in Indian history. The assimilationist bias reflected in Dabney’s book, according to which the adoption of any sort of European cultural item marks the decline of Indian culture, now appears to be more Faulkner than reality. A spate of research during the past thirty years has changed the premises for understanding the colonial, territorial, and early statehood history of Mississippi and of the several peoples who came to inhabit it together, simply by beginning to turn away from an exclusively white male political-historical viewpoint.12 Like the rest of U.S. history, this history of Faulkner’s multiracial region now offers a drastically changed focus.

It is now evident that we should be satisfied to take Faulkner at his word on the creative role that he played in orchestrating the materials in the Indian stories: though clearly he worked from historical and legendary materials to a considerable extent, his Indians are constructions, stage properties, not modified portraits of real individuals or individual types whom he knew personally and cared for, as was the case with many of his white and black characters. In Faulkner’s 10 The research cited by Dabney (26-27) reporting claims of Indian ancestry among African-American college students and city dwellers of 33 percent seems credible in the light of my own admittedly anecdotal experience. I was personally witness to many credible testimonies to such relationships, probably exceeding that percentage, when interviewing African-American community members during preparation in 1996 of the exhibit “Mississippi 1500-1700” for the Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History.11 Faulkner must in his youth have seen some of the Choctaws who lived as sharecroppers in east central Mississippi and after 1945 had a recognized reservation near Philadelphia, since he described them as being “a good deal like animals in a zoo” (FU 43).12 Standard works on the Chickasaws are those of Gibson and Littlefield. Gibson’s is a notably political history focused on the period before Removal, and Littlefield depends upon him for this period. Unfortunately no more recent ethnohistory of the Chickasaws is available; but James Atkinson, currently working on a history of the Chickasaws before Removal and concentrating on Chickasaw political history in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mississippi, where Gibson is weakest, has uncovered rich material in U.S. government documents, especially the American State Papers series, a familiar article in law offices that Faulkner could well have known.

A chain of works integrating Indians into the social and economic history of the region begins with Richard White’s The Roots of Dependency (1983). White’s The Middle Ground (1991) describes midwestern North America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a multiracial scene of complex negotiation among equals instead of white-dominated “acculturation.” Dan Usner’s Indians, Settlers, and Slaves (1992) also belongs in this category, as does his American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley (1998). In Becoming Southern (1995), Christopher Morris has opened up possibilities for a critical local history of the region and period, and Don H. Doyle has used modern scholarship to produce a similar but Faulkner-focused work in Faulkner’s County (2001), though unfortunately without referring to the most recent ethnohistorical work. Recent studies of the Choctaw include those of Galloway (1995), Kidwell (1995), Carson (1999), and O’Brien (2002).

Mississippi there were very few identifiable Indians, and his approach to portraying them was an amalgam of received stereotypes and modernist orientalism.13

Yoknapatawpha

The Faulkner timeline, incorporating information from the whole of the œuvre, places the Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe in 1813 as the seller of the square mile of land that will become Jefferson for a racehorse (SF “Appendix” 406-7). In 1833 Ikkemotubbe sells a 100-square-mile tract to Thomas Sutpen (AA 23). These two dates and the whole foundation of Faulkner’s fictional universe are anchored of necessity to the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc by which the Chickasaws ceded their Mississippi lands in and all around Lafayette County. The treaty provided formal allotments of land in Mississippi to individuals (few of whom were situated precisely in Lafayette County), who agreed to sell them in order to remove to Oklahoma, thus permitting speculators to buy up their lands. Hence the “Indian stories” that have actual Indian characters in some kind of tribal setting all must somehow have taken place after 1798, with the exit of the Spanish and the entry of increased numbers of English-speaking witnesses and actors, and before 1837, when the Chickasaws finally departed for Oklahoma.14 The three Indian stories linked by being parts of the story of the Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe apparently took place in Mississippi’s territorial and early statehood periods, 1798-1837, since there is no portrayal of the Spanish influence that prevailed after 1763. The expedition of the Choctaw mixed-blood chief Weddel to Washington seems to have taken place around 1824-1830.

This was a time when Anglo settlers were following early French and British traders (some of whom, like John Colbert, had stayed put) into north Mississippi by marrying into prominent Indian families. Such mixed families include, in the Chickasaw case, the Colberts, who are mentioned explicitly in the stories, and in the Choctaw case, the LeFlores, who are far more important to the stories.15 The Colberts were soon joined by royalists after the American Revolution, some bringing their slaves with them from eastern colonies, and began to prosper through the cultivation of cash crops. Through the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, however, there was a real fluidity of class, race, and gender in Mississippi, at least partly because the numbers of whites and blacks who lived in the Mississippi interior among the Indians were still 13 There were several thousand Choctaws in Mississippi during the period, but they kept a notably low profile in the east central part of the state and were subject to segregation laws.14 Dabney observed that Faulkner had expanded the time normally allotted to one generation into three for his Indian characters, “to do justice to its varied possibilities” (14).15 James Colbert came into the country as a Carolina trader in the 1730s, died in 1783 or 1784, and had at least four sons (William, George, Levi, and James) who would rise to political power among the Chickasaws at the end of the century. French-Canadian Louis Le Fleur was appointed to serve as the agent of a U.S. trading post in 1792, established first at LeFleur’s Bluff (modern Jackson) and then a hundred miles further north along the Natchez Trace at French Camp; he married the daughter of the French trader Cravat and his Choctaw wife, by whom he had eleven children, one of whom was Greenwood LeFlore.

relatively small.16 Surrounded by Indians as they were, embedded in what remained a distinctly Indian society, they had to succeed in their ends by conforming to Indian requirements. Traders married into matrilineal clans to gain access to trading preferment, and farmers did the same to gain access to land. One very clear signal that Faulkner manufactured Indian culture as well as people was his imposition on Mississippi Indians of the same patriarchal social structures that he gave his Anglos and Africans – when in fact female control of land, lineage, and possibly even politics was a central element of the culture of all Mississippi Indians and was the key to the power of Chickasaw and Choctaw mixed-blood men, who were the children of the sisters of chiefs and were considered by the tribes to be of the substance of their mothers (Swanton, Indians [1946], 654, 666-70).

Time and Blood

The presence of mixed-blood Indians in Faulkner’s stories is thus not surprising in view of the historical context, but may also have been nudged along by the fact that those who wrote Mississippi history paid greatest attention to their stories and believed them to be superior in their admixture of white “blood” to their full-blood relatives. In fact the shadowy and chorus-like character of Faulkner’s full-bloods – the President in “Lo!” speaks of their all having the same face (CS 382) – echoes the popular memory of Indians in Mississippi. I quote from the final paragraph of the “Indian chapter” of John K. Bettersworth’s school history from 1959:

Today, Mississippi’s Indian heritage is almost forgotten. Very little is known about the Indians who once roamed these parts. About all that the average person knows is that some of our towns, counties, and streams have unpronounceable names that hark back to the days when the first of Mississippi’s “first families” inhabited the state.17

Even Bettersworth, however, went on to mention Pushmataha (as a heroic and loyal ally of Old Hickory), Greenwood LeFlore (the planter and legislator from Carroll County), and at least one Colbert (a sacker of Mississippi River commerce during the Spanish period): these leaders had become canonical.

Scholars have construed the Indian strands in Faulkner’s work as two family sagas for some time, none more explicitly

16 This is a significant argument of Morris’s Becoming Southern.17 Bettersworth 44; of course the book itself, ignoring the wide range of source material that was really available, thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bettersworth’s book drew in substance and emphasis from a long line of Mississippi school histories beginning with that of Franklin L. Riley in 1914, and his treatment of Indians functioned rhetorically, as when he claimed that they had to be sent “off to Oklahoma in order to make way for the white settlers” (32). I cannot resist reporting what Bettersworth had to say about Faulkner: having assured readers that Faulkner’s great-grandfather was a Civil War colonel and that he had lived all his life in an “Oxford antebellum home built in 1848,” Bettersworth continued, “Faulkner wrote in unglamorous fashion of the turbulent South of his own day. . . . Hard to read, with his long sentences, his long parentheses, and his frequent use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ as a device for telling a story, Faulkner was more talked about than read” (497). But Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize, so he couldn’t be left out, even though Bettersworth reassured his readers that his most readable work included the Civil War stories of The Unvanquished.

than Walter Taylor in making the case for another shadowy “novel Faulkner never wrote.” According to Taylor, “Red Leaves,” “A Justice,” and “A Courtship” are all manifestations (and include retellings) of an “Ikkemotubbe” saga, while “Mountain Victory” and “Lo!” are evidence of a “Weddel” saga, which can be analogized respectively to the Sutpen/McCaslin and Sartoris strands of Faulkner’s overall Yoknapatawpha scheme. These materials were then reworked and reused to expound the main themes of loss of innocence and degradation in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, and accordingly never saw the light of day as a fully-articulated novel. Interesting as this argument is, there are elements in the extant stories themselves that argue for a more piecemeal accretion, and perhaps a more episodic inspiration.

The social organization of the Indian groups portrayed in the stories is more like that of Germanic warlords than of Chickasaw or Choctaw tribal chiefs. The “Man” is an absolute leader whose word is not only law but life or death, and this word is carried out by a cadre of male retainers who also participate in the supervision of African slaves. There is talk of a council of elders in “Red Leaves,” but no indication that they actually have substantive control at the time of the story; instead they function as a chorus to reflect on the novelty and burden of black slavery. Previous Faulkner scholarship has simply accepted this sociopolitical structure as a genuine expression of aboriginal Indian governance, or else taken Doom’s progress as a sign of the degeneracy into tyranny that Faulkner attributes to white influence. Both the historic Choctaws and Chickasaws, however, were known for their egalitarian social organization and practices, and among them political power (as opposed to influence through kinship) was at best weak and situational, leading to a systemic factionalism in the face of calls for unity but a resilient decentralization that made external dominance impossible as long as no tribe faced a single more powerful hegemonic enemy. These very characteristics left them more or less at the mercy of white exploitation once Americans took uncontested control of the region. Only the powerful mixed-blood families, especially the Colberts among the Chickasaws, were able to orchestrate their extended families into structures that even remotely resembled what Faulkner portrays, and even they did not dare approach the level of orientalist tyranny wielded by Ikkemotubbe and his family. But even here Faulkner’s imagination had a good deal of help in the long-embedded conviction of white historians that white-Indian mixed-blood leaders automatically rose to dominance of their tribes through their superior “blood,” and virtually controlled the tribes in the making of treaties toward Removal.18

The convoluted genealogy underlying the Ikkemotubbe family, although it does not remain fixed from story to story, seems to me to have been reconstrued from historical fact.

18 Gibson (150 and passim) was adamant that the Colberts ran the Chickasaw tribe as a private fiefdom. In a forthcoming book, Splendid Land, Splendid People, Atkinson paints a much more nuanced picture of the less visible (in popular histories) activities of full-blood leaders. Kidwell (116-42) has similarly revealed how full-blood desires, and not the influence of mixed-blood leaders Greenwood LeFlore and David Folsom alone, drove the Choctaw acceptance of a Removal treaty.

Issetibbeha was in fact a historical figure, actually the last “king” of the Chickasaws who appears in treaty documents: Ishtehotopa, the nephew of the leading chief Chinubbee. And Faulkner didn’t just use the name, but gestured at the pattern of inheritance as well. Chinubbee was the nephew of the leading chief of the 1760s, Paya Mataha, and was preceded as leading chief by his own brother, Taski Etoka or the “Hair Lipped King.”19

Then the pattern repeated: on his death in 1819, Chinubbee’s leadership role was initially passed to Ishtehotopa’s brother Chehopistee, then to Ishtehotopa on Chehopistee’s death in 1820 (by natural causes, I hasten to add). Ishtehotopa held the distinction of “king” (the nomenclature was white-applied) from 1820 through Removal, and into the 1840s in Oklahoma (Atkinson, in press; Gibson 174, 188, 245). As already mentioned, to the extent that anything was inherited among the Indians of Mississippi, perhaps especially their ethnicity, it was inherited through the mother, so that when chiefly office was passed on to a male relative it went to a brother or a sister’s son, and that is the pattern we see here. The several transitions of power in both the fictional and the real events are sufficiently similar, I think, to warrant the suggestion that Faulkner used the real events and the name, but inverted the lineal transfer of power: in the real Chickasaw case, the son of the chief’s sister would not have been excluded from leadership, but specified for it.

FIGURE. Ishtehotopa Genealogy

Faulkner did more than this, however, and I think that what he did can be shown by tracing the alterations he made in his fictional genealogy over time. In “Red Leaves” the truncated “male” side of the genealogy is little elaborated, as power is quickly hijacked by Ikkemotubbe to create his own Indian-African dynasty of three generations, which we see from the perspective of its conclusion. But in “A Justice” two things have happened: Ikkemotubbe’s path to power has been made more complex, while his dynasty is as yet not specified, and the Indian-African miscegenation that creates Sam Fathers is proxied for Ikkemotubbe by a slave he owns and a henchman, Craw-ford, whom he commands. By the time of “The Old People” the three-tier dynasty has been fully articulated on the “male” side – now transformed to “fullblood” – by folding in the brother’s abdication from “A Justice” to the Issetibbeha-Moketubbe sequence taken from “Red Leaves.” Sam Fathers is now Ikkemotubbe’s own son and the miscegenation Ikkemotubbe’s as at the beginning, but shortened by the subtracted generation. The final step, fictionally earliest, shows the “male” side regularized to three generations and the “female” side with Ikkemotubbe’s future unknown. This process of reshaping the Ikkemotubbe story keeps the African-Indian miscegenation on the “Doom”-ed “female” side while transferring the Issetibbeha-Moketubbe relation to the fullblood “male” side. Faulkner was no longer interested in the Africanness of the grotesque Moketubbe; instead he found a 19 Sic; this spelling and the information comes from a mid-nineteenth-century interview by historian Lyman Draper with Indian trader Malcom McGee, in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Draper Manuscripts.

way for a “doom”-ed Indian race debauched by Europeans to join with the endurance of African women to produce the archetypal figure of Sam Fathers.

FIGURE: Ikkemotubbe Genealogy through Four Stories

The Weddel lineage is less complex, more clearly the reflection of one individual. The story “Lo!” presents a large group of “Chickasaw” Indians who have come to Washington to obtain “justice” from the President regarding the death of a white land speculator who had attempted to trick them out of control of a ford. Once more their leader is French-influenced, with a French name (Vidal – or perhaps Weddel?) and possibly French blood; he is inordinately fond of European garments as long as they do not include trousers. As Elmo Howell pointed out long ago (253), this incident is probably modeled upon the 1831 expedition to Washington of the three-quarters French, one-quarter-Choctaw, slave- and plantation-owning eventual Mississippi state legislator Greenwood LeFlore, with other features borrowed from the 1824 journey of the full-blood Choctaw chief Pushmataha.20

This connection is further explicated in a slightly earlier story, “Mountain Victory,” which outlines the journey to Washington and makes more evident the connection to LeFlore by explicating the French blood quotient of the returning Civil War soldier with a half-French father who had built a huge mansion called “Countalmaison” on his slave-farmed plantation. Greenwood LeFlore’s mansion near Greenwood, Mississippi, which burned in 1942, was called Malmaison in memory and admiration of Napoleon’s wife Josephine – adding another link with Saucier’s grandfather Vidal, “a general of Napoleon’s and a knight of the Legion of Honor” (CS 759). As Taylor has pointed out, this leads us back in a circle to Ikkemotubbe’s patron/tutor Sœur Blonde de Vitry, said to have been worthy of being a Napoleonic marshal (SF “Appendix” 403). A couple of historical facts tantalize here: the chief military engineer in the Louisiana colony in the 1720s was named Le Blond de La Tour; while one Joseph Vidal was the aide to Spanish governor Gayoso of Natchez in the 1780s and later served as an agent of several consortia of Natchez businessmen in buying up Chickasaw lands in the 1830s.21 Faulkner’s omnivorous readings in the available Mississippi documentation could easily have supplied these names too. But again the context of received beliefs about European predecessors in Mississippi intrudes: the descendants of Anglo “winners” in the struggle for control of the lands of Mississippi justified their success by disparaging the Spanish as actively evil minions of the Pope, and the French as debauched failed colonists of a bloated monarchy; Lafayette, even 20 Howell’s identification was repeated by Dabney (35-36, 43-56); for information about LeFlore both Howell and Dabney consulted a picture-book for school children by Allene DeShazo Smith because there was no scholarly biography of LeFlore then, just as there is none now. For a brief recent treatment, see Halliburton.21 Le Blond de la Tour appears in French colonial documentation from the 1720s; see Rowland and Sanders, III (1932), passim. Joseph Vidal’s papers, including materials on Chickasaw land transactions, are held by the Louisiana State University Library, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, and the Louisiana State Museum; see Beers. The town of Vidalia across the Mississippi River from Natchez is named for Vidal.

Napoleon, were their French heroes, both safely gone from the American continent.

Slavery and Retainer Sacrifice

The central story of “Red Leaves” is the nameless slave’s long run to escape what anthropologists refer to as “retainer sacrifice” – burial with his dead master. There is no verifiable record at all of Chickasaws’ having killed black slaves to accompany them to the other world, and only a little evidence to suggest that they may on occasion have killed dogs or their much-prized Chickasaw ponies for this purpose, though they frequently took inanimate objects with them into the usually modest graves placed underneath the bed platforms they had occupied in life within their houses; archaeological evidence has verified the historical accounts in these particulars. Hence the central thesis of “Red Leaves” misrepresents both Chickasaw and Choctaw funeral practice, although as Dabney and others have observed, the Natchez Indians, driven from the state in the eighteenth century but amply documented by Claiborne and Swanton, practiced large-scale retainer sacrifice at the deaths of their supreme “Sun” leaders (see Swanton, Indian Tribes [1911]). It has been suggested that Faulkner, like many another writer, was fascinated by the imperial picture of the Natchez “Suns” whose obsequies echoed the sacrifices of European prehistory so fancifully but influentially portrayed in Frazer’s Golden Bough. Yet the immediate inspiration has been identified as a local one. Dabney has documented and others have mentioned the local Lafayette County tradition that at the death of a Chickasaw chief named Toby Tubby, efforts were made by his people to bury his personal slave with him.22 As far as can be discerned, this legend is poorly located in time and cannot be substantiated historically, but people in Lafayette County believed it, and Faulkner made it the premise of “Red Leaves.”

The general treatment of African slaves by Indians and the attitude toward them expressed by slave-owning Indians has long been an issue in discussions of “Red Leaves” and “A Justice.” The colonial-period Chickasaws had not scrupled to serve as notable catchers of Indian slaves on behalf of the English among their neighboring tribes since before 1699, when the French arrived on the Gulf coast and immediately gained popularity with the Chickasaws’ victims because they were willing to supply them with guns to counter those that the English had supplied to the Chickasaws. But this practice, already unprofitable because Indians made such poor slaves both in the Carolinas and in the Caribbean, came to a halt with the Yamassee War of 1715 against the Carolina colonies. The Chickasaws were not notably involved in enslaving Indians for sale afterwards, though they did trade war captives to the English from their various encounters with the French of Louisiana. The whole of this practice, however, should not be conflated with that of chattel slavery practiced to extract free 22 Dabney (96-97) suggests that the transport of Moketubbe on a litter may reflect the ceremonial carrying of the Great Sun as sketched by the French explorer Du Pratz. Doyle also cites the story of Toby Tubby as one well known to Faulkner and the general populace of Oxford (49-50 and notes, 392).

labor for the working of cash crops. Instead, it was part of the Native practice of non-chattel, non-hereditary slavery that amounted rather to keeping a captive alive to replace a lost relative, or the use of captives as hostages, and it is not clear to what degree the Chickasaws had actually begun to think of Indian slaves traded to the British as commodities by the time the trade ceased. During the colonial period, their acquaintance with enslaved and free Africans was limited to occasional packhorsemen in the service of English traders and to the black militias used by the French in their Chickasaw wars. It therefore seems that Faulkner’s notion that some Indians learned a new style of slavery from whites is in fact accurate, however accidentally it may have been arrived at. It is interesting that the examples of the abuse of slaves by Chickasaws, given in the Faulkner literature to support the verisimilitude of the slave’s sacrifice by Chickasaw Indians, seem to resolve to a single report by a disgruntled Indian agent.23

Clothing and Shelter

Indian use (or misuse) of European clothing is mentioned in “Red Leaves,” “A Justice,” and “Lo!” Dabney, citing A. Irving Hallowell, interpreted the Indians’ “curious” use of white clothing in the Faulkner stories as a reflection of the failure of Indian acculturation (94). Since then, the picture has come to seem more complex, as the study of culture-contact situations has increased our understanding of the ways in which cultures in contact reuse and adapt each other’s goods in particular ways that enhance their own cultures rather than the reverse. White visitors to Chickasaw country did report colorful dress on the part of Chickasaw men, who had a distinctive style of their own and adapted European articles of clothing and jewelry to their own uses:

The Chickasaw men are very effeminate and dressy – the head is, in a hot summer day, bound with a handkerchief, over it a thick binding of fulled cloth, covered with broaches; to the nose hang six bobs, one in each ear, the outer curl of which is slit, and enraped in silver and beads, the hair of a deer’s tail coloured red; this hangs over the face and eyes: the face is painted with streaks and spots of red and black; the beard is pulled out; the neck adorned with a dozen strings of beads of different sorts, besides a silk handkerchief; the arms and wrists adorned with silver bands; the body and arms covered with a calico shirt; the dress of the lower limbs is various . . . The men have a bunch of white feathers fastened to the back part of the neck, and if a person of note, a black feather; and lest the dress or coloring should

23 Littlefield (5 and 26n6) cites several murders from a single report by agent William Cocke dated 1816, at a time when the Chickasaws were at odds with Cocke for having failed to remove white squatters from Chickasaw land; see also Atkinson, Splendid Land, ch. 11. In his report Cocke accused Factor’s Son, one of the complainants against him, of having beaten and burned a slave to death. Dabney’s citation (96) comes from a different source but represents the same incident.

be discomposed, carries his glass in his pocket, or hanging to his side.24

This description appears exotic, certainly – for one thing, it portrays dress for a special occasion rather than ordinary dress – and its author is not an ethnographer; yet it lacks the grossness and grotesqueness with which Faulkner’s Doom, Moketubbe, and Weddel/Vidal wear their trappings of “European finery” (CS 331).

Oddly, Issetibbeha’s coveted red-heeled Paris shoes in “Red Leaves” could conceivably not be a complete fabrication: red shoes – red moccasins – were used in the ceremony of the making of a warrior among the Chickasaws and Choctaws, and their war chiefs often had the element “red” as part of their names; among the Choctaws, they were even frequently called Red Shoes, and several famous chiefs by this name are well documented in readily available literature.25 The shoes in this story are not moccasins, but that fact in itself, it seems to me, adds to the credibility of such a possible reworked source. I also find myself wanting to complete the Ikkemotubbe-Weddel circle once more by connecting these ironic red-heeled shoes with the cracked dancing slippers that Saucier Weddel wears when dressing for the evening in “Mountain Victory” (CS 752).

Another significant object with what may be a concrete inspiration is the stranded steamboat that was moved overland to become Doom’s house. This is an astounding episode, epic and outrageous, attributed by Dabney to Faulkner’s awareness of the proximity of Indians and steamboats on the Tallahatchie (Indians, 12), but I think it represents another link to the Weddel story. Greenwood LeFlore’s Malmaison had an attached two-story ell with porches on both levels, and was surmounted by a belvedere and balustrade that gave it an appearance not unlike a steamboat surmounted by its pilothouse, thus quite likely at least reinforcing the idea of Doom’s overland transport of a steamboat to become part of his house.

FIGURE. Malmaison from the north. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Vidal/Weddel’s concern with the control of the ford in “Lo!”, on the other hand, must be a Chickasaw connection, an echo of what the Colberts were most famous for: Colbert’s Ferry on the Tennessee River, which they received as a grant, together with a square mile of surrounding land, from part of the old Chickasaw domain in Tennessee ceded to the American government, allegedly in return for George Colbert’s assistance to the U.S. in securing favorable treaty terms.

Lo! the Poor Indian24 Phelps, ed., 273. In “Death of a Chickasaw Leader” Atkinson reports a Chickasaw grave found by a developer in 1956, associated with a Washington peace medal dated to 1793, and with 21 silver brooches, two silver arm bands, two silver wrist bands, and two small mirrors, among many other items including brass uniform buttons and gold-bullion epaulets – thus confirming the Chickasaw style of dress reported by Bullen from the same period as well as the sets of “rich uniform clothes” sent to Chickasaw chiefs around 1792 by Washington.25 The Choctaw chief Red Shoe dominates Volume 1 of Rowland and Sanders’ Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, published in 1927.

The cultural context of the story “Lo!” involves not only “high” but also popular literature. In particular, “Lo!” can be seen as a heavily ironic and explicit response to a particular formulation of the notion, popular in Faulkner’s youth, that Indians were doomed to pass from the earth. This idea, part of the whole Manifest Destiny ideology, came to be connected with the famous verses from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man:

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mindSees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;His soul proud Science never taught to strayFar as the solar walk, or milky way;Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n,Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav’n,Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d,Some happier island in the watry waste,Where slaves once more their native land behold,No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!To Be, contents his natural desire;He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire;But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,His faithful dog shall bear him company.26

Such sentiments were widespread, even in Minnesota, where the Sioux uprising and massacre of whites in 1862 (after they had been starved by those who had stolen their allotments) had led to cries for their complete extermination. They were echoed for example in 1885 by Joseph Kennedy, who, after quoting these same lines from Pope, says:

The aboriginal race is fast dying away . . . We deem it the most real of tragedies in society when a young person, full of life and vigor, is taken away by death; the tragedy is proportionately greater when a whole race is dying slowly but surely . . . The tragedy is more appalling when we see in all the relations of the pale face to the red man the evidence that the poor savage is not dying a natural death, but that civilization, so-called, is slowly doing the deed . . . [h]istory testifies to the many noble, self-sacrifices endured by Indians for their white friends. Their fortitude and constancy are unbounded. The Indian has more of the true man in him than any savage on earth. He could not be a slave. The impress of majesty is on his soul, and he would die rather than be degraded.

This attitude was linked to the crusading of Indian supporters like Helen Hunt Jackson, whose arguments in A Century of Dishonor (1881) were dramatized in her novel Ramona (1886).

26 Butt, ed., 508. Previous scholars have made the identification with Pope’s poem, but have failed to appreciate the popularity of its opening words during the period of Faulkner’s youth. Those who used the phrase disparagingly apparently paid attention to Pope’s argument: he is discussing human awareness of death and its sequel, and places Indians midway between Europeans and animals in their awareness of death.

The romantic melancholy of this view was reflected in art as well: the painter William Holbrook Beard (1823-1900), well known for his paintings of animals, especially anthropomorphic bears that were frequently reproduced in popular publications and for advertisements, painted a canvas entitled “Lo the poor Indian,” a dark and atmospheric image of a lone Indian looking off into a stormy sky, some time during the 1880s.

The expression “Mr. Lo” became a shorthand for this complex of issues, even where sides were not taken, as can be seen in many other accounts of various aspects of Indian affairs towards the turn of the century.27 Horace Greeley gave the title of “Lo! The Poor Indian” to one segment of his New York to San Francisco, in which he argued that Indians must die out and stop blocking progress. That these motives could be mixed is shown in the 1880 autobiography of Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, a well-known abolitionist and campaigner for women’s rights, who also railed against an American Indian policy dominated by Eastern interests in maintaining savage, infant-murdering, and lazy Indians in idleness in the West:

If by gentle means Mr. Lo can be persuaded to stop taking all the wives he can get, extorting their labor by the cudgel, and selling them and their children at will, all well and good . . . All the property of every tribe must be held in Common, so that there can possibly be no incentive to industry and economy; but if the Indian refuse to be civilized on that plan, he must go on taking scalps and being excused, until extermination solve the problem . . . For long years, Indians had sat like crows, watching the white farmers and artisans sent to teach them industry, and had grunted their honest contempt . . . Thousands of dollars worth of agricultural machinery lay “rotting in the sun” while the noble red aristocrat played poker in the shade; his original contempt for labor intensified by his power to extract a living from laborers, through their fear of his scalping-knife. (227-28)

She had much more to say about the atrocities of the Sioux uprising, and her rhetoric is characteristic of the genre. Her views were also expressed in images, including a wide range of cartoons of ragged and drunken Indians.28 Such was the variety of the popular theme of “Mr. Lo” in the discourse about Indians at the turn of the twentieth century.

FIGURE: “Lo the poor Indian” cartoon, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

27 In 1874, for example, Joseph McCoy described how he and other cattle traders carried out government contracts to provide beef to feed reservation Indians (or failed to do so – McCoy is acerbic in commenting on profiteers). Throughout, he refers to Indians as “poor Lo and family,” “Mr. Lo,” etc.28 Berkhofer, “White Conceptions,” 528 fig. 4; he comments: “‘Lo the poor Indian’ is always in reference to Indians who are taken advantage of or pitiable in some way.” For a full exposition of the good Indian/bad Indian images that played themselves out in the “Lo the poor Indian” discourse, see Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian.

But Faulkner was not indebted alone to the portrayal of “Mr. Lo” in the dime novels of his youth. The phrase and its thematic complex became so widespread and persistent that it was used by Charles E. Van Loan in the title of his story “Lo, the Poor Piute [sic]” published in the Saturday Evening Post on December 11, 1915 (Beidler et al., 66-67). We can go further; in structure and theme this story also suggests itself powerfully as an intertext for Faulkner’s “Lo!” In the story, a group of cowboy swindlers plan to cheat the Paiute Indians of Moapa, Nevada, at their annual horse-race meeting: the whites plan to enter the five scheduled horse races, four times with a slow horse, and for the fifth and final race with a ringer that is sure to win, manipulating the betting so as to win all the Indians’ money. They hide the fast horse, which happens to fear coyotes, at the ranch of an old Paiute man, an apparent drunkard whom they pay with whisky. On the day of the race, the fast horse is run off the course by a tame coyote that the old man borrows from a young boy. The story is replete with offensive descriptions of the Indians put into the mouth of one of the swindlers who narrates the story, and who concludes that more education for Indians would be a positive danger to whites.

Of course “Lo!” does rework materials from the two Choctaw chiefs’ well-known trips to Washington, as we have seen. It seems to me, however, that we can add additional dimensionality to the story by a reading that sees Faulkner using the genre of the frontier tall tale (which it shares with “Lo, the Poor Piute”) and the knowledge of another treatment in a coveted publishing outlet to explore many dimensions of the “Mr. Lo” theme received from the popular treatment of historical events of Removal, Plains Indian wars, and reservation enclosure.

Conclusion

In the light of ever-improving knowledge of what Faulkner knew about Mississippi Indians and of the political and social context of Indian affairs as portrayed in the popular culture of his time, we have to affirm that Faulkner’s portrayal of Indians was not based alone on his imagination. His Indians are an amalgam, in space and time, of features of the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Natchez of Mississippi, and his central characters and some of their activities draw upon – indeed repeatedly mine – the well-known stories of both the mixed-blood Chickasaw Colberts and the mixed-blood Choctaw LeFlores. In addition, Faulkner’s Indians betray the reception of both Southern and American stereotypes of Indians as exotic, lazy, dirty, sly, and especially dying out. Other ingredients were added to decorate them with orientalist touches of cruelty. Their portrayal as foolish victims of commodity lust and instigators of quixotic grand gestures is no more exaggerated than Faulkner’s similar treatment of white characters. At the same time, they are inscrutable Others who provided an infinitely malleable middle term that served Faulkner well for asking any number of questions of the white-black relationship, as has long been understood. Yet in the end the “Indian” who interested Faulkner most was someone on whom the machinery of Indian genealogy

in the stories focuses: forever elided between two Indian fathers, brought up in the house of a fictive African father, and doomed, as the son of an African mother, to suffer her fate – as the real Indians would have understood – Sam Fathers endured to assert what Joseph Kennedy called the “impress of majesty on his soul” from at least one of his Indian fathers.

He is still doing it. Everybody with any Faulkner connection has a Mississippi story, and here is mine, from yesterday’s newspaper. James Meredith, the first African-American to be enrolled in and to graduate from the University of Mississippi, has written extensively on the Choctaw roots of African-Americans in Mississippi. In a recent interview in The Northside Sun he was quoted as follows: “I knew from oral history that me and my kind had ruled the south and Mississippi for over 2,000 years before the Europeans came here. I went to Ole Miss to fulfill my divine responsibility which was to restore the power and the glory to my bloodline.” This is not faux Faulkner but real Meredith. On the same newspaper page, next to the article, was an advertisement for a concert by the African-American Isley Brothers, playing at the splendid Silver Star Casino at Pearl River Resort, “A Development of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.”

University of Texas at Austin

Works Cited

Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. 1775. Ed. Samuel Cole Williams. Johnson, City, TN: Watauga, 1930.

Atkinson, James R. “Death of a Chickasaw Leader: The Probable Grave of Piomingo.” Mississippi Archaeology 35:2 (Winter 2000): 124-72.

-------. Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, in press.

Beers, Henry Putney. French and Spanish Records of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1989.

Beidler, Peter G., Harry J. Brown, and Marion F. Egge, The Native American in Short Fiction in the Saturday Evening Post: An Annotated Bibliography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2001.

Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978.

-------. “White Conceptions of Indians.” Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations. Ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn. Washington: Smithsonian, 1988.

Bettersworth, John K. Mississippi: A History. Austin, TX: The Steck Company, 1959.

Brown, Calvin S. Archeology of Mississippi. Oxford: U of Mississippi for Mississippi Geological Survey, 1926.

Butt, John, ed. The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text. London: Methuen, 1963.

Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.

Cushman, H[oratio] B[ardwell]. History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians. Greenville, TX: Headlight Printing House, 1899. Abr. ed. Ed. Angie Debo. Stillwater: Redlands P, 1962. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999.

Dabney, Lewis M. The Indians of Yoknapatawpha: A Study in Literature and History. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1974.

Doyle, Don H. Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001.

Draper, Lyman. Interview with Malcom McGee. Wisconsin Historical Society. Draper Manuscripts, Series U, Frontier Wars Papers, vol. 10.

Faulkner, William. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random, 1950.

Galloway, Patricia. Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.

Gibson, Arrell. The Chickasaws. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1971.

Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1959

Halliburton, R., Jr. “Chief Greenwood LeFlore and his Malmaison Plantation.” After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi. Ed. Samuel J. Wells and Roseanna Tubby. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. 56-63.

Howell, Elmo. “President Jackson and William Faulkner’s Choctaws,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 45:3 (Autumn 1967): 252-57.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes . New York: Harper & Bros., 1881.

-------. Ramona: A Story. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1886.

Kennedy, Joseph. “The Aboriginal Race is Fast Dying Away (Essay of Lamentation for the American Indians).” Ariel Literary Magazine (U of Minnesota: December 1885).

Kidwell, Clara Sue. Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818-1918. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Littlefield, Daniel. The Chickasaw Freedmen: People Without a Country. Lanham, MD: Greenwood, 1980.

Lowry, Robert, and William McCardle. A History of Mississippi from the Discovery of the Great River by Hernando de Soto . . . to the Death of Jefferson Davis. Jackson: R. H. Henry & Co., 1891.

Malone, J. H. The Chickasaw Nation: A Short Sketch of a Noble People. Louisville, KY: John P. Morton & Co., 1922.

McCoy, Joseph. Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest. Kansas City, MO: Ramsey, Millett & Hudson, 1874.

“Meredith discusses learning program; Ole Miss integration.” The Northside Sun (Jackson, MS), 2 Aug.2001: 8A.

Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern:The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

O’Brien, Greg. Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002.

Phelps, Dawson, ed. “Excerpts from the Journal of Reverend Joseph Bullen, 1799 and 1800.” Journal of Mississippi History 17 (October 1955): 259-81.

Rowland, Dunbar, ed. Mississippi Territorial Archives, vol. 1. Jackson: MDAH, 1905.

-------, ed. Mississippi Provincial Archives: English Dominion, 1763-1766, vol. 1. Jackson: MDAH, 1911.

------- and Albert Godfrey Sanders, eds. and trans. Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, vols. 1-3. Jackson: MDAH, 1927, 1929, 1932.

Rowland, Eron, ed. “Peter Chester . . . 1770-1781,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Centenary Series (1925): 1-183.

Smith, Allene De Shazo. Greenwood Leflore and the Choctaw Indians of the Mississippi Valley. Memphis: C. A. Davis Printing Co., 1951.

Swanton, John R. Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 43. Washington: GPO, 1911.

-------. “Aboriginal Culture of the Southeast,” Bureau of American Ethnology Forty-Second Annual Report 1924-1925. Washington: GPO, 1928. 673-726.

------- and Henry S. Halbert, eds. A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language. By Cyrus Byington. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 46. Washington: GPO, 1915.

-------. Early History of the Creek Indians and their Neighbors. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 73. Washington: GPO, 1922.

-------. “Social and Religious Beliefs and Usages of the Chickasaw Indians.” Bureau of American Ethnology Forty-Fourth Annual Report. Washington: GPO, 1928. 169-174.

-------. Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 103. Washington, GPO: 1931.

-------. The Indians of the Southeastern United States. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 137. Washington: GPO, 1946.

Swisshelm, Jane Grey Cannon. Half a Century. Chicago, 1880.

Taylor, Walter. “Yoknapatawpha’s Indians: A Novel Faulkner Never Wrote.” The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon: Essays in Honor of Harry T. Moore. Eds. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987. 202-09.

Usner, Dan. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.

-------. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998.

White, Richard. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.

-------. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Winston, E. T. “Father” Stuart and the Monroe Mission. Meridian, MS: Press of Tell Farmer, 1927.

-------. Story of Pontotoc. Pontotoc, MS: Pontotoc Progress, 1931.