Doak's Stand, Mississippi in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

Doak's Stand was the site of a tavern established on the Natchez Trace by William Doak in about 1812. The novel's reference to how the "wilderness's dark denizens" were already "dispossessed at Doak's Stand" (84) refers to the treaty that the Choctaw Indians signed on 18 October 1820 with the United States, ceding about half of their homeland in Mississippi in return for land west of the Mississippi River.