Unnamed Chickasaws 8

The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white traders and settlers arrived early in the 18th century. At that time they numbered perhaps 10,000 people. By the early 1830s, when they were 'removed' across the Mississippi River, that number had been reduced to less than 3,000 - many of whom had been assimilated from other tribes, and from mixed marriages with white men and black slaves. In Faulkner's fiction, the still smaller Chickasaw clan that inhabits the area that became 'Yoknapatawpha' was associated mainly with the chief named Ikkemotubbe (or Doom), and Ikkemotubbe's mother, the matriarch Mohataha: in the early days of the white settlement, for example, as recounted in Requiem for a Nun, it is a "party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" who assist the settlers when they use their tracking skills to follow the horses ridden by the bandits "westward toward the River" (15); and at the moment of her 'removal,' Mohataha is accompanied by a group of "young men" that the narrative refers to as "her body guard" (170).