Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator of Requiem for a Nun puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived.
Ironically, the "turnkey" or "jailor" in Jefferson during the Civil War in Requiem for a Nun is "a failed farmer," who secures the position through political influence (179).
At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne and Humphries are mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.
Beroth Egglestone is a real man who served in the Civil War as a Union General. Afterwards he settled in Mississippi as a planter, and in 1868 was elected Governor of the state as a Republican by the constitutional convention held in Jackson. But since Mississippi had not yet been re-admitted to the Union, he never served in that office. To unreconstructed Mississippians, he was a carpetbagger, which explains how he acquired the unflattering sobriquet that Requiem for a Nun uses to refer to him: "Buzzard" (87).
Temple Drake Stevens' brothers appear in Requiem for a Nun only when Temple recalls the family she was rebelling against eight years ago: "Temple . . . just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing they would forbid her to do if they had the chance" (108). (Three of these brothers appear, with some individual details, in Sanctuary.)
According to Requiem for a Nun, Abraham DeFrance advised the men who founded Jackson on how to "lay out the city" (85). Faulkner got the name "Abraham DeFrance" (along with a lot of the other names and historical details in "The Golden Dome" introduction to Act II of Requiem) from Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State, a product of the Depression era's Federal Writers' Project (New York: Hastings House, 1938).
Henry Clay represented Kentucky in both houses of the U.S. Congress during the decades before the Civil War. As a U.S. Senator, he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 (referred to in Requiem for a Nun as "Clay's last compromise," 86), which attempted to resolve the national conflict about the spread of slavery westward across the Mississippi.
In Requiem for a Nun Governor (William C.C.) Claiborne was the "Territorial Governor" of Louisiana, the land the U.S. acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, from 1804 to 1812 (85).
The "Burnside" who makes the list of men who heard the "hackle-lifting" rebel yell in Requiem for a Nun had command of the Union Army at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
"Bee" (Bernard Elliott Bee, Jr.) was a newly appointed general from South Carolina when the battle of "First Manassas" was fought (36); although Requiem for a Nun does not mention it, he was mortally wounded during the fighting there.
