In "A Name for the City" this party of Ikkemotubbe's young men" (208) trails the bandits who escaped the poorly-improvised jail, and participate in the white settlers' search for Alec Holston's lost lock (208). The description of them anticipates their removal by calling them "the wilderness's tameless evictant children" - and establishes their "wild and homeless" appearance by noting how they wear "the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw" (208).
When the bandits are brought to the settlement by their militia captors, the white population of the settlement splits into at least two camps: one "small but determined gang" is a "faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without preliminary" (11).
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, as soon as the bandits are brought to the settlement by their militia captors, the white population of the settlement splits into at least two camps: one "small but determined gang" is a "faction bent on lynching them at once, out of hand, without preliminary" (206, 11).
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun, these "Natchez Trace bandits" threaten all who pass through the wilderness between Nashville and the Mississippi settlement (200, 4). Pettigrew's bravery is demonstrated as he carries the mail pouch without firearms through "a region where for no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (204, 9).
During the time covered by "A Name for the City," the white settlement that becomes Jefferson is first occupied by two men and a boy who are given names by the narrator and their own character entries in our database - see Doctor Habersham, Doctor Habersham's Son and Alexander Holston. This entry represents the next two generations or at least phases of inhabitants, the men who can called pioneers and settlers.
In "A Name for the City" Gavin Stevens refers to the "world travelers" who made history by circumnavigating the globe, from the first ones, who did it in "three years" (he is referring to Magellan's voyage in a sailing ship, 1519-1522), to the ones who did it in "ninety hours" (he is referring to the crew of the US Air Force B-50 bomber who made the trip in 1949); Gavin wrongly adds that "now" - when the story was published, presumably - the feat has been accomplished in "thirty hours" (200).
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun these two categories represent the kinds of white men who have been confined in the jail: occasional lawbreakers who are easily detained by "a single wooden bar in slots across the outside of the door like on a corn crib" (202, 6).
Invented by Gavin Stevens in "A Name for the City," this aviator aspires to be the latest individual to set a new speed record for traveling around the world. Stevens gives him elementary emotions and diction, suggesting that a lack of respect for such an individual.
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts.
