In "A Courtship," Captain Studenmare is the owner of the steamboat that visits the Chickasaw plantation annually. He depends upon another man, David Hogganbeck, to pilot it. After he fires Hogganbeck for dereliction, he is forced to return to Natchez overland with his "steamboat slaves," the enslaved Negroes who do the physical work on board the ship (378).
In "A Courtship," Log-in-the-Creek is the only one of the Chickasaw young men who does not stop courting Herman Basket's sister after Ikkemotubbe's interest in her becomes known. His unheroic name seems to fit his apparently negligible character: he cannot hold his liquor, and he "raced no horses and fought no cocks and cast no dice" (364).
The character David Hogganbeck in "A Courtship" evokes the heroes of American tall tales about the frontier. "Bigger than any two" of the Chickasaw men "put together" (366), he is a skilled steamboat pilot, an accomplished fiddle player, a formidable opponent in eating, drinking and dancing competitions, and Ikkemotubbe's chivalrous rival for the hand of Herman Basket's sister. For her love he is willing to throw off his job, and for his Indian rival he is willing to lose his life.
The character whom the narrator of "A Courtship" refers to twice as "old David Colbert" (365, 374) is presumably based on a real historical figure, Levi Colbert. The son of white father from North Carolina and a Chickasaw mother, he grew up among the Indians. Among the real Chickasaws (unlike Faulkner's) kinship was defined in matrilineal terms, and through his mother's lineage and his own accomplishments Colbert eventually became head chief of the Chickasaw nation - or as the story says about "David," "the chief Man of all the Chickasaws in our section" (365).
In "An Error in Chemistry" Mr. Workman is an insurance adjuster from the Memphis office of the company that wrote a life insurance policy on Ellie. He is dressed in "neat city clothes" (126), and speaks with a "cold" voice, yet is described as being in "a sort of seething boil" about the shooting (126). Suspecting something after meeting with "Old Man Pritchel" in person (126), he goes out of his way to tell the sheriff about the imminent sale of the Pritchel farm.
In "An Error in Chemistry" these three men from an unidentified place in the North want to buy Wesley Pritchel's farm in order to use the clay from the clay-pit to "manufacture some kind of road material" (119).
According to "An Error in Chemistry," "generations" of these "random boys" dug into the clay-pit on Wesley Pritchel's farm, where they found "Indian and even aboriginal relics - flint arrow-heads, axes and dishes ad skulls and thigh-bones and pipes" (119).
In "An Error in Chemistry" the sheriff sends "Ben Berry and some others" to Joel Flint's house in case the escaped Joel Flint returns there (122). These "others" are not described in any way, though it seems as if they are not members of the sheriff's office, which is why we identify them as a kind of 'posse.'
In "An Error in Chemistry" these unnamed local residents are the neighbors whom Joel Flint meets and talks with most often "in the little cross-road hamlet near his home" and occasionally in "Jefferson" (114). Nothing specific is known about them as a group or individually, except that they find Flint contemptuous of their custom for drinking whiskey with sugar and water.
In "An Error in Chemistry" a group of "archaeologists from the State University" dig up Native American relics from Pritchel's clay pit until he runs them off with a shotgun (119).
