Porter was a career Army officer who led a Union division at Gaine's Mill, Virginia, during the Civil War. In The Reivers it is one of the men in that division who shoots Lucius' great-grandfather "out of his saddle" (278).
Wade Hampton fought with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He was a brigadier general during the fighting at Gaine's Mill in 1862. In The Reivers Lucius' great-grandfather was serving under Hampton as "a color-sergeant" until being wounded in that battle (278).
Gabe is identified in The Reivers as "the blacksmith" at Priest's livery stable (6). "Though short, he was a tremendously big man," one of whose knees is "terrifically twisted from an old injury in his trade" (9).
Nathan Bedford Forrest had two brothers who also served as Confederate officers during the Civil War: Colonel Jeffrey Edward Forrest and Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Anderson Forrest. Either could have been the officer in charge of the event Lucius recalls in The Reivers - "legend to some people maybe.
Henry Ford's name was almost synonymous with automobile during the early decades of the 20th century. The Model T Ford, which he introduced in 1908, brought owning a car within the reach of average Americans - though the car that Grandfather Priest owns in The Reivers is a much more aristocratic make and model.
This character is mentioned in The Reivers as an "idiot nephew or cousin or something" of Dan Grinnup, and like him is a last living descendant of the Grenier family, perhaps the oldest white family in Yoknapatawpha (7). He lives "in a tent in the river jungle beyond Frenchman's Bend," on land that had once been part of the big antebellum "plantation" belonging to Louis Grenier (the "Frenchman" from whom the Bend gets its name, 7).
"Old Dan" Grinnup in The Reivers is one of the last two surviving members of the Grenier family, perhaps the oldest white family in Yoknapatawpha. A "dirty old man with a tobacco-stained beard," he is "never quite completely drunk," but obviously is an alcoholic (7). His daughter married Ballott, the stable's foreman, but apparently he owes his marginal position at work to the fact that, when the family was in better circumstances, Maury Priest "used to fox hunt with old Dan's father out at Frenchman's Bend" (8).
"When Father was a boy," Lucius Priest says in The Reivers, "he used to fox hunt with old Dan's father out at Frenchman's Bend" (8). Dan is Dan Grinnup, but his father's last name could have been Grenier. He was descended from Louis Grenier, the man from whom Frenchman's Bend gets its name. Because Dan and a "cousin or something" are the last living descendants of Grenier at the time of the story (8), we know his father is dead.
Mentioned first in The Reivers as "a Negro man" who works for Miss Ballenbaugh (75), Ephum presumably helps her farm, takes care of the horses of the men who stay there, and does other masculine chores around the place. Ned stays overnight at his home, which must be nearby.
In his description of the McCaslin-Edmonds' plantation house in The Reivers, Lucius mentions how "the women the successive Edmondses marry" have enlarged and transformed the original building (61). At least some of these wives appear in Go Down, Moses, and Louisa Edmonds, who appears in this novel, is presumably one of them as well.
