In 1839 William C. Falkner, the novelist's great grandfather, arrived in Ripley, Mississippi, a poor fourteen-year-old boy from Tennessee looking for work to help his widowed mother. He became a clerk and then was put to "reading law" in a lawyers office. Later, as a young man, he rose to political and economic prominence in Lafayette County (the model for Yoknapatawpha). A man of fiery and imperious character, Falkner became involved in gunfights. He killed two men, but was acquitted both times by local juries on a plea of self-defense. Yet he was not quite a conventional Southerner. He grew impatient with the chivalric code and in his own way tried to break out of it. Nor was Falkner really part of the plantation aristocracy. By the 1840's large plantations had been carved out in Mississippi--Falkner would own one himself--but there was not yet an aristocracy comparable in power, wealth, and size to that of the Southern seaboard states. Life was much rougher in Mississippi than in Virginia and South Carolina. The wilderness still lay within reach and the air of the frontier had not yet disappeared from the towns. In this atmosphere Falkner was one of the rising "new men," energetic figures who by force of circumstance would become defenders of a society they might not entirely accept.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Falkner became Colonel of the Second Mississippi Regiment, and under his leadership it saw a good deal of action, especially in the first battle of Manassas. But when the regiment, apparently chafed by his strict discipline, replaced Falkner as Colonel at its annual election of officers, he simply packed up and went home. Back in Mississippi, he formed a guerilla band to harass the Northern armies that were cutting deep into the rear of the South.
At the end of the war, instead of succumbing to the lethargy of defeat, the Colonel turned to new occupations: money-making and literature. With enough rolling stock for two trains, he built a sixty-mile narrow guage railroad which went from Oxford to a point within the Tennessee border, where it met the Memphis and Charleston line. He became active in politics and wrote several books.
The Colonel died in 1889, having been shot by a business associate in the public square of Ripley--much as Colonel Sartoris, his great grandson's famous literary character, is also killed.
Note: The picture of the Colonel was borrowed from Faulkner: A Biography written by Joseph Blotner (First Vintage Books Edition, January 1991, Random House, Inc., New York, 1974)