Josiah Lucas Boone

## Character Story:

Personality: Boone is more or less an easy going fellow, not much riled him except disrespecting the native people. He can be a bit quirky telling stories and conversing with horses and mules like they were old friends. He is very much a restless soul, he is almost always moving or doing something. He has a deep affinity for feral horses and their domestication. He is almost never referred to by his Christian name claiming “only my mother ever called me that.” He claims to have had a number of “husbands and wives” but it is not known whether these were actual marriages or something cooked up in Boone’s head during lonely nights in the remote frontier

History: Joined the California gold rush of 1849 but only made it so far as Van Horn Trading Post where his companion and stake partner robbed Boone of everything he had, except the clothes on his back and disappeared in the Roanoke woods never to be heard from again. Boone scrounged as a homeless vagrant barely surviving until one night he slept in front of a warehouse and was swept up with the stevedore work crew and it was eventually accepted that he was one of them despite never being formally hired. He received enough pay to have a change of clothes, two meals a day and lodging with the rest of the work crew. He continued this work until 1852 when a steamboat captain hired him away for double the wages, with the foreman’s blessings. Boone spent seven years before the mast until the captain of his ship died from a sudden heart attack. Boone had been told that he would inherit ownership of the steamboat and cargo transport business, but due to the captain’s mountain of debts, these were sold off and Boone was once again homeless and unemployed. He was older and wiser, but no less desperate when he learned of the Colter Silver strike. He scraped together everything he had saved over the past seven years and struck out for the West Grizzlies. He worked his claim for two years never finding more than enough precious ore to barely break even. In 1860, during a selling trip to Saint Denis, he learned of a company that would use riders to deliver express mail across the continent. He signed up only to find his riding skills weren’t sufficient to be an express rider, but they did take him on as a stock tender. It was during this time, until the company went under in 1861, that he learned to train and tend to horses. With the outbreak of war in 1861, Boone joined the army serving as a scout and cavalry trooper obtaining the rank of Sergeant by the war’s end.

When he left the army in 1866, he decided he wanted to get away from people so he tried his hand at trapping and fur trading, becoming a trusted friend of the Kamassa and Wapiti peoples. By 1870, trapping was no longer worth the trouble, so Boone decided to try get work as a traveling horse trainer, in time this too proved unprofitable. So he tried out life as a ranch hand, but got tired of working hard only to have someone else make all the profit. He headed back up into the Grizzlies and worked at prospecting again, only to eventually find his way into the Heartlands, Great Plains and Tall Trees areas where he helped build the towns of Valentine and Blackwater as well as a trading post called Manzanita Post, which remains his home. In 1885, the people of Valentine drafted Boone in an election as Sheriff, a post on which he served admirably enough that he received and appointment as U.S. Marshal for the whole of Yonder County. In addition to his duties as Marshal, Boone has been known to write freelance articles for The Frontiersman magazine, most notably on local and tribal histories. Boone has a number of children, three of which are known to him, Bright Eyes, Connor Keane and Dhani Fayth