Name: Miriam Schwartz

Age: 38

Occupation: Homesteader

Appearance: She has curly brown locks tied back and typically wears jeans for riding, a man's shirt and her old Union Army jacket, which is now showing signs of age. She is still lean and muscular for her age, thanks to years of work on the homestead.

Personality: Miriam is a little rough around the edges and it is only getting worse with age. She is independent and fiercely protective of her three sons.

Possessions: Springfield Model 1861 rifled musket, her service weapon from the war days which she has kept well-maintained used now as a hunting rifle. A Colt Army Model 1860 revolver, converted to use modern .44 brass cartridges, is glued to her hip. She also carries a large bowie knife, a trophy from her war days and her personal riding horse is a copper gelding named "Edward."

Backstory: Miriam is a hardened veteran of the civil war. She was born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1847. In 1864 she enlisted in the union army under the name "Samson Schwartz" to avoid marriage. She served in the XXIV Corps until the war's end in 1865 when her unit blocked Robert E. Lee's escape at Appomattox and forced the surrender of the Confederate Army. After the war, Miriam moved out west to homestead just outside the town of Longwater where she has lived for the last 20 years. She never married, but has had three boys out of wedlock - Benjamin, Jesse, and Daniel aged 16, 14, and 10 who help around the homestead.

Name: Julia Bisset

Age:26

Occupation: Apothecary.

Appearance: A pale skinned, almost doll like woman, with short brown hair and dull brown eyes. She is fairly unremarkable, a face while not ugly or pretty, tailor made to be forgotten. Just another in the crowd as her father would say. Blotches an stains mare the calloused flesh of her hands from years mixing medicines and poultices.

Personality: Julia's foremost virtue is curiosity. Curiosity of the world around her, of the pants and animals she comes across in her travels, and above all, the secrets the human body holds. When she's not divining secrets from the books and journals she's collected or pilfered, she's making sketches and notes in her journal on the natural world. Julia's drive is to unlock the secrets the world throws at her. Where other people are concerned, Julia puts forth a mask, meek, mousey, soft spoken when dealing with strangers or customers, but when her curiosity is peaked her nearly boundless wide eyed energy takes root and Julia becomes nearly uncontainable.

Possessions: Julia wheels around a cart full of her tools, dried plants, dried foods and medicine, books on natural philosophy, medicine, and anatomy, and lastly surgical tools. From this horse drawn cart her livelihood is contained. On her person she carries several bottles of various liquids known only to her, knives of varying usefulness, and lastly a little kit for on the spot dissections or healing.

Backstory: Julia was born in the French countryside to a traveling curious of performers, a gypsy. Her mother was an apothecary and taught Julia many generation's worth of skill with the mortar and pestle. Julia from the start loved everything dealing with making potions and poultices, her bright, curious mind taking in everything her mother taught at a frightening pace. Where the other children were content to chase each other with sticks or play in the river, Julia would spend matching plants she found to the drawings in her mother's books. She took up an interest in drawing, inspired by her mother and took up a hobby sketching nature. There was just something she found so beautiful about it.

When she was barely thirteen her father stowed her and her mother away on a ship bound for America, a so called promise land to escape persecution. Sadly her mother wouldn't survive the voyage, the memory of watching her mother waste away Julia unable to do a damn thing about it, is a driving force for her desire to study medicine. Years passed and she and her father wandered around, he'd find work as a tracker/bounty hunter, while she practiced her mother's art. They ended up participating in the war to come, but ended up separated when they got caught in the cross fire of one a skirmish. Julia found herself being a medic for some confederate camp, figuring the free meals, and a chance to practice actual medicine. When the war ended, she traveled around in a cart she bought from money collected here and there going from town to town. Upon hearing rumors of this town in Kansas and its many strange phenomenon, her natural curiosity was again peaked.

Name: Ezekiel Gillum

Age:35

Occupation: Outlaw

Personality: Ezekiel’s profession makes the time he spends in most towns limited. As such he tries to keep a reserved, but polite demeanor with most people, approaching interactions with a disarming smile and a sly way with words. Ezekiel is as quick with a compliment as he is with his six-shooter when it suits him.

Appearance: Ezekiel is a man of average height standing at an even 5’10. He keeps his dark brown hair shoulder length and swept back tightly with a mixture of pomade and heavy grooming whenever it's convenient for him to visit a barber. Ezekiel’s age is shown in the form of the salt and pepper prominently displayed on his beard and he sports scars on the right side of his face running deeply down from his cheek to his jaw, earned from a knife fight during the war.

( Ezekiel )

Possessions: Ezekiel has a Black Tennesse Walker named Pepper that’s been with him since the end of the Civil war. He carries a Colt Single Action Army on his hip and has a Winchester Repeater Strapped to Pepper’s saddle.

Biography:

Ezekiel Gillum was the youngest of five in Atlanta Georgia. Although far from the rich plantation owners resident to Atlanta prior to the civil war, Ezekiel’s family was far from poor. His father owned a small tobacco farm and the Gillum family housed at least a dozen slaves prior to the war. When the war began Ezekiel was 16, and he shared the same sentiments many people around him felt when the Union made its declarations. Slavery was integral to the way of life of the south and the Northern politics would mean the destruction of the economy and the bankrupting of his family. His older brothers enlisted in the Confederate army and served from the wars initial start, and although Ezekiel wanted to do his part his mother and older sister refused to let him go, still considering him the baby of the Gillum’s. They instead sent him to study, with hopes of Ezekiel becoming a lawyer and perhaps one day a politician.

In 1862 the option of Ezekiel staying behind to focus on his studies became a moot point with the Confederate conscription laws. At 17 Ezekiel was thrust into service against the Union, where he served dutifully for a long time. The war took a heavy toll on Ezekiel however, watching many of his friends die changed Ezekiel. Gone were the fanciful idea of heroism and coming home with medals pinned on his chest for valor on the battlefield. Replaced with an overwhelming desire to just survive to the end of the war, regardless of outcome. The ideals of White Supremacy in Ezekiel also died somewhere on the battlefields of the Civil War as Ezekiel served alongside slaves who were forced into battle and began an earnest friendship with one such man by the name of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was kind, and stoic at the belligerency spouted at him by some of the other confederate soldiers outside of the heat of battle. Ezekiel and Jeremiah began their acquaintance by sharing a drink with one another as well as a joke or two about the eccentricities of their Sergeants, and soon it turned into an exchange of skills. Ezekiel teaching Jeremiah letters, as well as the beginnings of reading whenever it was possible, and away from earshot of the other men in Ezekial’s unit. Jeremiah Taught Ezekiel how to play the harmonica and would speak to him about his family's way of life, unfiltered and without pause a trait about Jeremiah Ezekiel would grow most fond of.

The pairs friendship was solidified when Ezekiel took part in a repelling of a bayonet charge a few months after their friendship had begun. Ezekiel was quick with his rifle, but still he was overwhelmed by a Union soldier, the man gave Ezekiel his facial scars and would of killed him were it not for his friend coming to his aid and ending the Union man. Jeremiah like all the black men in the confederate unit were not allowed in combat situations, so he had put himself at risk for Ezekiel.

Not long after this battle Ezekiel’s Sergeant; a man known for his cruelty to the white men and doubly so to the black slaves in the unit made for Jeremiah, grabbing the man up with hollers and shouts, dragging him off to be punished for being caught with a knife. No amount of pleading from Ezekiel would sway the Sergeant, Jeremiah broke the rules and he was to be punished. It was then that Ezekiel made his choice; he ran up behind his sergeant and stole his percussion revolver, putting a round in his back and one into the head of another fellow confederate comrade before snatching up Jeremiah and telling him they were getting out of the service together.

Ezekiel and Jeremiah made a fighting retreat from the Confederate camp, Ezekiel now a turncoat murderer and Jeremiah a runaway slave. They made their way north, toward the Union lines, and soon Ezekiel would repay Jeremiah’s heroism by taking the man to his freedom. They promised to meet again after the war, but because of Ezekiel’s Confederate ties, he would be imprisoned upon being taken, a notion Ezekiel had no interest in. As such, the man tore off his uniform and shook his friends hand, making off with just his Revolver for a time on his own, he would then steal a black tennessee walker he’d name Pepper and make his way west.

Ezekiel’s family soon lost their home with the burning of Georgia, but even before that Ezekiel knew he had no home to go back to. By then word that he had killed at least two of his comrades in defense of a black man would have reached his family, and if he dared show his face back there his brothers and father would hang him. Ezekiel faced with the reality of having no worldly possessions other than his stolen horse Pepper and his sergeants former weapon, soon took to the Outlaw lifestyle, moving from town to town robbing men as needed and shooting others as needed, Ezekiel would build a small reputation for himself as well as a bounty that would push him West over the following decades.

Now at the age of 35, Ezekiel found his way to Longwater. Old and weary, with no family besides his horse and a friend he occasionally sends letters to and almost no money to make his way he would ride into town in hopes of a new score, or atleast cheap liquor to pass the time.