Banquo is half-Mexican and half-Swedish, and also a colossal dick. How does that happen? Sometimes, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they hug each other in a special way and have a baby. And other times, a man and a woman who are barely acquainted and intensely drunk fumble in a back alley and, nine months later, are blessed with a wiggling reminder of why it can be bad to do that. Banquo's mother was an actress on the Chicago stage who actively loathed him, but fortunately for him she only had ten years to screw him up--he ran away from home after that, bouncing around the Western territories and learning how to do manly things like steal and receive fellatio.

Banquo does not like anyone unless he or she is an attractive woman; given the paucity of such women on the frontier, it thus becomes fairly obvious that he hates everyone. His hatred is very subtle, though, and he is exceptionally charming and manipulative, mostly because it is easier to cheat people that way. The one person who is not an attractive woman that he does not hate is Colin, and that is mostly because Colin confuses him too much for standard hate to apply.

Though Banquo is perfectly capable of killing people, and has done it lots of times, he tries to avoid it for convenience's sake. Still, some folks just need killing, so he does oblige when the situation requires it.

There's a quote somewhere in Dostoyevsky about fresh-faced academics who debate and debate and debate radical philosophy without bothering to do anything else about it. Colin is not one of those people. Yes, he is fresh-faced, and yes, he was an academic before traveling to Colorado, and yes, he is a committed Marxist who translated his own copy of the Manifesto because the few English-language versions extant at the time were not acceptable to him, but BY GOD he is doing something about it.

And by "something" I mean blowing shit up.

It's all very complicated--having something to do with the Iroquois and the natural state of man and a precursor to Cold War containment policy--but Colin has decided that the best way to prevent the pernicious spread of capitalism is to halt its westward spread. With explosives. It sounded a lot better in his head.

Colin refuses to wear a hat, because it makes his hair look silly. He is also a very skilled marksman, thanks in no small part to MIT's physical education program, and has yet to learn that shooting people, while easier in the West, is still reasonably illegal there. Good-natured to a fault, he also comes with his own manly skillset, which includes demolitions engineering and the administration of fellatio.

You heard me.

Picture it: you're a girl in her teens in a swiftly dying mining town, and one day an exciting, tall, dark stranger rides into town on a black stallion looking for a place to hide. An exciting, tall, dark stranger nearly your own age, even. You fall hard for him and offer your most precious flower of maidenhood unto him, but he refuses to take you up on it unless he can give you some money. It's to help you, he says. Since you're so special to him, he really wants to support you in every way he can. You feel a little funny about it, but then he gives you this look that makes you feel an entirely different kind of funny, and you decide that if your preacher daddy really knew what he was talking about he wouldn't have gotten his fool ass shot in the back two years ago.

A few years later, you're not really a hooker, since you don't entertain clients other than the exciting, tall, dark stranger (who, as it turns out, is a lot less exciting now that a few years have passed, and also not as tall as you thought, relatively speaking), but he does still pay you for intercourse, which kind of DOES make you a hooker. And yes, you could leave, but really, would you want to give him the satisfaction? Really, the best thing to do is to stay and keep taking his money. That'd show him.

And besides, the sex is still pretty great. This is because you hate him.

Man, what's this guy's problem? You betray one town full of Christians and suddenly everyone wants to lynch you. No wonder Banquo likes Colin so much; at least atheists never get a posse together.

Saying more would spoil it, but suffice it to say--he and Banquo know each other.

Cordelia is half-Ute and half-white, while Bridget is an Irish girl with a gun. They used to travel with Wild Bill Hickok's Wild West Show, but were tired of being gawked at by yokels, and decided to rob said yokels instead.

Though the concept didn't quite exist at the time, Cordy and Bridget are lesbians. (Technically, Cordelia is bisexual, but they hadn't been invented yet either.) Poor Bridget is a cuckold, but loves Cordelia anyway. No, there are no parallels to be drawn between their relationship and their new male friends. None at all.

A Union scout and spy during the war, now a mountain man living about a day's ride outside of Boulder, Colorado. He's had a checkered past and knows all kinds of interesting sneaky skills that he has had time to perfect in his secret lair, so Colin really lucked into an Appalachian gem here. Of course, things are complicated by the bitchy presence of You Know Who.

Fun fact: Johnny has killed a bear with his bare hands. Other fun fact: Banquo is much smaller than a bear.

At one time, Jacob Coleridge was a wealthy planter and lawyer in the heart of Georgia. (This time was 1859.) Unfortunately, geopolitical events would conspire to make his chosen profession no longer cost-effective--that is to say, some fool in South Carolina would get it in his head to pick a fight with a better-equipped foe up yonder--and Jacob, being a wise man, took his young son and lit out for the territories.The fact that he left behind his wife, young daughter, and a few dozen slaves indicates an admirable ability to separate himself from worldly attachments. What a good Buddhist he is!

For young Daniel, this must have seemed like quite an adventure, traipsing around the mountains with his beloved Pa, occasionally shooting bad men and turning them in for the reward. However, not everyone is well-suited to be a manhunter, and of this sort gentle Danny was one; though he was certainly capable of doing the work, it was not necessarily a thing he was equipped to handle mentally. But his father needed a weapon, and Danny was desperate to please him, so here we are.

Jacob is an extremely cautious and thorough man; he does not take unnecessary risks, and if he thinks his life would be safeguarded by killing somebody, that person may consider himself dead. This makes him a highly effective bounty hunter, and also a bastard.