Here are the men and women who wander the Five States looking for stories just for you. They risk bodily harm and even death to bring news from far and wide and they do you not for money, but out of passion for the Five States. Take a moment to read about the folks who give you so much to read about.
Name: Sofia Kathleen Fairfax. (Sue to close friends, to everyone else, just Sofia) – Lead Correspondent
Bio: Sofia is the daughter of Alexander and Molly Fairfax. Alexander was a prominent military man, fighting proudly in the Mexican American War and later the Civil War. After the war he was put in charge of keeping the peace in a few prominent southern cities, he became a politician, almost beating president Fisher to the White House.
Molly is, was and always will be a die-hard suffragette, much to the chagrin of our other wealthy New York City neighbors. Every other week she’s at Tompkin Square Park protesting injustice. Just this year, she, along with a woman sharpshooter from Ohio, penned a letter to Alfred MacAlister, asking him to let women join the US Army.
Many would-be schoolmasters learned that arguing with the Fairfax girl was a fool’s errand, no matter how many beatings were given. She always feels if somebody made a mistake, it needs to be corrected. I guess her intellectualism came from her mother, and her stubbornness came from her father. She loves to play the piano on long cold nights; nothing makes the heart grow more than music she sometimes muses. Although she loved high society life, her boundless appetite for adventure eventually turned her westward. With her family’s permission, she traveled to the five state area to become a newspaperwoman.
Well, somebody has to tell women’s stories she often says. Plenty of people will hear what the Lemoyne farmer will say; I want to hear from his wife! You’ll read countless stories about Billy Midnight, but aren’t Maybelle Colter’s tale’s just as exciting? While calm and chipper in person, deep down, she dreams of a world where she can vote. Its a dream worth fighting for, and I intend to be the first person to break that story when it happens.
The Man from Mashonaland
Name: D’Artagnan “Doc” Deschain (but always Doc, if you please, my mother was a Francophile and I am not)
Bio: Doc has much to his life to tell before his boots hit American soil. The thirty-five-year-old English born ex-soldier was stranded here out of a situation many would find familiar. Doc grew up in the Cape Colony and joined the British Colonial Army as part of the medical corps, where the moniker ‘doc’ was quickly exchanged for a name he had long since abandoned. Too young to fight the Zulu in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 Doc wanted to fight in the native wars and so jumped at the opportunity to join Cecil John Rhodes’ British South Africa Company expedition into Mashonaland, leaving the army for good. Doc was instated as a British South African Policeman in October 1888 and traveled with the Pioneer Column the next year. He fought in the Anglo-Matabele War of 1893-94 as a scout for the Company forces under Major Forbes. He served under Major Allan Wilson and narrowly avoided the disaster of the Shangani Patrol whilst tracking another party of Ndebele warrior south of the Shangani. Doc was a member of the ill-fated Jameson Raid in 1895-96 under Leander Starr Jameson and did a short stint in a Transvaal prison. He was released with Frank Rhodes and returned to fight the Matabele again in 1897 in the new colony of Rhodesia, now wracked with rebellion. Sent on a mission to by Jameson to America, Doc came to these shores in search of American scouts, veterans of the Indian wars, to bolster Company forces as tensions build between the Boers and the British. Doc traveled West in search of the best and got off the boat in Blackwater where he was arrested and accused of the murder of one Mr. Le Clerc. A stranger in a strange land, an easy target. Aided in his escape, discredited and a wanted man Doc was forced to adapt to the new land. A highly skilled tracker and scout, the West was new but not unfamiliar. Now a bounty hunter in the Five States and writer for the Five States Herald, Doc has seen his fair share of hardship and will use his medical skills and gun fighting ability to aid anyone on the Frontier. One eye lost in a shootout with criminal Sergio Vincenza will not slow the man from Mashonaland in his quest for the story, nor the hunt for his target.
Notable stories: Coldhearted Functionality, not Fashion.
Keep an eye out for “Doc’s Prescriptions” in the Herald where Doc shares some hard earned bush lore with the readers of the acclaimed paper.
Name: Meixiang “Mickey” Zhou (“Mei” to some, but almost certainly “Mickey” to you.)
Bio: Mickey was born in 1879 under tragic circumstances. Her mother “rode” into Armadillo with half a dozen pellets of buckshot spread between her person and her horse with her water already broken. The town doctor kept the woman alive long enough to deliver the child and name it, but the woman unfortunately passed before any information about potential kin could be extracted.
A local hunter named Raj Austin ultimately took her in, and raised her as his own in a quasi nomadic lifestyle in Gaptooth Ridge and Rio Bravo Counties. He tought her how to shoot, how to fight, how to pitch a camp, and how to persuade people to do those things for her.
Since just before she turned 18 she’s been roaming the five states doing odd jobs for odd people, and has become quite adept at apprehending fugitives. (Though claims to have denounced this profession in favor of “more peaceful activities like reporting news.” after her involvement with the “Raider Skinning” in 1898.)
Mickey is peaceful by nature, and considering by many to be a girl of upstanding morality and absolute honor; drawing her pistol only after all other options are exhausted.
She has a motto for a code, which she claims is tattood on her left breast.
“Draw last, but shoot first.”
The Five States Herald 