Lincoln Cole

Age: Late 30’s
Height: 6’ 5”
Weight: 230 pounds
Hair And Beard: Reddish-Blond
Eyes: Blue

Lincoln Cole is a great bear of a man, standing nearly six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and powerful arms and legs. At first glance there appears to be nary an ounce of fat anywhere on his body. However, in spite of his large size, he can be surprisingly stealthy and quiet when he puts his mind to it.

He wears his hair long and has a bushy, untrimmed full beard. His complexion is tanned and weathered, as befits a man who has spent most of his adult life in the out-of-doors.

He most commonly favors a red gingham shirt and buckskin pants, and sometimes wears an old gray slouch hat if the weather is warm – or rainy. He prefers moccasins – the Apache variety that lace up high on the shin; he will, however, sometimes don a pair of brown jackboots to do his mining, especially if he is working around mud and water. Lincoln always wears a necklace made from grizzly-bear claws.

Lincoln’s preferred weapons are his “Buffler-huntin’”rifle – a single shot, breech-loading Sharp’s Big Fifty that packs a huge punch, and his Bowie Knife, sometimes known as an “Arkansas toothpick.” The Bowie knife is worn on his left hip, the haft slanted across his stomach so that he can draw it quickly.

A smaller throwing knife is worn in a sheath sewn into the right leg of his buckskin pants, and Lincoln sometimes also carries a tomahawk stuck into his belt.

He also owns a lever-action Winchester ’73 rifle, which he sometimes carries instead of his Sharps. If he wears a hand-gun, it will be a Colt Peacemaker, which he recovered near the body of an unfortunate fellow who had the bad judgment to use it to try to kill a grizzly bear. The Colt will be worn jostling around loose in an old U.S. Cavalry-issue holster that is made to hold a longer-barreled weapon – Lincoln is obviously not a fast-draw expert, but a revolver can sometimes be useful.

Lincoln was formerly a “mountain man” who lived in the Rocky Mountains – the “High Lonesome.” When the beaver became scarce, he drifted down out of the mountains and took up buffalo-hunting on the plains – not a bad line of work for a loner, but not as desirable as living high in his beloved Rockies. With the buffler being hunted nearly to extinction, Lincoln began drifting. Hearing rumors of gold being found near Whisky Flats, he headed in that direction and staked himself a small claim. He enjoys the solitude that independent mining offers him, but he misses the mountains . . . and Little Otter . . . terribly.

Lincoln is not normally a talkative man. If he warms up to you and becomes comfortable around you he will begin to talk more, and will reveal that he has a good sense of humor and a lively intelligence.

Get him good and “likkered up,” and he may recite the “Mountain Man’s Creed” for you.

Sadly, Lincoln is a man whose time is past. He would have been much happier had he been born 50 years earlier. Civilization and the press of the population moving westwards have made it virtually impossible for him to live his life as he would like . . .