OOC: Please do not post without permission. If you want to get involved, send me a Telegram. This RP is set in the year 1791.
Franklin County was one of the largest counties in the Republic of Mareyland. It covered a large stretch of the country’s southwestern frontier, near the headwaters of the Langston and Asheulot Rivers and nestled up against the Whitetail Mountains. It was large by virtue of its relative emptiness - much of the land was unsettled, and it had few settlements that could honestly claim the grand title of town. Instead the rolling piedmont was covered in forests of oak and hickory, broken up by meadows and tributary creeks. Families had, with great labor, carved small homesteads into this landscape. These white settlers lived in a tense coexistence with the land’s native inhabitants, the Ura. There was peace now, but everyone knew the stories of their terrible raids, egged on by the Royalists during the War for Independence. Many people had experienced that brutality, or knew someone who had experienced it, firsthand.
Connor Rollins had heard the stories, but to a boy of twelve years they were no more real than tales of knights and dragons. Young Connor was just one year older than the Republic of Mareyland itself. So his main concern as he played in the creek near his family’s home was not the risk of being killed or abducted by a fearsome Ura warrior, or any risk at all. He scampered over rocks and fallen trees with the gleeful sense of invincibility that was the domain of youth. It was while he was balancing on a trunk that had fallen across the creek that he noticed something in the water, glinting in the sunlight.
Connor eased himself off the tree - his care not for his health but for the condition of his clothes, just repaired by his mother - and took a step into the creek to get a closer look. It was a rock, but it looked different from the others around it. It felt different too, as he lifted it from the gently running water. It was heavy, too. Connor dropped it into his satchel, which had been left laying against a tree. His mother liked to see the strange rocks and flowers that he found while he was playing. It then fell to the back of his mind, and he did not remember to take it out of his satchel and show his parents until they had finished their evening meal.
Samuel Rollins had fought in the War of Independence. He had been at the Battle of Pembroke, and seen the vaunted redcoats break and run. He’d seen the war come to a shocking end, with the surrender of their pompous Lord General. But long after he forgot those moments, he would never forget the sight of his young son drawing, from his plain haversack, a ten pound nugget of solid gold.
* * *
The discovery of gold - not just gold, but gold that was apparently sitting there ready for the taking - drew a flurry of people to Franklin County. Most of them were men hoping to strike it rich by finding gold in the stream beds. Then there were the merchants, who took the easier path to wealth: selling supplies to those hopeful prospectors. And less present but no less involved were the men who claimed to have pieces of land in Franklin County that they were willing to sell. After all, finding gold wouldn’t do a man any good if it was on someone else’s land.
Unfortunately, almost all the land deeds purchased by the dozens, soon hundreds, of new inhabitants of Franklin County were fraudulent. Most of the county was, in fact, the property of the Stafford family. They had acquired vast tracts of land in the Republic's infancy, looking to eventually profit from their sale. But their claims were often ignored, and families of aspiring yeomen felt no compunction about settling wherever they liked. Since no great migration into the Franklin County region had taken place before the gold rush, the benefits of evicting squatters had been far lower than the expense of claim enforcement.
But now there was greater profit to be made. So Henry Stafford, the family patriarch, took action. He began to more proactively seek out squatters, or those who had purchased fraudulent patents to land that was rightfully his. If he could not make these new settlers into paying tenants, then he would drive them off. He had aid in this endeavor from the Cawthorne family. They were one of the first families to settle in Mareyland, and through the generations they had amassed a great fortune. Thomas Cawthorne had no intention of being the man who saw those fortunes decline. He arranged a marriage between his daughter Annabelle, and Daniel Stafford, Richard's younger brother. Through this family connection to the Staffords, the Cawthornes could gain access to the newfound gold fields. The Staffords, meanwhile, gained a powerful political ally in the halls of power.
No one stopped to wonder what the Ura might do in response to this new influx of white settlers. The natives had been pushed, through war and disease and demographic pressure, further and further west since the arrival of the first white colonists. The lands in Franklin County were some of the last lands that they held claim to within Mareyland’s borders. Now even these final hunting grounds were under threat. The Ura had gone to war with Mareyland twice in the last forty years. Now, some of the more aggressively-inclined chiefs among the Ura called for their people to take up the hatchet once again.
