Description 

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Rowan Thorne is a 51 year old man with a rough life behind him. His appearance and his mannerisms for the past decade have been like those of a man older than he is now. There is little that excites him anymore, though he has always kept himself open to being surprised.

Early Life 

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Rowan Thorne began his life as Rowan van Doorn, a child of Dutch immigrants. Born in 1853 in the Dutch settlement of Pella, Iowa, Rowan led a very isolated life. The town had only been founded around 6 years prior and did not have much contact with other communities. Surrounded by fertile lands, farming was a major source of food for the settlement, and all children were expected to work the fields alongside the adults.

Life was hard, the soil was even harder, but it was a modest and relatively fruitful way of life. Though somewhat isolated from other settlements, Pella itself had a very tight-knit community where everyone knew each other. By age 18, Rowan’s life was steadily predictable, fulfilling the expectations life in those days had placed on him. He married a young woman from down the street. Annelies, a woman with blue eyes, and blonde hair that was usually in a thick, singular braid. The courtship had been brief, as they often were in that community, and not long after they had gotten married, their household welcomed a little girl. Melinda. With the same bright blue eyes and blonde hair as her mother, little Melinda held little resemblance to Rowan. Something for which he was grateful.

In the years after, his world was simple. The fields, the church, the steady rhythm of the seasons, and the quiet joy of watching his daughter grow. The little girl had softened Rowan. Something he never admitted aloud but felt all the same.


Years later, in 1876, when Rowan was 23 years old, the simplicity of life in Pella, Iowa no longer felt like enough. Farming kept his family fed, but it offered little else. Money was scarce, opportunities were even scarcer, and Rowan felt the weight of responsibility weighing down on his shoulders more heavily each year.

When an Army recruiter passed through the region, promising steady pay, adventure, and a chance to see more of the world than the endless rows of corn, Rowan made a difficult choice. One that would alter the course of his life with no way back. He enlisted, believing he would return home with fuller pockets and brighter prospects. Money to send his little girl to school. Money to buy a bigger house for his family, perhaps even in a more thriving community than his own. The risk seemed small. After all, the trustworthy-seeming recruiter had explained in detail that all he would be doing was keeping the roads safe. Guarding borders. Protecting convoys. It was going to be easy money. The uniforms were enough to keep at bay anyone with bad intentions, or so he had been told. With a hug and a kiss, and a drawing he had made of his wife and daughter, with a childishly handwritten message from his daughter that read “Je bent mijn held, papa”, Rowan set out to make his and their lives better.

The drawing Rowan did of his wife Annelies, and daughter Melinda. Melinda's parting message is still visible in the bottom right. Drawing heavily creased and worn down after having carried it with him since 1876.

But reality proved quite different. After several months of training, he was sent west. Far west. To the rolling plains of Montana Territory, where tensions with the Lakota and Cheyenne were reaching a breaking point. His unit was assigned to the command of one Captain Silas Merrick, a man whose appearance was too crisp, too clean. Every battle and every deployment ended with Captain Merrick looking pristine. Not a wrinkle in his uniform, not a speck of mud or blood on his boots. That same smug, overly groomed expression looking down from horseback as fewer and fewer of his men returned after each battle.


Army Captain Silas Merrick, picture taken in 1875.

It didn’t take long for Rowan to see the truth of Merrick’s leadership. The captain issued orders with a cold detachment, sending men into danger with little regard for their survival. His decisions were polished, precise, and disastrously wrong. And when Captain Merrick’s detachment had been assigned to support the 7th Cavalry’s movements in the region, Rowan’s platoon knew the fight they were marching into at Little Bighorn was unwinnable. But Merrick pushed them forward anyway. The result was a predictable slaughter, though much worse than even the more experienced soldiers under Merrick’s command had feared. Screams, gunfire, smoke, horses trampling through the dirt and bodies. And then silence. When the dust settled, Rowan and only one other soldier emerged as the only ones left breathing. Everyone else, friends, strangers, boys barely old enough to shave, lay motionless in the muddy hills, some of them torn apart.

Through dirt and pain, Rowan and the other survivor made it back to camp, to find Captain Merrick in his tent. Uniform crisp as always, as the man sipped his coffee. Something inside Rowan broke. He raised his revolver, the same one he had carried since enlistment, and shot the captain without a word. Then he fled. There was no future for him in the Army after that. There was no explanation he could give that could save him. All he could do, all he could think to do, was rush back home. To find his family, gather all their belongings, and make a life somewhere else in the hope that that the repercussions of his actions would not catch up with him.

He rode hard and fast back to Iowa, sleeping little and eating less, clinging to the hope that at least his family would be waiting for him. With every sunrise for weeks, the mental image of his wife and daughter’s bright blue eyes welcoming him home kept his journey steady. He would explain everything to his wife, and she would understand. He was sure of it.


But home had changed in his absence. Disease had swept through the settlement mere weeks earlier. Cholera, the neighbors whispered. When Rowan entered his house, he found them huddled together in bed. Annelies and Melinda. Their once blue eyes now wide and pale. Their smooth, light skin now dark and decaying. The once loud and playful laughter that filled the household had been replaced by an infinitely louder silence. He sat in the room with their lifeless bodies for hours, trying to hold on to the memories of how proud they looked when he had enlisted, repeatedly glancing at the little message his daughter had written on a drawing of her and her mother when he left, now stained with dirt and blood. “Je bent mijn held, papa”. But even as he sat there, he could feel those memories being overwritten by this ghastly display of death.

After nightfall, he carried them outside and into the fields and dug the same hard soil he had farmed for years prior, to lay them to rest. Believing himself a wanted man with no more family, he sat by their graves until the sun rose and fell again. Days later, an Army letter arrived in town addressed to his late wife. Rowan feared they had found out he was the one who had killed Silas, and that he would be a wanted man until the day he was hanged. He opened the letter, and read the words intended for his late wife, informing her that her husband Rowan van Doorn had died honorably at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The Army had misidentified a body. In a way, they weren’t wrong. The man he had been was gone now.


Rowan sitting by the fresh graves of his wife and daughter, 1876

With nothing left to anchor him, to anything, Rowan shed his old name. He took on the English translation of his family’s surname, Thorne, and walked away from Pella with only the clothes on his back, a note his little girl had given him when he had left for the battle, and the revolver he had used to kill Silas Merrick. From then on, Rowan Thorne wandered. He survived and had been given a second start in life. But the spark that had once been his eyes would be gone forever.

Present Life 

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When he arrives in New Alexandria, the year is 1905. Rowan Thorne is 51 years of age. He is tired, worn down, and despite never having gotten over the events of his past, he is desperate to find a new spark in his life, whatever remains of it. He’s been surviving in order to find a reason to survive.

Affiliations 

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Quotes 

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Trivia 

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To this day, Rowan carries the revolver he used to kill Silas Merrick. In contrast to how rough and weathered Rowan looks, the gun looks pristine, as if he services it every chance he gets. He has given the gun the nickname 'Melinda', after his late daughter.