Arafed man in a brown coat and hat standing in front of a pile of logs

Barron Lachlan Alden holds the remote wilderness territory of Kalkaska County as steward for an absentee land speculation company based in Detroit and funded by eastern industrialists. He administrates affairs of the sparse hunting camps and isolated colonists from the main trading post Torch Lake - a modest fortified longhouse with plantation array along the shoreline improved by company lumber crews to facilitate timber exports. Having never been beyond sight of his laird’s northern Scottish castle ruins growing up one of twelve siblings, adolescent Barrett Alden left impoverished tenancy for British Army service in India, then answering a recruitment broadside for armed escorts of merchant shipments destined across Lake Huron. He switched north shore lake livery contracts periodically before assuming the overwintering timber camp manager post at Torch Lake where he makes and enforces laws for hundreds of miles about with a bare few dozen temporary lumberman to back him. Unlike other landed nobility who remain loyal to their liege out of mutual debts, Baron Alden holds allegiance very loosely to any flag beyond opportunities to retain an orderly fief profitable to his employer and safe for folk choosing to dwell within their bounds of dominion - no matter how distant metropole authority grows with each passing season as cut timber depletes and crews pull out for fresher stands ever northward.