Just spent half my lunch break replying, then got thrown off t'internet
I wrote a 3 part series in WI about the Mountain Men when they first came out, can't remember the dates/issue numbers offhand.
They were chiefly fur trappers/traders employed by the fur companies or independantly in the c1820-1840 period, working on the northern plains but most significantly in the rockies, although they ventured into the south west to Santa Fe etc. The boom in beaver pelts for making beaver hats from the felted fur to supply the worlds fashionable milliners gave them a very lucrative income until the fashion changed to silk hats and the bottom dropped out of the beaver market.
They associated or fought with most Indians, Crows were particularly co-operative, Blackfoot (until their numbers were dramatically reduced by smallpox, the most powerful nation on the northern plains) were particularly aggressively opposed to them, and to the Crows.
They were something of a mixed bunch, but contained a lot of British, American born and French/metis, as well as, as you say, mixed race - the famous Jim Beckwourth being a classic example.
After the beaver boom, some remained eking out a living trapping, others went on to pastures new, a good numbere became scouts for the armies, or for the immigrant trains that were starting to cross the continent to the gold fields in California or to settle Oregon. Some crop up decades later in accounts of all sorts of events.
Watch any of the following movies for a bit of background atmosphere:
Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford)
The Mountain Men (Charlton Heston)
Across the Wide Missouri (Clark Gable)
Man in the Wilderness (Richard Harris)
There are more, of course....
Some of the guns are carried in decorated buckskin scabbards simply to protect them for when needed, in which case they were easily slipped out.
They are very good representations of the subject, superbly sculpted by Mike Owen of Artizan etc when he worked for Foundry, the only possible detraction (if you're a bit of an anorak like me
) is the over-generic, over-clumsy muskets many of them carry, other than that they're excellent.
The above will probably suggest several uses for them, in groups falling out with Blackfoot down to Comanche and even in at least one instance with digger i9ndians, with Mexican Presidials (see the excellent Boot Hill Miniatures range), and later as individuals or small groups as scouts, early buffalo hunters, indian fighters or even later as ornery vicious old varmints
Can't remember whether they appear in Lotow, but they should be easy enough to create something suitable - I'll be amazed if no-one's done that yet.
