The John Day "Indians" are the most notorious groups of people living along our Rocky Mountain frontier. Named after a river in the area, their homeland stretches throughout central and western Oregon, where they make their living by small scale farming and nomadic herding, heavily supplemented by pillaging frontier settlements. They live in small bands, traveling constantly to avoid attacks by the Royal Army frontier troops. They sell captives to the biker gangs across the Rockies to the east.
Interestingly, the John Days are not properly an Indian tribe at all. Instead, they are descended from a mixture of outlaw biker and bandit gangs that had coalesced around a charismatic survivalist leader known to his followers as Old Buffalo Breath, sometime in the early 1990s. Buffalo claimed that the only way to survive in the post-Apocalyptic world was to follow the ways used by earlier men, in his case, what he felt the pre-Columbian Indian ways. To this basic concept, he added Social Darwinian ideas that helped reinforce the ruthless patriarchy of his rule.
The John Days reached the peak of their power and influence in the first decade of the Twenty First Century. Growing competition by the expanding UKA and Mormon State of Deseret reduced their numbers. By the 2020s, the expansion of the railroad to Ogden allowed the Royal Army to successfully counter the swift moving raiders, and the widespread use of the RAF to harass and scatter John Day bands has weakened them and has prevented any large scale assembly of that people. It is doubtful that the John Days will survive much longer as an independent culture.
