Character Information: John Marston
Character Name: John Marston, known as Marston, Mr. Marston or Johnny to some.
Character Series: Red Dead Redemption
Character Age: 38 years old.
Household: 751 Partridge Drive
Background: John came from exceedingly humble beginnings. His mother was a prostitute, and his father was an illiterate Scottish immigrant, coming to America with hopes of starting a family with a simple job he could earn money with. John was born in 1873, but his mother passed while giving birth to him. His father tried to do what he could to provide for his new son, but ended up drinking away a good chunk of their money without even meaning to. Since he couldn’t always provide for his son, John eventually got the hang of taking care of himself, gaining an incredible sense of independence along the way. He learned to live without luxury, and to provide for himself, because nobody else was going to do it.
One night, while drinking and attempting to forget his financial trouble, John’s father was caught up in a bar fight. He was consequentially blinded, and shortly thereafter died. John was only eight years old, and sent off to live at an orphanage.
And he despised every second spent in the orphanage. John detested the fact that he was kept holed up with people he didn’t know, or even like, eating their food and wearing clothes that weren’t his. Every other day was a new challenge to his quickly-thinning patience with the home, and the people who kept it alive.
After a few more years, he eventually had no patience left, and he broke himself out. He never looked back.
His next move in life was to join a local gang of hustlers, bandits and murderers - Dutch Van der Linde’s charisma won him over, and he started riding with his gang of cutthroats and thieves. John hates to admit it, but he learned more here then his father could ever have hoped to teach him. Here was where he learned how to read, the way to line up your iron sights just so you could hit a man right between his eyes, where to shoot a guy to make sure he really couldn’t run away, how to tie and throw a lasso, some really good ways to make sure a whore wasn’t ripping you off - and lastly, he learned how to ride a horse. This has been his most versatile skill. Through learning to ride, he also discovered his natural gift with handling horses, and this became a very useful skill when stealing horses or sheparding some rancher’s herd of cattle away. John rode with the likes of Dutch Van der Linde himself, Bill Williamson, Javier Escuella and other well-known scumbags. The gang, however, had some reason to its madness - in stealing and fighting against the rich and giving to the poorer citizens, they hoped to shake some change into the people of the West. Or so Marston says. For all anyone knows, that could just be him justifying his own horrible deeds to himself.
Riding with this gang, he met Abigail. At the time, she was a harsh, standoffish woman who rode with Dutch and carried herself as a man would - and, surprisingly to John, the others treated her like a man. She wore clothing clearly tailored for a man, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and spurred boots. When John tipped his hat with an off-handed ‘ma’am’ towards her, he was met with a wall of laughter from the other members of their posse. He was intrigued by how easily she could yell commands in battle, ride into a fight on a stolen horse with a rifle. John had never seen a woman wield a Bowie knife like she could.
In 1895, Jack and Mabel Marston were born in a saloon the five had commandeered for the night. The pregnancy was sudden and the birth ill-prepared, but Jack was born a healthy baby boy with surprisingly few complications - a nearby Doctor had been called, luckily, and forced to cooperate. Mabel, sadly, barely lived passed infanthood.
Even while they were raising a child, John and Abigail continued their raucous and chaotic lifestyle just as they had before. And, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t have helped Jack seeing the things he did. John regrets this decision to this day - he knew the things Jack had been there for were things no one should ever have to witness, let alone a child. He’d crouched for dear life and covered his ears during gang shootouts, he’d witnessed the hangings of men both innocent and criminal. Jack had been there for the execution of a handful of different people, and now, John knew the things he’d seen with Bill Williamson and the rest of the gang would haunt the child for the rest of his life.
After many years of being a bandit and an outlaw, John finally found a reason to retire. A botched bank robbery left Marston gravely wounded. Bill Williamson and his former brothers in arms left him to bleed out or be taken by the local Marshal. At this event, John and Abigail came to a wordless agreement; the life of crime wasn’t the life for them anymore. It was time to move on. With help from his son and his wife, he limped from the bank and they disappeared, prepared to put their deeds behind them in exchange for a new life. John recovered with fair ease and purchased the deed to a ranch on Beecher’s Hope with the money they both earned from their crimes. Their life was safe, secure and idyllic for a short while.
Sadly, John and his family weren’t left in peace for very long. Because of John’s strong affiliation with Bill, the Bureau of Investigation viewed him as a way to get to the gangs roving the West freely, to exterminate them and pave the way for civilization to enter the last ragged corner of America. His wife and his son were kidnapped shortly after John established the peaceful life he’d always wanted for his family, and he was forced to cooperate. Their collateral? The lives of the men John used to ride with in exchange for his wife and his son unharmed. Either John killed the men he used to consider family, or he never saw his wife and son again.
He was on the ferry to Blackwater within the day, accompanied by a pair of federal agents, then sent to the dusty little town of Armadillo by train. He ventured to Fort Mercer by carriage as soon as he could, and tried to peacefully coax Williamson into peacefully surrendering himself. The only thing he got from trying to reason with Bill was a rifle bullet to his ribs, and he was left for dead on the side of the dusty road.
It was by complete chance that a horse-drawn wagon happened to be passing by, however, and John was brought back to the McFarlane Ranch by the proprietor’s daughter, Bonnie McFarlane.
After regaining his health and paying back his debt to Bonnie, John did the only thing he could do - took a more direct approach towards Bill with the help of Marshal Leigh Johnson and his two deputies. After building a name for himself, John met many colourful characters along the way. At the point when he was taken to Mayfield, he had been in contact with a charismatic and flashy old conman selling snake oil as a miracle elixir, a dirty, crazy old prospector who now robs graves to get any sort of treasure he can, a dysfunctional but fast-talking Irish drunk with a tendency towards whiskey and away from any sort of fighting and a young Mexican revolutionist by the name of Luisa, to name a few.
John knows that his success boils down to his own determination. And, luckily, John is a diligent man. He will stop at nothing to reunite with his family.
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I will be pulling him out for this during the Cowards Die Many Deaths mission, during the Nuevo Paraiso chapter of the game.
Personality: When you ask others about John Marston, his anger and impatience are what you’ll probably hear about first. While this isn’t really a positive trait, it‘s also somewhat understandable if you know of his current predicament; his family’s abduction by the government and the whole ‘being forced to kill people after he tried to stop killing people’ issue have served to effectively fray John’s nerves, and he wants nothing more then for this wild goose chase to be over and for his family to be safe again. Most of what you’ll get out of him will be bark and no bite; it takes either a lot of aggravation or a very good reason for him to actually cause harm to anybody and maintain a clear conscience. He might be very good at intimidating the information out of people - and sometimes, not even that - but you aren’t likely to find John actually hurting anyone outside of a few harsh words unless they really had it coming.
Crass and rude behaviour aside, John is a man of few words. Because of this, what he does say is well-thought out and clever. Not to mention surprisingly well-spoken and polite for a former bandit who is self-described as ‘literate enough.’ He is quick with his tongue and shows a surprisingly wide vocabulary. Whether interaction with him will go smoothly or not, however, depends on a myriad of factors. If you’re female, he will be almost infallibly polite and will not hesitate to help if it’s needed. He will tip his hat, call you Ma’am or Miss and hold doors open for any woman he comes across, social class and behaviour be damned. When he uses a woman‘s name, he will insist on calling her by her surname, even if that‘s not exactly how she would prefer to be addressed - not because John‘s sexist, but because he finds it more respectful, and it’s what he’s accustomed to. When concerning a man‘s character, however, John tends to judge with a degree more harshness then is sometimes called for. He has an incredibly strong moral compass, and adheres to it almost to a hypocritical point. The morality-oriented outlook he takes often shows in his interaction with many of the individuals he meets in his travels; he doesn’t hold back in letting them know that he’s disgusted by whatever they’ve done. John knows what he did was wrong, but in his eyes, robbing a man at gunpoint is a bit more dignified then robbing him with fake medicine. Inversely, he is willing to forgive a lot if you are an honestly good person - while he’s appalled by West Dickens’ methods of scamming the public by selling ineffective medicine, he is a good deal more tolerant towards Abraham Reyes and his unabashed philandering, simply because he considers Reyes a more honourable man. John basically does what he knows is right when he can, and sticks by it.
In addition to his ethical composure, John has an amazing dedication to his family, and will stop at nothing to ensure their safety. This will occasionally even override his strong sense of honour, and while he’s not above risking some lives for his family’s sake, he doesn’t exactly feel good about some of the things he’s done. He feels dismayed and ashamed to be associated with his past, and he and Abigail both wish they could have done better by Jack and his deceased sister. This was a major factor in their cutting ties with Dutch and the rest of the gang: John’s brush with death was just the door-opener they needed. This has magnified the possible loss he feels looming around every corner, and he wants nothing more then to grow old alongside his beloved wife and make amends with Jack. John has lived the harrowing life of a gun-slinging outlaw since he was in his teens, blinded by Dutch Van der Linde while he was young and foolish. This decision has haunted him to this day, and has put his family in great danger. It’s all he can do to hope his son doesn’t end up the same way, and John plans to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening. John calls himself ‘a bad man who tried to be a good father,’ and this descriptor is somewhat fitting. He did terrible things to good people, and he knows that. He just hopes Jack learns from his father’s mistakes.
John’s rough life has also made him into something of a cynic. He continually questions and challenges others around him, and sarcasm rolls off his tongue with ease. His insults can be quite clever and biting, if he especially doesn’t like you. Most of the time, his sarcastic remarks will be restricted to commenting on his surroundings, or events… never really specific people, barring they haven’t crossed Marston somehow. John’s cynicism lends him a slightly darker outlook on life, and he is often the first to rain on any given parade. He is quick to apply hard logic to his life, and tries to iron out any kinks as quickly as possible when presented with a means to get something done. It’s possible for Marston to come off a touch paranoid as well, but this is probably a byproduct of growing up both in an orphanage and riding alongside the most notorious gang in the West for the majority of his earlier life.
To surmise, John Marston is the quintessential Western protagonist. Jaded, secretive, quick to draw his pistol and hellbent on the destruction of all things criminal… even if it isn’t entirely of his choice.
Abilities: John has a good bundle of skills, but none of them he’d consider special, let alone magical or otherworldly. In fact, most of the things he does well are simply known as ‘survival’ to him. He knows how to break a wild horse, skin a coyote and sell the hide, he can cut the edible meat off of a boar and he can pitch up an improvised campsite with relative ease, depending on where he is. He is a crackshot with nearly every gun you toss his way, and typically, he isn’t picky about what weapon he‘s holding. Any firearm that he can easily carry with him is probably something you don’t want to be on the business end of, if it’s in John’s hands.
One of John’s other natural abilities is his remarkable way with horses. Give John a wild horse, and he’ll return by the hour, leading the freshly-broken animal by his lasso. He is adept at breaking, riding and handling horses from his life as a hustler, and aspires to settle down with his family and become a rancher when he’s done with killing his former best friends.
In a pinch, he’s also quite the cook, if you don’t mind eating such delicacies as Rattlesnake and Coyote.