Poppa Honore

Most of the people who escaped from the Big Charry region fled into the independent cantons to the north and east, but some did go west, and a lot of the people who have come since to explore the region and their luck ferreting out the secrets and wealth of those underground have come from the west.  These folks from the hills and lakes and clans of the Affiliation, they're pretty easy to spot.  Folks in the cantons refer to them collectively as bigguns, since there's no good way to make a single word out of people from a body called the Affiliation and, really, the term is nicely descriptive.

Folks from the west start at 72 inches tall and go up from there, and we are not talking about bean poles like you find in the cantons or among the Cray down south, builds are heavy muscle and bone.  Like just about everyone, they have a mix of shade and hair and feature, maybe a few more with lighter skin and a few more with very dark than you find in the cantons, but the same range.  The Affiliation predates the cantons as a unified (as much as either are unified, which is not much at all) political body, and the culture out west is one of the oldest on the continent.  That culture and all its emphasis on spiritual learning, woodcraft and athleiticism is credited to the same source as the height and build of its people.  That source is Poppa Honore.

When people first started fleeing from Big Charry and those underground, back when those underground still brought people to the region, people who remembered where they came from before, well, they didn't get too far.  Most of them settled in what would become the cantons, some went south across the sea and became the Cray, and some ran and kept running until they got to the west.  There they found a man, a great, tall man with a hundred burly children.  Poppa Honore said he that they were the last people of the west, and that he'd been granted rulership of the land by the spirits that lived there, but people were welcome to come and share, so long as some of their children were willing to marry his.

Poppa Honore knew the land, knew the very active and high population of local spirits, and taught his hundred children all he knew.  He taught the people who came all he knew as well, and fathered a hundred more children in the process (it's not really clear if his first hundred children were genetically his or just kids he had adopted, or if there really were a hundred, or that they really were children, it's probably not that important).  At this point, all those who live in the west claim to be Honore's direct descendants, and their clans group based on which one of his lovers and wives is claimed as their clan's mother.  The great size and strength of the bigguns holds true, the smallest men are quite big by canton standards and their smallest women are larger than the biggest girl in the cantons, no question.

Some people think that the size of the western folk comes from tinkering by those underground.  They point to Poppa Honore's residence in the west when the first of those who fled the Charry in the first days as a possible link to a previous set of slaves those underground had, and perhaps something happened as a result of their engineering people for size that resulted in their later reticence about altering humans.  It's also possible that the land itself has something to do with the size of the bigguns, since it creeps into families not claiming descent from Poppa Honore within a couple of generations.  A petite cantoneer might move west and find their grandchildren scraping their heads on the doorframe regardless of who their parents got with.

The Affiliation has a rotating, seasonal form of tutelage and apprenticeship which leans heavily on both woodland survival and crafts and spiritual practice.  Neither of these things are strictly necessary for everyday survival in the west, but they are both cornerstones of cultural practice, and means that a lot of folks from the west are very well suited to the rigors of exploration in the Big Charry region.