Richard Brown

Richard Brown leads Brownsville, a fledgling settlement not far from Fraser's Ridge, and he meets Jamie Fraser as a neighbor, an equal, a man building his own patch of authority in the same wilderness. He is measured and self-interested, quick to organize a militia, and uneasy about ceding any ground — literal or political — to Jamie.

He works because he never announces himself as a threat. Chris Larkin plays him with a bureaucrat's calm, all reasonable tone and procedural language, so that his hunger for control creeps up on you rather than declaring itself. The show uses him to show how power on the frontier is negotiated in committees and small slights long before it erupts into violence.