Who is Archer Walsh in the novel, East Indian?

Archer Walsh is a traveling adventurer who wins Tony's bond in a poker game with Ralph Ganter. Although Walsh does deploy Tony as a servant, he is significantly more accommodating of Tony's humanity than Ganter was, and often allows Tony not only to spend time on his own but also to have a say in their travel plans. The warmth and humanity with which Walsh treats Tony instills in Tony a newfound optimism in life and in the colony at large.

Walsh also comes to represent the pioneering inventive spirit of the era, a forward-looking globalism that rests strangely, for Tony, against the racial abuses that accompany westward expansion and colonization. Walsh's optimism about the future transfers to Tony, though, who begins to find the steps being taken in exploration, technology, and medicine fascinating and invigorating. When Walsh is eventually killed while on a westward journey with Tony, Tony mourns his death as he would a friend's.