The year is 1838. A young Scotsman forced out of his homeland arrives on the frozen lip of Hudson’s Bay. Angus McDonald is twenty-one, contracted to British masters to trade for fur. But the world he discovers is far beyond even a Highlander’s wildest imaginings: raging rivers, buffalo hunts, and the powerful daughter of an ancient and magnificent people. In Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nez Perce chiefs, Angus recognizes a kindred spirit. The Rocky Mountain West in which they meet will soon be torn apart by competing claims: between British fur traders, American settlers, and the Native peoples who have lived for millennia in the valleys and plateaus of the Shining Mountains’ western slopes.
In this epic family saga, based on the true story of the author’s Scottish forebears, the real history of the American West is revealed in all its terror, beauty and complexity. The Shining Mountains brilliantly limns a world now long forgotten: of blended cultures seeking allies, trading furs for guns and steel, and a way of life in collision with westward colonial expansion.
Available in: hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook.
About the novel
This novel is based on the true story of Angus McDonald, the younger brother of my great-great-great-grandfather Duncan McDonald. The story focuses on a hugely important period in America’s past, described through the eyes of the real actors in the drama. The tale of Angus, his Nez Perce wife Catherine, and their son Duncan illuminates a little-known history stretching from the Highland Clearances to the extraordinary lives of the mainly Scottish traders in the Hudson’s Bay Company who forged alliances with North America’s indigenous tribes.
To tell the story of the McDonald family I consulted extensively with the Native communities about whom I write. I sought and received formal approval from both the Nez Perce and Confederated Salish & Kootenai tribes, while elders from each tribe read and approved the manuscript. From the start I have had the strong support of my cousins on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, who are direct descendants of the protagonists of the novel. They agree that the story of their blended family is an important –and heretofore missing– piece of the history of the American West.
Praise
“An impressively original, truly epic, and memorable saga, “The Shining Mountains” is a deftly crafted historical novel that draws from the genuine history of the early 19th Century American West, now revealed in all its ‘terror, beauty, and complexity”.
Midwest Book Review
“A chronicle of the shameful treatment of the native peoples of the northwest, this eminently readable and engaging novel is informative, touching and passionate, taken from the author’s own family history. Written with a restrained passion but always with heart and a sympathetic inclination towards people to whom she is related, the author has produced not only a highly readable novel but a chronicle of white shame that should never be forgotten.”
Reading the West
“Christie’s prose sings with detail, transporting readers back nearly two hundred years to feel the landscape enduring beneath momentous historical changes. [She] captures the conflict of cultures and the promise of something progressing beyond them both, all the while evoking the uncanny force of the landscape of northwestern Montana.”
Montana: The Magazine of Western History
“Alix Christie has not only written a generous and spirited novel of the fur trade and the marriage of two worlds, she has written a rousing adventure tale steeped in research and oral histories. Humorous and deeply tender, I admire The Shining Mountains for its vivid and emotionally rendered characters, its magnificent landscape, and how Christie captures the extraordinary power of living story.”
Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
“A historical novel as wild and sprawling as the land it inhabits.”
Big Sky Journal
Historical Novels Review (Editors Choice Title)
“I loved this book not only because it’s an action-packed historical family saga based on the truth, but also because it says important things about multiculturalism, family ties, family continuity, and the evils of prejudice and avarice. Highly recommended.
“The Shining Mountains is an extraordinary family saga that captures an important period of American history, revealing the relationships and cultural blending that occurred when European trappers encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Oregon Territory and Rockies.”
Lucille Lang Day, poet and editor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California
“An exceptional novel; Intimate and expansive, tender and violent, The Shining Mountains is both a gripping family saga and a profound requiem for the lives lost and displaced by American westward expansion. This is storytelling at its finest.”
Zack Bean, author of Man on Fire
“The Shining Mountains is a rousing historical novel that kept me up late, with woven storylines of fascinating characters moving across the Pacific Northwest seeking fortune and the thrill of survival, and of course, love. I especially loved the women, their bravery and clear-eyed vision of this world, from ancestral legends to the danger of the new.”
Susan Straight, author of Mecca
“The Shining Mountains is an ambitious rendering of the conflicts between and among Indigenous Nations and European invaders in the final years of British-American rivalry below the Medicine Line, centered in the diverse voices of a mixed-heritage family. Christie’s book improves and expands on an important chapter of the West, becoming a welcome addition to the literature that engages with this time and place, filling in for fans of historical fiction the times and spaces that lead up to D’Arcy McNickles’ The Surrounded and are dramatized in Alfred Silver’s epic Red River trilogy of the Canadian Plains.”
Theodore C. Van Alst, author of Sacred Smokes and Sacred City
“Like the best historical novels, The Shining Mountains takes its history seriously, drawing on rich contemporary sources to paint this tender, painful story of the impact of immigrant settlers on the indigenous tribes of the northwestern states. No cowboys and Indians here. Just two sides engaged in an existential battle for survival inside the raw, hauntingly beautiful landscape of virgin America. Love, treachery, violence and honor, it is all here, seen through the eyes of a Scottish trader who finds himself caught between the two sides. A novel to be savored.”
Sarah Dunant, author of In the Name of the Family
Alix Christie 