Our multicultural family history, a guest post by Alix Christie, author of “The Shining Mountains”

I'm very happy to have Alix Christie here on the blog with her essay about the family history behind her latest book, a family saga set in the Rocky Mountain West. Her debut, Gutenberg's Apprentice, was one of my favorite novels of 2014, and her second, The Shining Mountains, was just released in paperback by the High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press. For additional information, please visit her website.

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Our Multicultural Family History

Alix Christie

From an early age I was fascinated by the stories my Canadian grandmother told of her Scottish forbears in the Pacific Northwest, particularly one 19th century fur trader, Archibald McDonald, who married an alleged “princess” of the Chinook tribe. Decades later I would understand how offensive this fantasy depiction of Native wives of white men could be, and how common it unfortunately was. Yet as a child I was enraptured enough to draw a detailed family tree, showing that Archibald had indeed married Raven, a daughter of Chief Comcomly of the Chinook tribe. There the matter would have rested, if my younger brother, a historian and professor of literature, hadn’t turned up one day a decade ago with a boxful of books. He’d just written a scholarly paper on another distant relative, Duncan McDonald, and was gifting me his research. “For your next novel,” he said.

A quick count of the “Cast of Characters” of the book that eventually resulted adds up to more than fifty names. They include those Scots Highlanders, French missionaries, British bosses, American trappers, Norwegian, German and English immigrants, and Native Americans from five different tribes across the Rocky Mountain West. Though my research began with that one man — Duncan McDonald, son of our Scots great-great-great-uncle Angus and his Nez Perce wife Catherine—the story I discovered reached back several generations and across a vast expanse of the West, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. It all came together when I flew to Montana to meet my many cousins on the Flathead Reservation, all enrolled tribal members descended from Angus and Catherine.

Angus McDonald, 1860s, at the new international boundary between the U.S. and Canada

Catherine McDonald (Kitalah—Eagle Rising Up, Nez Perce), studio portrait, 1860s Montana

Growing up in California public schools I had not the slightest idea of the deep pre-American history of our land. The story we were taught was one of pilgrims and triumph; the mechanics of “Manifest Destiny” and westward colonial expansion were not so much glossed over as ignored. Meeting for the first time Native Americans with whom I shared some drops of Scottish blood was therefore an extraordinary introduction to their history, both painful and proud. The five years I spent learning about their lives has been one of the richest experiences of my life. The Montana McDonalds welcomed me, offering advice and support; only with their generous help and a long and careful consultation with tribal authorities, was I able to breathe life into their family story as a novel.

The Shining Mountains recounts the life and times of this mixed-race family—half Scots Highlander, half Nez Perce, Mohawk and French—who were prominent in the last years of the fur trade between 1840 and 1860 in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Angus McDonald was the last Chief Trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the vast chunk of territory that would become the northwestern United States. But it wasn’t his prominence that most amazed me. What struck me with even greater force was how incredibly multicultural was the mid-19th century world within which he and his family moved. We Americans have traditionally called our country a “melting pot” but on its western edge it was less melted than bubbling with many diverse peoples, all intermarrying and hunting and farming and trading together, Norwegian and Salish and Scottish and Yakama, French and Russian and yes—American. It was a Babel as well: many Native tribes communicated with one another through sign language, while the traders who bought furs from them used a pidgin they called “Chinook-wawa”.

Two of Angus and Catherine's children, Angus P. and Maggie McDonald,
in full Scottish regalia, 1870s Montana

Angus and Catherine's son Duncan McDonald, with his wife
Louise “Quil-see” Shumtah (Salish),
in Native dress with American flag, 1870s Montana

This novel is about the love between two people of radically different backgrounds, yet sharing, paradoxically, a common culture of hunting and tight-knit family clans: Highlanders, too, were considered “savages” by the English who colonized Scotland. In North America families like theirs were put under incredible stress by the waves of Anglo migration that displaced Native people and forced them onto reservations. Yet against the odds they survived, to maintain their cultures and deep connection to their homelands. The “old Scotsman,” ancestor of many tribal members on the Flathead Reservation, remains a great source of pride. I was deeply moved when his great-grandson, the late Joe McDonald, the founder of Salish Kootenai College, and a great supporter of this project, described the book I wrote about Angus’ and Catherine’s life as “brilliant and invaluable.”

The author with the late Dr. Joe McDonald, Angus & Catherine’s great-grandson,
at the family cemetery at Post Creek, Montana (2016)

When I think now of the history of this country, I think of Joe, and of his cousin Maggie, the head of McDonald Ranch, and the rest of those descendants five and six generations later, every possible blend of indigenous and immigrant. America has always been a multicultural place, a mixing and mingling of different peoples and cultures. It’s a vital thing, today, to keep in mind.

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The Shining Mountains (High Road Books/University of New Mexico Press) appeared in paperback in early March 2025. Also in e-book, audiobook and hardback wherever books are sold.