"In The Shadow Of The Hanging Tree"

For Portola novelist Michael McLellan (michaelamclellan.com) it started in Chico. "In 2010," he emails, "I bought the house my grandparents had purchased new in 1962 (a stone's throw from lower Bidwell Park) from my grandmother's estate. I wrote a fair portion of my first novel on a picnic table" near the creek. 

McLellan has produced in his third novel a searing tale of the 1860s, intertwining Southern slavery with massacres of Native Americans as white settlers expanded Westward. It is not for the squeamish.

"In The Shadow Of The Hanging Tree" ($15 in paperback from Sweet Candy Press; also for Amazon Kindle) begins in 1861 in Missouri, charting the horrific life of twenty-year-old Henry, a newly freed slave, attempting to escape the roaming militias intent on killing runaways.

Caught by Emmet Dawson and his band, Henry and his companion Eliza face almost certain death. They are taken to a big tree by the road. "There were six people hanging from the tree limb. Even with the blood from his cut face blinding one of his eyes, Henry saw more than he could bear: five men and one small boy, all slaves."

There is a parallel story. In 1865 John Elliot is expelled from West Point at the behest of influential East Coast businessman Jonathon Hanfield. He is shipped off to Fort Laramie in the Dakota Territory to assist Colonel Frank Picton "with the Indian situation." John, in love with Hanfield's daughter Clara, is also the son of Hanfield's rival.

Henry survives, recuperates with the Cheyenne, and becomes a military guide at Fort Laramie. When it becomes clear that Picton has formed a militia intent on fomenting an all-out race war against the indigenous peoples, Henry and John (now reunited with Clara) face stark choices. There is graphic violence (with the N-word used fifty times) in this deeply affecting, gut-punch of a novel.

"The white man only knows desire," Standing Elk tells Henry. "He knows nothing of contentment. ... The white soldiers murder without regard, but themselves are spiritless and go screaming into their own deaths as they were born into life. ... There can be no peace with such men."