In 2000, Julia Sullivan and her husband bought property in Hamilton, Montana. “He was born and raised here,” she says. “I wanted to get the lay of the land. The Big Hole Battlefield (in Wisdom) is nearby, and I knew nothing about the Nez Perce tribe. That place has owned me ever since; you can physically feel what happened there.”

What happened there was a dawn attack on peaceful Nez Perce by the U.S. Army on August 9–10, 1877, the year when the Nez Perce reservation was reduced to one tenth its original size and they were evicted from their homeland, known as the Flight of 1877. Between 60 and 90 men, women, and children were killed, with an unknown number wounded, according to the National Park Service. Of the military and civilian volunteers, 31 were killed and 38 wounded.

Sullivan is a lawyer in the U.S. and a solicitor in England and Wales, and she had never contemplated writing a novel. But “Big Hole haunted me,” she says. “I started researching it until I had accumulated just a ridiculous amount of material. As a lawyer, writing has always been a way for me to organize my thoughts. I wrote a large article about treaty violations. But one day I decided I wanted to write a novel…It seemed like an outlandish thing to do; it was about a tribe of Indians to whom I had no real personal connection other than being obsessed by their story.”

Some 20 years later, Sullivan completed Bone Necklace, which Kirkus Reviews praisesfor its “fully evident” years of research and its characters who move beyond “mere archetypes…it’s bracing to follow their personal journeys.”

Bone Necklace blends historical and fictional characters, most prominently Jack, an alcoholic Idaho militiaman haunted by his stepmother’s death in a fire set by the Nez Perce; Running Bird, who set the fire as an act of vengeance; and Nicole, an artist whom Running Bird takes captive. As the Nez Perce make their way to Canada with a relentless U.S. Army on their trail, their fortitude and honor turn the tide of public opinion and an initially racist media.

The main characters, too, initially antagonists, likewise reach an understanding. Jack, for example, forms an unexpected bond with Running Bird and offers to help him at a critical juncture:

“We don’t have much time. All I can say is, I’ve made a lot of bad decisions. I want to make something come out right for once. If not for me, then for someone else. Maybe this will give me peace. I want you to take those horses…I want you to make it to Canada.”

Sullivan was enthralled by the Nez Perce story on several levels. One, she says, is that it defies expectations. “You think you know how it would come out if a small band of Native Americans went up against the U.S. Army in the 19th century,” she says. “They faced insurmountable odds but did not give up. Forty percent received political asylum in Canada and preserved their culture.”

The Nez Perce story also resonated with her on a personal level. Her father, a colonel in the Air Force, moved the family every couple of years. She always felt like the outsider. When she was young, he was falsely accused of assault and battery by a policeman. Her father was later acquitted, but the incident ended his military career (he was later successful in the private sector). “It’s what drew me, in part, to writing my story because it was about the abuse of power by the majority against a vulnerable minority,” she says.

Sullivan worked on the book off and on over the last two decades, she says. “It was my first attempt at fiction….I didn’t really appreciate how different legal writing is from fiction writing. I’m embarrassed in hindsight by my own hubris. I’d work on it, I would get stuck and attend writing conferences and take classes, and then I would pick it back up. It took me many iterations to get it to where I was ready to release it.”

During much of this time, she did not tell anyone that she was writing a book. “Lawyers,” she jokes, “what we do is confidential, right?”

In 2004, she told her parents and her husband what she was up to. This was necessitated, she says, by her desire to travel the entire Nez Perce trail. “I let the cat out of the bag then. But I didn’t let anyone read it until it was finished. And when I did, I wasn’t looking for comments. I wanted them to tell me they liked it. Can I admit that?”

Sullivan was determined not to demonize or romanticize one side or the other. The research was what she loved most about writing the book. “It was like a scavenger hunt,” she says. “I made a list of first-hand witnesses who left behind written accounts. That was easy from the army side, from generals on down. There were fewer accounts on the Nez Perce side, but there are a couple of really good written accounts, including one by Chief Joseph.

“Then I went to contemporaneous media and newspaper stories. There were lots of conflicting stories, but you could pick up common threads. What was fascinating to me was how unapologetically racist and genocidal some of the stories were at the outset, and how the Nez Perce changed public opinion by the way they conducted themselves during the war. I loved that arc that I saw in the newspapers, where by the end when Chief Joseph surrendered, there was no question of an execution by the Army. He was way too popular at that point.”

This is evident in the book’s appendix, in which Sullivan shares contemporaneous newspaper accounts from The Tennessean, The New Northwest, The Ouachita Telegraph and other actual period newspapers.

Sensitive to cultural appropriation, Sullivan did consult with a Nez Perce advisor. “He read three drafts for me over a period of a couple of years and gave me good comments,” she says. “He didn’t like many of the names I had in mind [for the Native American characters]. Culturally, native people put so much more importance on names than [we do]. Julia doesn’t mean anything as far as I know.”

Sullivan has a second book in mind. Reflecting on her first novel, she agrees that writing an epic historical novel was a challenge. “But that was what made it fun,” she says.

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.