In the summer of 1877, the bedraggled remains of the Nez Perce Tribe evade the U.S. Army for four months before escaping to Canada. Inspired by true events, Bone Necklace captures the intensity, violence, and unexpected conclusion of Americaâs final âIndian War,â told from the perspectives of a Nez Perce warrior, an Idaho militiaman, and an English painter who gets caught up in the violence.
Bone Necklace is a tale of survival in which the Nez Perce not only overcome
staggering odds but also win the grudging respect of a war-weary nation. While
deeply rooted in American history, this remarkable story continues to resonate,
illuminating modern debates around institutional racism, journalistic bias, and
the call for courage in times of moral crisis.
In the summer of 1877, the bedraggled remains of the Nez Perce Tribe evade the U.S. Army for four months before escaping to Canada. Inspired by true events, Bone Necklace captures the intensity, violence, and unexpected conclusion of Americaâs final âIndian War,â told from the perspectives of a Nez Perce warrior, an Idaho militiaman, and an English painter who gets caught up in the violence.
Bone Necklace is a tale of survival in which the Nez Perce not only overcome
staggering odds but also win the grudging respect of a war-weary nation. While
deeply rooted in American history, this remarkable story continues to resonate,
illuminating modern debates around institutional racism, journalistic bias, and
the call for courage in times of moral crisis.
At the sound of Chocolate Barâs deep-throated growl, Jack scrambled to his feet and grabbed the Hawken rifle leaning against a scrubby white bark pine. He found the dog crouched at the foot of a massive basaltic boulder, baring his teeth at a buff-colored mountain lion. The cat had been stalking Jack and his dog all day, all the way up a steep ridgeline overlooking Hells Canyon, but Jack was surprised at the predatorâs boldness now, venturing so close to his camp.
The cat let out a hair-raising howl, high-pitched and apocryphal, the kind of sound Jack imagined heâd hear the day he finally arrived in actual Hell. The dogâs growl was a low, dull rumble, like distant thunder gathering momentum. Jackâs mule, Hammertoe, shuddered and bucked at the end of her picket line. Her instinct was to run, but the picket kept her moving in frantic circles.
Jack wedged the Hawkenâs worn maple stock between his shoulder and his cheek, aiming at the mountain lionâs chest. He felt the rifleâs cold trigger against his finger, but he didnât pull. The cat was such a beautiful thing, so sleek and daring and dangerous.
Jack had loved mountain lions ever since the day he saw one sitting on top of a giant saguaro cactus. For all their beauty, all the elegance in their movements, all the heat in their fiery eyes, cats sometimes made spectacularly bad decisions. Jack, whose life had been one bad decision after another, understood the astonishment, the bewilderment, the futile regret of that cat on top of the cactus, almost as if they were kin.
He holleredââHey! Hey! Hey!ââand fired the gun in the air. The muscular cat took the warning and bounded away. She flew to the top of a rocky outcropping, fifteen feet or more in a single leap, and disappeared in the fading light just as silently as sheâd arrived.
Chocolate Bar, about the same size as the cat, chased after her, snarling and full of bloodlust, but the dog couldnât hope to match the mountain lionâs retreating speed. He ran back and forth from Jack to the base of the high, bony shelf where the cat had escaped, moaning and sniffing every footmark sheâd left. Hammertoe trembled, brayed, and reared against her picket line, which only tightened the knot.
Jack stood in a patch of wild buckwheat, holding the hot-barreled rifle, breathing in gun smoke. âYouâd have died gloriously if youâd caught her,â he told the dog, âbut youâd have died all the same.â
Chocolate Bar yowled and whined and refused to come when Jack called him.
âIâm not drunk,â he told the insolent dog. âI missed her on purpose.â
Chocolate Bar stared at Jack doubtfully, but it was the truth.
Jack sat down on a dusty boulder, surrounded by mountains with names like He Devil, She Devil, Ogre, Goblin, Devilâs Throne, Mount Belial, and Twin Imps. Vertical walls of rock, covered with pictographs and petroglyphs, plunged thousands of feet from the high shelf where Jack had stopped for the night to the Snake River crashing through the narrow gorge below. He wondered how the ancient Indians had climbed those sheer canyon walls with their pots of ochre paint to record births and deaths and plagues on the face of the rock. He wondered how a spider could hang on there.
Jack took his supper from a pretty silver flask. Eventually, the truculent dog settled down beside him. Jack pulled pine needles, sticks, pebbles, and bits of grass from the dogâs bushy tail and used oil to remove gobs of sticky sap from the thick black fur around his neck. Forgetting his grievance, Chocolate Bar rolled over so Jack could scratch his tummy.
âSometimes I think God put cats and women on this earth for the specific purpose of humbling men like us,â Jack told the dog, picking up their earlier conversation. âHe knew full well how theyâd taunt us.â
The dog stretched and yawned.
âYou mustnât ever let them see your desperation, though,â he said. âNo whining. No moaning. No panting if you can help it.â
Chocolate Bar yawned and closed his eyes.
###
Three days earlier, Jack couldnât have imagined heâd soon find himself camped in the Seven Devils, chasing Indians. Then again, three days earlier, his fatherâs house hadnât been burned to the ground by the Nez Perce. Rescuers had combed through the smoking wreckage with rakes and shovels, searching for Sallyâs corpse, but it had proven a futile task. If she was inside that house when the conflagration went up, her remains would never be identified. The fire had burned too blistering hot, reducing every shingle, every beam, every stick of furniture to cinders. Door hinges, jewelry, silverware, even pots and pans had been melted. Window glass had liquefied and cooled in iridescent pools beneath the ash. Two stone chimneys were all that remained, facing each other like forgotten sentinels. Â
Witnesses saw a Nez Perce flee the scene. Nobody mentioned a hostage, but that didnât mean the Indian hadnât taken Sally with him, in which case she might still be rescued. After sending a heartbreaking telegraph to his father, who was meeting with the governor in Boise at the time, Jack had gone out on his own, drunk as a boiled owl, vowing to bring Sally home. Now he was camped on the ridge overlooking Hells Canyon, which the local band of Nez Perce would have to traverse if they wanted to join the other hostiles.
Sally was the only mother Jack remembered, and though she could drop the temperature in a room ten degrees just by walking in, she and Jack had always shared a peculiar bond. When Jackâs father beat him, Sally would bring cold compresses to his room, touching his brow with her elegant hands. When Jackâs father spent the night with one of his whores, Jack would sit beside Sally on the porch, listening to her muffled sobs. They knew things about each other that neither one would ever share with another living soul. Wasnât that the essence of family? Â
 Jackâs father, Robert Peniel, had devastating flaws, but he wasnât a bad man entirely. When Jack was a boy, his father would rise early each morning to start the fires, which would be blazing by the time Jack stumbled out of his room with his clothes in his arms to dress before the kitchen hearth. Peniel would be scalding his throat with coffee by then, measuring flour and lard into a bowl for biscuits, which he insisted on making himself. Biscuits were too important to trust to Sally, who made them hard and dry. âLike turds,â Peniel would say in an oft-repeated rant, which used to make young Jack laugh.
Breakfast would be a gluttonous affair, with eggs fried in butter, thick slabs of bacon slathered with maple syrup, and peaches fixed with cloves and soaked in brandy. Penielâs biscuits came out of the oven hot and steamy so the honey and apple butter melted down Jackâs chin.
Over breakfast, Peniel, who usually hadnât slept the night before, would read aloud from the Lewiston Telegraph, whose publisher was a friend, or from well-thumbed volumes by Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Shelley, and other sensualists, with his spectacles perched on his shark-fin nose. Jack loved the sound of his fatherâs deep, baritone voice. The man could be charming when he wanted.
Jackâs father had engaged in a number of vocations over the yearsâteacher, missionary, farmer, trader, lawmanâbut his real genius, the thing he truly excelled at, was lying. Peniel had a capacity for eloquence, camouflage, unverifiability, and inventiveness that was unequalled among even the most unrepentant charlatans. Heâd once tried to tutor Jack in this industry, explaining that a good lie had to be delivered brazenly and unashamedly, with oneâs shoulders thrust back and chin tipped up. It needed a few small bits of truth woven into the tapestry so it resembled something that might have been true under other circumstances. A good lie had to be alluring. It had to seduce you, irresistibly. There had to be artistry in itâbeauty, almost.
Jack only ever knew one person who didnât seem to understand, let alone appreciate, the occasional necessity of prevarication. Motsqueh and Jack had been six years old when theyâd met at an orphanage where Jackâs father had left him for a while. The two boys sat beneath a giant cedar tree for hours, companionably mute, until they were called for a cold supper. The next day they played âquietâ again, but this time Jackâs new friend broke the silence, forfeiting the match.
âTake a breath,â Motsqueh said. âNow let it out. . . . Now take another breath. . . . Now let it out. . . . Now take another breath but hold it.â
Jack held his breath for one, two, three seconds.
âNow let it out. See? That didnât hurt, did it? My mother died just like that. She was breathing and then she wasnât. The next breath never came.â
âI didnât see my mother die,â Jack said.
âMaybe sheâs not dead.â
Motsqueh was like that. Tell him the mountains were created by an invisible trickster named Coyote, or that Jesus was born to a virgin named Mary, and he believed it unhesitatingly, but tell him that the paint on the porch rail was wet, or that someone you knew had died, and he had to see it for himself, or at least interview three eyewitnesses.
If Motsqueh had been around after Jack went to live with his father, he never would have believed the ridiculous explanations for Jackâs many injuries. The two boys would have played quiet, and Jack would have told his friend everything. Motsqueh would have told his older brother, Tiloukaikt, who would have done something about it. Maybe the two Cayuse would have helped Jack hide in the mountains. But Motsqueh died of measles when the boys were only eight, and his brother, Tiloukaikt, killed the doctor with an axe and was hanged before a cheering crowd. Years later, Jack whispered his secret into an empty tobacco tin, quickly tapped on the lid, and buried it next to Motsqueh and Tiloukaikt in the ground, hoping for supernatural intervention which never arrived. Â
After Motsqueh died, Jack found that he was one instead of two, and though he hadnât studied his numbers much at that point, he understood that one wasnât half of two. One wasnât even one billionth of two.
The more Jack thought about Motsqueh, the more other people disappointed him. At boarding schools, apprenticeships, church socials, Jack always found himself standing slightly apart. He was the fish in a jar. The white crow in a flock of black ones. The pine scion ludicrously grafted onto an apple tree. He was always carrying thingsâa block of clay, a plaster mold, an empty bucket sometimesâas a buffer between himself and the people he might bump into on the street. He stared down at his shoes a lot. When someone tried to be friendly, he stared down at their shoes.
As the years rolled by, Jack found that things were easier, and so much more lyrical, when the whiskey flowed. Sure, his art had suffered. Sure, heâd lost Jessica. Sure, his hands shook and his stomach hurt almost all the time. And yet the whiskey kept him company. It covered up an overwhelming sense of loneliness that sometimes felt catastrophic. It made him forget that his name was Jack and that he slept alone in a cavernous studio with only a kiln and a forge for warmth at night. Like a beautiful woman or a worthy lie, good whiskey demanded his appreciation. Then it kicked him in the teeth.
âDamn it all,â he said out loud. He reached for the Hawken, poured powder down the barrel, added a patched iron ball, and pulled the hammer back to half-cock. He laid the gun in a rocky crevice, within easy reach, and pulled off his boots.
When the Nez Perce outbreak had begun, Jack had promised his father heâd drive Sallyâs carriage to Fort Lapwai and leave her there in the care of friends. Instead, heâd passed out on his straw mattress with an empty bottle in his hand. A messenger had woken him later that night with the news that his fatherâs house had been torched.
The idea that Sally had been kidnapped rather than killed was a notion hatched by desperation more than rational thought. Jack sensed the cresting of a massive wave, and only this tiny, mad ideaâthat Sally was still aliveâsomehow kept it from breaking over and smashing him to bits.
He stripped to his cotton union suit and lay beneath the darkening sky. The canyon was noisy with tree frogs and boreal toads, screeching hawks and hooting owls, and the Snake River grinding through the deep gorge down below.
Lying in the unquiet dark, thinking about Sally, Jack fell into a hazy dream in which heâd somehow rescued her and delivered her safely back to Lewiston. In the dream, he could hear people murmuring that perhaps theyâd misjudged him all those years, that perhaps he wasnât as frivolous as many of them had believed, that sometimes he acted as white as any man. He was wearing a hat that heâd constructed entirely from orange peels, and this, too, seemed to impress the people in the crowd. Even his father seemed pleased with him for once. But naturally, and in due course, he woke up alone in the wilderness, almost embarrassed by the absurdityâthe transparent needinessâof the dream. Chocolate Bar looked at him with such sympathy, Jack suspected that even the dog found him pathetic.
âYou probably dreamed you caught and killed that mountain lion,â Jack said, âbut you donât see me pitying you for it.â
Chocolate Bar stood up and stretched.
âHalf of life is hope, and thatâs the half that sustains the rest,â Jack said. âShe might still be alive.â
The dog ambled to a tree, lifted his leg, and trotted off.
There are some periods of American history that are steeped in controversy and Julia Sullivan has chosen one of these as the framework of her really very good historical novel: the Idaho wars between the government's army and the Nez Perce Tribe in the late 19th century.
Sullivan does much to ground it in the facts and reportage of the day with the extensive inclusion of pictures and contemporary accounts to be found at the rear of the book.
But what she effectively does within these pages is bring the events alive in a way that no reading of an historical text can do - through her description and her characterisation, focusing on her created key characters to show the impact of these events on the individuals who make up the tribes and the "white" men who are desperate to control them. It is a tale full of misery and loss in so many ways; however, there is the goodness of humanity here too and it makes for a balanced read.
We follow the lives of Running Bird, a young warrior of the Nez Perce, who has all of the impetuosity of youth and feels keenly the unfairness of the way his people have been treated: this is exacerbated by him having experienced a severe personal loss, which has affected him deeply; and Jack Peniel, drunken son of the local sheriff who has lost his way and is trying to find it again but with no beacon of light to follow, he is struggling. Becoming a soldier out of guilt and with the chance of redemption, he may just find this in the most unlikely of places.
What Sullivan is successful at presenting in her book is a human struggle in the face of prejudice and government expectation. Both sides are represented here but the focus is on the fight of the Nez Perce in the face of enduring prejudice, ignorance and the bad mishandling of events which lead to unnecessary escalation.
One particularly memorable part of the book that I liked was the inclusion of the tourists at Yellowstone, caught up in a conflict far from their world but destined to change it and them forever. This perspective provided an outside window into the conflict that really made me think: how would I have reacted if faced with people who I have been told are savages?
Great historical fiction.