Review: Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, by Peter Boag

In 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery, the eldest son of a rural sharecropping family in Brownsville, Oregon, committed a triple homicide that sent shockwaves throughout the region. With seemingly little provocation beyond a slap in the face, Montgomery turned his rifle on his parents and a family friend. In his fascinating study of the murder and its aftermath, Peter Boag insists that typical explanations for parricides provided by psychologists and criminologists are insufficient: “Ascribing the offense to personality types and mental illness ignores a variety of temporal matters” (p. 9). Instead, Boag places the parricide within the context of 1890s agrarian Oregon at a time of economic depression, political disillusionment, and increasing urbanization.

What emerges from the book is, on one hand, a declension narrative. Montgomery grew up in the shadow of dwindling prospects for putatively self-sufficient Anglo-American farm families, ceaselessly romanticized for subduing Indigenous communities and altering the physical landscape...