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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pioneering Death: the Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon by Peter Boag William Willingham PIONEERING DEATH: THE VIOLENCE OF BOYHOOD IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY OREGON byPeter Boag University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2022. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 314 pages. $99.00 cloth. $30.00 paper. Peter Boag’s excellent Pioneering Death is, at its heart, an outstanding study of community in late nineteenth-century rural Oregon. Using a case study of an 1895 parricide in Linn County, Boag probes the nature of family and society during a time of turbulent change, exposing the jarring relationship between the idealized view of rural western American life with its often-painful reality by 1900. Boag’s goal is to contextualize, and thereby render more explainable to a twentieth-century readership, what caused a troubled, eighteen-year-old farm youth to murder his father, mother, and a neighbor in an apparent moment of overwhelming rage. Using the murder and its aftermath as the point of entry, Boag lays bare the range of economic, social, and cultural factors that impinged on Loyd Montgomery, the adolescent responsible for the gruesome murders that took place in the heart of the Willamette Valley on November 19, 1895. As Boag states it: “An examination not only of the people involved and their relations with each other but also of the community, the society, and indeed the history that they were part of — [is] where we can best find answers to why a rural Oregon lad murdered his farming parents on a cool autumn day long ago” (p. 9–10). The author employs a wide array of published and unpublished sources to reconstruct the character of late nineteenth-century rural Oregon. Beyond a variety of legal, land, and census reports and other pertinent government documents and personal papers, he makes superb use of the abundant newspaper coverage of the murder and its aftermath. There was a great fascination with the murders, locally, regionally, and nationally, so Boag is able to gain good insight into how people at the time tried to make sense of the event. He has also read widely in the modern literature on parricide and troubled youth, but wisely does not try to psychoanalyze or to read an ahistorical interpretation of adolescence into the past to account for Montgomery’s actions. The narrative is well written and carefully organized so that each element of the author’s thesis comes together to create a coherent historical context. Boag argues that Montgomery’s life in rural Oregon occurred at a time when his community and society were suffering from numerous painful situations. By the 1890s, Willamette Valley farmers were finding it hard to achieve the economic and republican political success that was supposed to follow from their commitment to fulfilling the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian landscape of independent, noble yeoman farmers. Belief in that ideal, and the values underlying it, led the Willamette Valley farmers to emmigrate to Oregon during the 1840s and 1850s and create a society of thriving White farmers. The second and third generation, however, were not able to successfully build on what the founders had worked so hard to make possible, causing economic and social anxiety. The deaths of the founding generation only enhanced the anxiety that the younger generation faced and pushed them to mythologize the accomplishments of the founders through memorials and pioneer societies. The Depression of 1893 made matters worse for the farmers and their families, especially for the numerous youths who seemed to be deserting the countryside for the city. Additionally, the culture of the Willamette Valley was suffused with violence as an inheritance of the White settler society’s dispossession of the Native Americans. In this volatile social, cultural, and economic mix, Montgomery, in a fit of violent emotion, did the unthinkable and became a “product, agent, and victim of an extraordinary history” (p. 216). Boag’s book shows that there is still much to be learned about Oregon history and that [End Page 97] community studies are a particularly powerful way of getting at that story. This study and Boag’s other book on the nineteenth-century Willamette Valley...