Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon by Peter Boag (review)

Reviewed by: Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon by Peter Boag Naama Maor Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon. By Peter Boag. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. xiv + 300 pp. Hardcover 105. 00, paperback 30. 00. Peter Boag's meticulously researched Pioneering Death introduces a haunting question: "Why do some children kill their parents? " (7). For the past fifty years, Boag notes, psychologists and criminologists have identified parricide perpetrators mainly as children who were severely abused, had suffered a mental illness, or exhibited antisocial tendencies. His exploration of a late-nineteenth-century case in rural Oregon—the killing of John and Elizabeth Montgomery along with their neighbor Daniel McKercher by eighteen-year-old Loyal (Loyd) Montgomery—suggests that no psychological explanation can fully capture the circumstances that led to these murders. Instead, Boag asserts that it is necessary to examine the community and society that shaped the perpetrator, particularly the violence that informed his life. In their attempts to explain what made Loyd Montgomery shoot his parents and neighbor on November 19, 1895, journalists and members of his community described Loyd as a troubled youth with a history of behavioral issues, including fits of anger or "gloomy spells" (58–59). Boag, however, invites the reader to see Loyd as a product not only of his parents' upbringing and home environment but also of a society in crisis, and his actions as the extreme culmination of a life submerged in a "culture of death, violence, and killing" (125). Accordingly, Pioneering Death focuses on the social, economic, and cultural landscape within which young Loyd Montgomery grew up and operated before and after the murders, using a diverse set of sources, such as newspapers, census records, personal papers of community members, and unpublished documents produced by local organizations and governmental agencies alongside End Page 323 published reports. As part of the tapestry of young Loyd's life, the book outlines the challenges of boyhood in rural Oregon followed by an account of the agricultural decline the region experienced during the late-nineteenth-century industrialization, market consolidation, and economic depression. Moreover, it examines how local communities celebrated and memorialized Oregon's pioneer history, including the violent acts that white Americans perpetrated against Indigenous people, and it analyzes Oregonians' anxieties over the departure of a dying generation of venerated pioneers. Whether or not the reader accepts the claim that this rich landscape helps understand Loyd's actions, Boag's masterful achievement of reconstructing the world that became the stage for the youth's notorious acts is undeniable. Boys who lived in rural communities had to witness and endure a host of life-threatening, traumatic events as they navigated their path from childhood to manhood. Boag's account both draws parallels to the dangers lurking for urban boys and challenges the romanticized agrarian ideal that informed life in the American West. It sketches out scenes of "affliction, tragedy, and violence" that shaped the lives of children like Loyd Montgomery in Linn County, Oregon. Their exposure to danger and death on a daily basis contributed to a collective "traumatic childhood, " which, the author claims, affected Loyd's trajectory no less than a personal biography that, according to reports, included its own episodes of familial distress (46–47, 69–70). Boag highlights the significance of Loyd's age at the time of the murders. At eighteen, the Montgomery son was in a transitional stage—not yet an adult man but also no longer a child. He was assigned tasks that were performed by adult peers but resided and worked with his family. He was not independent of his father, who continued to control his labor and to discipline him. That after the killings his community addressed him both as an able-bodied man, who should be tried as an adult and was eventually executed, but also infantilized him, illustrates Boag's point that the two images rendered Loyd both an adult who was culpable for his actions and an unsalvageable person who committed a heinous crime at a young age (89). Ultimately, Boag is interested in the preservation and suppression of the memory of the. . .