Pioneering Death

A shocking murder lays bare fissures running through the founding myths of the American republic

On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery's Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery's consequent hanging exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives boys of the time inherited.

In Pioneering Death, Peter Boag examines the Brownsville parricide as an allegory for the destabilizing transitions within the rural United States at the end of the nineteenth century. While pioneer families celebrated and memorialized founders of western white settler society, their children faced a present and future in frightening decline. Connecting a fascinating true-crime story with the broader forces that produced the murders, Boag uncovers how Loyd's violent acts reflected the brutality of American colonizing efforts, the anxieties of global capitalism, and the buried traumas of childhood in the American West.

Peter Boag is professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West department at Washington State University. He is the author of Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (UWP, 2022); Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (California, 2011); Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (California, 2003); Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon (California, 1992)

Peter Boag is professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He is author of Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, and Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon.

"Pioneering Death is a masterful project that reflects an historian at their peak. Boag's research is impeccable, and the narrative reads fluidly like a murder mystery accompanied by the voice of a thoughtful and supremely interested scholar. The work is both entertaining and unsettling."

"Meticulously researched. . . Boag's masterful achievement of reconstructing the world that became the stage for the youth's notorious acts is undeniable."

"A compelling story that incorporates a diverse set of analytical methods to describe an eighteen year-old's parricide and murder in the 1895 Willamette Valley...Boag recounts this event, and the circumstances leading to it, with elegant prose and engaging detail."

"Like the best microhistories, Boag's book uses the minutiae of [an 1895 triple murder] to open a window into broader currents—exploring violence, uncertainty, expectation, and despair in the rural Pacific Northwest of the time, and beyond. . . . [T]he vivid writing and careful detail in Boag's Pioneering Death make the book suitable for an audience beyond specialists."

"Rigorous and compelling . . . Boag's insightful work does much to help us understand these shocking crimes and these unresolved stories that never seem to go away."

"Peter Boag's excellent Pioneering Death is, at its heart, an outstanding study of community in late nineteenth-century rural Oregon. . . . [The] book shows that there is still much to be learned about Oregon history and that community studies are a particularly powerful way of getting at that story."

"In his study, Boag successfully accomplishes two tasks: he assesses the environmental pressures that may have led Montgomery to slay his parents while offering a rare and intimate portrait of ordinary people in agrarian Oregon during the Gilded Age. . . . Boag's engaging prose, provocative ideas, and the inherent luridness of his subject matter make this work that rarest of things: an academic page-turner that should appeal to broad audiences of readers."

"A kaleidoscopic study of the whole societal context surrounding the Montgomery crime. It expands outward from standard criminology turf . . . to explore the grinding economic depression of the late 1800s and the complex financial and social pressures felt by Willamette Valley farm families."

"Boag uses a gripping local story to obliterate the fictions of the white "pioneer" tale. This is narrative history—powerful, painful, and full of paradoxes—at its very best."—Ryan Dearinger, author of The Filth of Progress

"With the bleak story of a triple murder, Boag explores the emotional landscape of society and family in the rural West at the end of the frontier era. The result is a stark portrait of the violence and stresses of growing up in one of America's more mythologized settings."—Elliott West, author of Growing Up with the Country