Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories

Abstract

Pioneers, Parricides, and the Spectre of Violence in Settler-Colonial Homes and Histories Katrina Jagodinsky (bio) Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon. Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in association with University of Washington Press, 2022. xii + 298 pp. Figures, maps, chart, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 Americans are grappling with everyday political and personal violence on a variety of fronts. Escalating frustrations with alternating police inaction and violence, failed explanations of gender- and racially motivated mass-shootings, and the heartbreaking centrality of children in this violence—as both victims and perpetrators—leave many onlookers desperate to understand how these acts have come to be so distinctly American. A cadre of scholars are focused on this problem: criminologists, lawyers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and, applying their own unique set of tools and methodologies, historians.1 Among the historians concerned with the peculiarities of American violence are those who specialize in the North American West, a region characterized in the popular imagination and in most scholarly treatments as fundamentally violent.2 Peter Boag's most recent book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (2022), joins this conversation, arguing that violence is intrinsic to American culture, particularly pioneering culture. Boag borrows an approach from Foucault to offer readers an "ethnology of parricide" (p. 9) that links a horrific "fifteen or so minutes" to "the westward expansion of the United States, rural and agricultural decline, the consolidation of market capitalism, political change, environmental transformation, race and labor, penal reform and the evolution of justice, religion and the meaning of death, and the especially intimate matters of childhood, family, gender relations, and memory" (p. 10).3 What unfolds is 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 and explain "why children kill their parents–a question that has haunted humanity since humanity has haunted the world" (p. 217). [End Page 143] At the core of Boag's study is Loyd Montgomery's parricide of his father and mother, John and Elizabeth, and murder of neighbor Daniel McKercher on 19 November, 1895. The eldest of five siblings at eighteen, Loyd stood at the intersection of boyhood and manhood, though his heinous actions ensured he would face execution before completing that transformation—unless we believe his murderous acts marked the end of his childhood. His parents, John and Elizabeth, were the children of Oregon founding families who had themselves practiced genocidal anti-Indian violence to secure their settler-colonial claims to the Willamette Valley in the 1840s and 1850s. As adults and parents of the Valley's third settler generation, the Montgomerys struggled to keep their footing amid the financial ruin that many rural farming communities faced at the close of the nineteenth century despite the tremendous wealth their relatives had accumulated through settler-colonial measures of dispossession that included the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. Daniel McKercher arrived in the Willamette Valley less than a decade before his murder, perhaps maintaining financial success because he emigrated with his parents from Canada in his twenties and remained single into his thirties. He was active in local fraternal organizations, widely respected in his community, and operated a gristmill in partnership with his brother. Concerned about his neighbor's dire straits, McKercher extended credit to John Montgomery, who at the time of his death owned no real property and left no estate for his four innocent children—all of whom lived with their widowed paternal grandmother after their parents' death. Boag recounts this event, and the circumstances leading to it, with elegant prose and engaging detail. The majority of his sources are local newspaper accounts, with the addition of regional and national coverage of the crime itself. He supplements newspapers with pioneer reminiscences and manuscripts, social and vital statistics, state reports, and county histories. He employs cultural, economic, environmental, and gender analysis to broaden the significance of Loyd Montgomery's 1895 murders, quickly acquainting readers with the bonds and troubles Willamette Valley residents shared together. Readers familiar with Boag's prior...