Pioneering Death

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.

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.

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 sory.

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.

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.