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

Boag relies explicitly on Richard Slotkin's influential 1985 study to argue that Loyd Montogmery's murders arose from the "fatal environment" of his childhood and the "simmering" developments his family faced.[7] But if rural Oregon was dangerous for all children, and the close of the nineteenth century found many families like the Montgomerys failing, why was parricide so rare? Boag makes a superficial effort to compare Loyd to other "bad boys" of his community but declines to delve into the case files that might have helped him compare the behaviors and fates of boys there with that of Loyd Montgomery, relying almost exclusively on newspaper coverage for this evidence. 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. Despite suggesting that many Americans shared the Montgomery family's troubles, Boag also persuasively argues that Loyd's sensational murders were "the scalding climax to developments in that family, the local community, and broader agrarian society that had been simmering from at least the early 1870s onward" (p. 121). [Extracted from the article]