Description
By Glen Sample Ely
Published by University of Oklahoma Press
On a sweltering August night in 1876, Methodist minister William England, his wife, Selena, and two of her children were brutally slaughtered in their North Texas home. Acting on Selena’s deathbed testimony, a neighbor, his brother-in-law, and a friend were arrested and tried for the murders. Murder in Montague tells the story of this gruesome crime and its murky aftermath. In this engrossing blend of true crime reporting, social drama, and legal history, author Glen Sample Ely presents a vivid snapshot of frontier justice and retribution in Texas following the Civil War.
The sheer brutality of the Montague murders terrified settlers already traumatized by decades of chaos, violence, and fear—from the deadly raids of Comanche and Kiowa Indians to the terrors of vigilantes, lynchings, and Reconstruction lawlessness. But the crime’s aftermath—involving five Texas governors, five trials at Montague and Gainesville, five appeals to the Texas Court of Appeals, and life at hard labor in the state’s abominable, inhumane prison system—offered little in the way of reassurance or resolution.
Viewed from any perspective, the 1876 England family murders were both a human tragedy and a miscarriage of justice. Combining the long view of history and the intimate detail of true crime reporting, Murder in Montague deftly captures this moment of reckoning in the story of Texas, as vigilante justice grudgingly gave way to an established system of law and order.
Glen Sample Ely is the award-winning author of The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858-1861 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) and Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity (Texas Tech University Press, 2011) which received sixteen awards and honors combined. Ely earned his Ph.D. in history from TCU. The Texas Historical Commission honored Ely with its Award of Excellence in Preserving History, and in 2018 he was inducted as a Fellow in the Texas State Historical Association
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