The Oregon Trail

Published March 6, 2007

There are commonplace experiences unique to every period of history. In other words, little activities that were once normal are now unfathomable to us: most great writers before the 20th century rode horseback, the Ancient Greeks rarely climbed stairs and the Romans did not understand the concept of zero.

One unique experience of our generation was the computer game, the Oregon Trail. This game was mysteriously installed onto the computers of every public elementary school across the country. We all huddled around and waited our turn.

The game’s purpose was simple: to replicate the travel of thousands of early Americans in the mid 1800s from Independence, Missouri, to the West Coast. Entire families headed west with promises of new possibilities.

But myriad problems arose en route and we felt them: broken wagon wheels, typhoid and scarcity of food. Our husbands and children died off, and headstones were erected.

Our younger and older peers never experienced The Oregon Trail – it is one of our formative, yet understated, experiences. It was our first love affair with computers, their potential to offer a world outside of our own.

The game lent itself to various strategies that revealed much about the player: the sado-masochist taking the most dangerous routes, the selfish traveller with no regard for the family, the chronic hunter killing for pleasure (the boys).

But it is intriguing that we confronted the historical occurrence of the Oregon Trail at such a young age – it was subsequently overshadowed in our study of US history by the Civil War, Seward’s Folly or the Age of Jackson.

Yet, we were immersed in at age ten, the most tangible and historical manifestation of the American Dream: the pursuit of gold, land and freedom.

Even though we did not realize it, the idealism inherent in the game’s spirit matched our own youthful outlook. We believed in that moment when our rickety wagon climbed the last hill, and we glimpsed the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean.

The Oregon Trail arose at a time when anything seemed possible. It was a time before Gettysburg, Japanese internment camps, Vietnam – and we played the Oregon Trail before we knew about any of them. Its innocence was our reality.

The Oregon Trail was, in many ways, the beginning of our route to adulthood, both as a nation and as fourth-graders. It constitutes the space in between the Bill of Rights and Kent State, the camaraderie of childhood and the brutality of adolescence.

In this way, it is perhaps more influential than the Roman ignorance of zero because they did not comprehend what they lacked, while we know what we had. Its connection with the innocence of the US, and of us, shows it’s less important to understand nothingness than it is to understand that all men were created equal.

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