61 Fun Facts About Oregon Trail

Student teachers from which Minnesota college wrote the original Oregon Trail?

Carleton College seniors Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger shared a Minneapolis apartment while student teaching, and designed and coded the game in about two weeks.

The first Oregon Trail was written in 1971 for a junior-high class in which subject?

History: student teacher Don Rawitsch was drawing a board game for his unit on westward expansion when his roommates, two student maths teachers who could program, talked him into a computer version.

In the original teleprinter version of The Oregon Trail, what word did players type as fast as they could to hunt?

BANG had to be typed quickly and spelled correctly: the faster the entry, the more meat, and a typo meant nothing at all, so classes put their best typist on hunting duty.

Which Minnesota organisation produced and distributed The Oregon Trail from 1975?

MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, was a state agency; once the game went onto its timeshare system in 1975 it became the most popular program schools dialled into.

In The Oregon Trail (1985), the wagon party sets out from which town on the Missouri River?

Independence, Missouri is the only place to set out from, but the 1985 game added a choice of departure month: leave too early and there is no grass for the animals, too late and snow closes the mountains.

Where does the journey end in The Oregon Trail (1985)?

The Willamette Valley lay beyond the Cascade Mountains, which is why the game's last decision is between a toll road over them and a raft ride down a river full of rocks.

In The Oregon Trail (1985), what did choosing to be a banker, a carpenter or a farmer decide?

Your starting money was all the choice changed: the designer wanted easy, medium and hard levels without building three games, and a richer start earns fewer points at the end.

Where does the 1985 Oregon Trail game have you buy food, clothing and ammunition before leaving?

Matt's General Store at the start of the 1985 game sells the supplies; the same goods cost more at the forts along the trail, so stocking up before leaving pays off.

How can you cross a river in the 1985 Oregon Trail game?

Players could ford the river, caulk the wagon and float it across, or at some crossings pay for a ferry; the odds depended on the river's depth and the weather.

On the last leg of The Oregon Trail (1985), players can pay a toll or raft down which river?

At The Dalles the player chooses between rafting down the Columbia River, dodging rocks in a simple action minigame, or paying to take the Barlow Toll Road around it.

What is the maximum food weight you can carry back to the wagon in Oregon Trail's 1985 hunting minigame?

However much you shoot, the 1985 game lets you carry only 100 pounds back to the wagon; its designer set the cap so children would think about waste.

What did the 1985 Oregon Trail game save to disk for later players to find?

A tombstone with an epitaph: when the whole party died, the leader got a gravestone the player could inscribe, and the game stored it on the disk for the next player to pass.

Which grim message from The Oregon Trail became a popular T-shirt slogan?

'You have died of dysentery' became a meme and a T-shirt staple; the 1985 version introduced several named illnesses, dysentery among them, in place of generic sickness.

Which hit of 2000 entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame alongside The Oregon Trail?

The Sims entered the hall in 2016 alongside The Oregon Trail, which the judges honoured as a single game across every version, from mainframe to smartphone.

Across all its versions, roughly how many copies of The Oregon Trail had been sold by 2011?

About 65 million copies had been sold by 2011, a striking total for a game first handed out free to Minnesota schools.

Which toy giant bought The Oregon Trail's owner, The Learning Company, in 1999?

Mattel bought The Learning Company in 1999; that firm, once called SoftKey, had already swallowed the game's Minnesota publisher, whose offices closed the same year.

Which educational game followed The Oregon Trail into The Strong museum's hall of fame in 2021?

Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985) shipped with a copy of The World Almanac, which players combed for clues to the thief's next stop; it joined the hall in 2021.

Which of these was a real spin-off in the Oregon Trail series?

The Amazon Trail (1993) sends players up the river by canoe to carry cinchona, a malaria remedy, to the Inca king; The Yukon Trail and Africa Trail were sister titles.

Which parody game swaps The Oregon Trail's pioneers for survivors of a zombie apocalypse?

Organ Trail began as a free browser game from The Men Who Wear Many Hats; its popularity led to a Kickstarter-funded Director's Cut for iOS and Android in 2012.

The 2021 remake of The Oregon Trail, developed by Gameloft, launched first on which subscription service?

Gameloft's remake debuted on Apple Arcade in 2021 and reached PC and consoles the next year; its creative director consulted Native American scholars to strip out stereotypes.

In The Oregon Trail's 1985 hunting minigame, how did the game show that an animal had been shot?

Hit an animal and it flipped upside down: the team used that as a stand-in until proper death graphics were ready, but playtesting children loved it, so it stayed.

What did StarKid Productions call its 2014 stage musical parodying The Oregon Trail?

The Trail to Oregon! has the audience name the family at the start and vote on which member dies at the end; StarKid later posted the whole show on YouTube.

The famous 1985 graphical version of The Oregon Trail was first released for which computer?

The 1985 version was written for the Apple II, the computer its publisher had been buying in bulk and reselling to schools; MS-DOS, Mac and Windows ports followed in 1990–1993.

In which programming language was the original Oregon Trail written?

The original was written in BASIC on the Minneapolis schools' timesharing computer; the team kept a paper copy of the code before deleting it, and Rawitsch rebuilt the game from it in 1974.

How did Don Rawitsch share The Oregon Trail's full program in 1978?

Printed in a magazine: Creative Computing ran the full listing in 1978, with some of the historical data he had used to set the odds of disaster.

What did Oregon Trail II let players choose for the first time?

Year: the 1985 game always set out in 1848, but Oregon Trail II (1995) offered any year from 1840 to 1860, and the trail changed with the year chosen.

The 'Oregon Trail Generation' is a nickname for which micro-generation?

Xennials, born roughly 1977 to 1983 between Generation X and the millennials, earned the nickname because so many of them played the game on school computers.

Roughly how long was the Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to Oregon?

About 2,000 miles is the usual round figure (the mapped route is 2,170); wagons needed four to six months, so trains left in spring to beat the mountain snows.

Which shallow, muddy river did the trail follow across the plains, 'too thin to plow and too thick to drink'?

The Platte, in the pioneers' joke a mile wide and inches deep, was useless for boats, but its flat valley gave wagons a natural road west with grass and water.

Which army post, founded in 1848, sold emigrants supplies and carried their mail on the early plains stretch of the trail?

Fort Kearny was sited just west of where the feeder trails from the Missouri River towns merged, so the army could guard and resupply the one road they became.

Until an 1846 treaty, the United States shared the Oregon Country with which other nation?

Britain and the United States held the Oregon Country jointly from 1818; the 1846 Oregon Treaty split it at the 49th parallel, after American settlers had poured in by wagon.

Which granite landmark on the Sweetwater River did Father De Smet nickname the 'Register of the Desert'?

Independence Rock, where thousands of emigrants carved their names, is said to have been named by fur trappers who spent a Fourth of July there.

With their wagons packed full of supplies, how did most emigrants cover the Oregon Trail?

Walking beside the wagon was the rule: the wagons were crammed with supplies and had no springs on their axles, so nearly everyone crossed the continent on foot.

Which fur tycoon's men made the first recorded crossing of South Pass in 1812?

John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company sent Robert Stuart's party east from Astoria; they crossed South Pass in 1812, but the gap had to be rediscovered by trappers in the 1820s.

Chimney Rock, the spire that appears in so many trail diaries, stands in which present-day state?

Chimney Rock stands in western Nebraska; erosion and lightning have worn the spire down, so it was taller when the emigrants sketched it.

The Barlow Road, opened in 1846 as the trail's final stretch, bypassed which mountain?

Sam Barlow's toll road, opened in 1846, skirted the south flank of Mount Hood, letting wagons reach the valley overland instead of being floated down the river from The Dalles.

In 1836, what did Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding become the first white women to do?

Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding were the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains, in 1836; their journey showed women could make the trip and opened the way for emigrant families.

Which animal did most Oregon Trail emigrants prefer for pulling their wagons?

Oxen were the favourite: cheaper than horses or mules, able to live on prairie grass and less likely to be stolen.

What nickname was given to the light covered farm wagons that most families drove west?

The prairie schooner was a light farm wagon whose white canvas top looked like a ship's sail crossing the grass; the bigger Conestoga was a heavy freight wagon.

Which disease was the biggest killer on the trail during the epidemic years of 1849 to 1855?

Cholera, spread through water fouled by crowded camps along the river, could kill within hours; some travellers were healthy at breakfast and dead by nightfall.

Use of the trail fell away sharply after what was completed in 1869?

The first transcontinental railroad, completed at Promontory Summit in May 1869, cut a journey of months by wagon to about a week.

About how many settlers, miners and ranchers used the Oregon Trail and its offshoots to head west?

About 400,000 people went west on the Oregon Trail and its branches, banding into wagon companies of relatives and neighbours for mutual help.

Oregon- and California-bound wagon trains typically averaged about how many miles a day?

About 15 miles was a typical day, because the wagons crept along at the pace of their teams, around two miles an hour.

On the treeless prairie stretch of the route, what did emigrants most often gather to fuel their cooking fires?

Dried buffalo dung, the 'buffalo chips' of the diaries, made a clear, hot fire but burned so fast that gathering it was a regular chore on the treeless plains.

Which town, the Oregon Territory's first capital, was the Oregon Trail's official end point?

Oregon City, where new arrivals went to file their land claims, was the trail's official end; many families stopped short wherever the land looked promising.

Sales of the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar of 1926–1939 were meant to pay for what?

Markers along the route were the aim: Ezra Meeker, who had made the crossing himself as a young man, lobbied Congress for the coin in 1926, aged 95.

The 1930 western The Big Trail gave which actor his first starring role?

John Wayne, billed under that name for the first time, led The Big Trail at 23, then spent eight years in low-budget pictures before Stagecoach made him a star in 1939.

Which 2021 Yellowstone prequel follows the Dutton family's wagon train from Texas toward Oregon?

1883 stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as James and Margaret Dutton, whose wagon train sets out from Fort Worth for Oregon but ends with the family settling in Montana.

Which folk singer wrote and recorded a song called 'Oregon Trail' while travelling the region in 1941?

Woody Guthrie wrote 'Oregon Trail' in May 1941, when the federal government hired him for a month to write songs about its Northwest dams; he turned out 26, among them 'Pastures of Plenty'.

Fort Hall, the Snake River trading post in Idaho, was sold in 1837 to which fur company?

Hudson's Bay Company bought Fort Hall from Nathaniel Wyeth in 1837, and its agents long urged emigrants to abandon their wagons there for pack animals.

In 1847, Brigham Young's pioneers left the main trail at which stop for the Salt Lake Valley?

At Fort Bridger the Mormon pioneers turned south-west, following the Donner Party's faint track of the year before through the Wasatch into the Salt Lake Valley.

On the overland trails, what did emigrants mean when they said they had 'seen the elephant'?

Endured the journey's hardships: emigrants set out eager 'to see the elephant', the wonders of the West, and the elephant became their name for every misery met on the way.

The ill-fated Donner Party of 1846 left the main trail to try which shortcut?

The Donner Party took the Hastings Cutoff south of the Great Salt Lake, lost weeks in the Wasatch and the salt desert, and was snowbound in the Sierra Nevada by November 1846; nearly half its members died.

Which danger, dreaded by emigrants, turned out to be among the least of their real problems?

Attacks by Native Americans were rare: tales of hostile encounters far outran actual incidents, while disease and accidents killed many times more travellers.

Which army captain, whose name lives on in Utah's salt flats, took the first wagons through South Pass in 1832?

Benjamin Bonneville, an army captain on leave to trade furs, took 20 wagons through South Pass in 1832, proving the route passable for wheeled vehicles.

The 1839 Peoria Party marched west under a flag bearing which motto?

The Peoria Party's flag read 'Oregon Or The Grave'; its young men, calling themselves the Oregon Dragoons, quarrelled and split near Bent's Fort in Colorado, though several reached Oregon.

Which disease, sweeping the Cayuse in 1847, led to the killing of missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman?

Measles was killing the Cayuse and Dr Whitman could not cure them; a small group of Cayuse men, suspecting his medicine, attacked the mission in November 1847.

Which 1841 group is credited as the first emigrants to use the Oregon Trail to head west?

The Bartleson-Bidwell Party of 1841 was the first organised emigrant train on the trail; about half turned off at Soda Springs for Oregon while the rest struck out for California.

What lured so many Oregon men off their farms in 1848?

A gold strike in California drew several thousand Oregonians south in 1848, and so much gold dust came home with them that gold coins were being minted in Oregon by 1849.

Trail guidebooks told emigrants to pack about 200 pounds per adult of which staple?

Flour headed the packing lists: one guide urged 'plenty of breadstuffs' as the staff of life when everything else runs short, and diaries record 200 pounds packed per person.

According to historian John Unruh, roughly what share of overland emigrants died on the trail?

About 1 in 25: Unruh's study put overland deaths near 4 percent, well below the legend, though other estimates run to almost one in ten.