
The player can choose to be a banker from Boston, a carpenter from Ohio, or a farmer from Illinois. The game has been released in many editions by various developers and publishers who have acquired rights to it, as well as inspiring a number of spinoffs and parodies. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding his or her party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley on the Oregon Trail via a covered wagon in 1848. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. Unfortunately, this game is currently available only in this version. If you prefer to use a java applet emulator, follow this link. This game is emulated by javascript emulator em-dosbox. For fullscreen press 'Right Alt' + 'Enter'. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.Game is controlled by the same keys that are used to playing under MS DOS. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselvesordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.Īt once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling US Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.īut The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water.


Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck was accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an "incurably filthy" Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl.

His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as "a funny, cocky gem of a book," and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life. Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures.

Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West - scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history - it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America.
