Everything you thought you learned playing 'Oregon Trail' is wrong

Photo of Amanda Bartlett

Die of dysentery, or cholera? Caulk a wagon, or ford the river? Consequences were dire, but in "Oregon Trail," the choice was left up to your eager 10-year-old self to make.

Since the game's 1971 inception, more than 65 million copies have been sold, and it is considered to be the most widely distributed educational game of all time. Even 48 years later, nostalgic adults still scour the Internet for versions of "Oregon Trail" that can be played in-browser.

Here in the Bay Area, some even travel to the Video Game Museum of Oakland to play. It's one of the only museums on the west coast where visitors can experience their favorite games of yesteryear. Chief operating officer Kyle Dean says that Oregon Trail is one of the most commonly requested games at the non-profit facility.

"There's a lot of nostalgia around it. It was the de facto thing you wanted to be doing in the computer lab," he explained.

And sure, if you weren't playing "Oregon Trail" in elementary school, you'd be improving your typing speed with games like Mavis Beacon or blowing up multiplication equations with a laser in Math Blaster.

But "Oregon Trail" had something more to offer.

"Kids enjoyed it because it gave them control over a scenario, which can be really appealing for a 10-year-old," Dean said.

"It involved themes that seemed to be historically accurate, but also more mature. They were able to get a feel for that sense of adulthood and making choices, while being immersed right in the middle of the game instead of observing the action."

But how historically accurate was the game, really?


Lee Kreutzer has served as a cultural resources specialist and archeologist for the intermountain region of the National Park Service for over 16 years. She's an expert on all things real life Oregon Trail, but interestingly, has never been asked to compare the history of the trail to the game.

So, of course, I sent her a link to play the game — she played it twice, and told me one particular inaccuracy stuck out instantly.

"Both times my entire party bit the dust before reaching Fort Kearney," she admitted. "That's pretty unrealistic – I think if you were losing family members at that rate, you would just turn around and go home."

According to most researchers, Kreutzer added, 1 in 10 settlers would die along the trail, amounting to roughly 65,000 deaths and burials total between 1841 and 1869. If evenly spaced along the length of the trail, there would be a grave every 50 yards from Missouri to Oregon.

Graves were common on the real Oregon Trail, but their etchings may not have been as funny as they were in the game.


Oregon Trail game

But would they have the means to produce actual gravestones, like you see in Oregon Trail, along the way? Kreutzer says it was likely, especially if you had a stone cutter or blacksmith in your party.

"You might ask them to help you carve some words into a stone," Kreutzer said. A pile of stones or wooden crosses were also frequently used to mark graves, though they usually wouldn't last more than a couple of years. In contrast, some of the graves still stand to this day.

Most people died of dysentery in the "Oregon Trail" game, spawning a modern meme that at least one historian says was not entirely accurate.


The Nerd Patrol/Flickr

Unlike the game, which has spawned a meme out of dying of dysentery because it happens so frequently, most people likely died of cholera. The symptoms were alike, Kreutzer said, and the diseases were spread in a similar way – usually through contaminated water. This resulted in another frequent cause of death: "the bloody flux," in which diarrhea was the primary indicator. Measles were another common disease.

Some of the other deaths Kreutzer described as downright freak accidents. Some women and children would get their dresses caught in wagon wheels and fall underneath them. Some were struck by lightning. Gun accidents were commonplace, as were drownings.

It's a common strategy (read: shortcut) in the game to choose to start out as a banker, rather than a farmer or carpenter. It typically allows players to start with more money for supplies and ultimately have a better chance at survival. But Kreutzer said that the reality was the opposite: regardless of class level, they all had equal likelihoods of accidental death.

"People didn't have germ theory at the time – they just didn't understand how diseases were spread," Kreutzer explained. "If a watering hole was contaminated, they would catch something if they didn't boil the water first. And I don't know of anyone who did that unless they were making coffee or tea."

Kreutzer noted there were also people working in many other types of trades not offered in the game that took the trip West in real life. Among them were teachers, doctors, writers, preachers and missionaries.

Unlike the game, bankers usually didn't embark on the journey. Kreutzer suspects they were financially comfortable enough already and wouldn't have to take the risk. Instead, shopkeepers and lawyers were likely the most wealthy workers on the trail. Yet, as the original game depicts, farmers had greater quantities of supplies and were likely more self-sufficient. They were also likely the most common.

"The people who actually wanted to go on the trail were the laborers, the ones who wanted to do better," she said.


At least in the beginning, playing Oregon Trail is a relatively serene experience. Your party is on their own, with nothing but digital sagebrush as far as the eye can see. But that's another myth debunked by Kreutzer.

"For one, the Oregon Trail shared a corridor with the Gold Rush trail, which began in 1849," she said. "It was likely that you wouldn't go a mile without bumping into another a wagon." Traveling with slow-moving oxen, most settlers would attempt to cover at least 20 miles, moving for about 12 hours a day.

Dixon Ford poses with oxen Zeus and Thor during a 2006 "Oregon Trail" reenactment at Alcove Spring. He raised and trained them from calves himself, using techniques he learned from his Mormon Pioneer grandfather.


Tom Parker

No one traveled alone, though. Most were better off on the journey with their families, or teaming up with other workers. If a solo traveler got sick or injured, it was unlikely that other settlers would stop to help them.

"So the game was pretty true to history in terms of making you travel with a family," Kreutzer said. Most were young – newlyweds, or parents with kids under the age of 15 – and groups of laborers banded together as well.

Yet, many men didn't want to take their wives along. Kreutzer said she's read journal entries of male settlers describing them as "too much work" or "too much to take care of." Yet, women on the trail contributed to a large share of the labor, waking up before the sun was up to haul buckets of water to the wagon and start preparing food.

"They weren't just along for the ride," Kreutzer said. "They were the first ones up and last ones to bed." Much of their day-to-day work also consisted of gathering firewood, boiling water and cleaning laundry, tending to the sick and gathering their family's bearings before setting off each day.


In the game form of "Oregon Trail," meals are purchased at Matt's General Store in Independence, Missouri, and typically consist of coffee, beans, bacon and bread. This was what accurate, though Kreutzer points out that cattle were highly useful as well. Many settlers brought herds with them in hopes of using them to make money once they arrived at their destination and began farming. On the trail, their milk was valuable for churning butter, and women gathered cow patties to fuel campfires.

Matt's General Store doles out similar goods that people would have eaten or purchased while on the real Oregon Trail.


Oregon Trail game

Kreutzer also recalls the diary of one family whose small cow pulled their wagon all the way to Oregon. "That would have been a long journey," she said. "They can only travel two miles an hour."

When it came to travel, though, the game accurately depicted a strong dependence on oxen. Unfortunately, they weren't much faster. When settlers traveled in the spring, the rain would cause mud to cake onto their hooves and the wheels of the wagon. For those who could afford them, mules were a viable, faster option.

"If people already had most of their supplies, they could afford that and still be able to survive on just a few hundred dollars – probably four or five thousand dollars in today's currency," Kreutzer said.

She said it was probably important to prepare for risky scenarios, though.

In certain points of the game, Oregon Trail players might reach a river and be faced with a difficult decision: caulk the wagon by floating it across the river like a boat, or ford the river by using oxen to walk across seemingly shallow waters? Both could result in disaster – members of the player's party might drown, and their supplies and cattle could also float away.

"It could be very dangerous, but it was also highly dependent on the conditions," Kreutzer said. "Some people made it just fine, while there were other cases of entire families drowning."

Weirdly, people usually avoid the third and final option: to pay for a ferry. The game makes it appear to be a costly and time-consuming venture. But Kreutzer said this option was a worthwhile investment for most. People also built their own rafts or hire big canoes – called bateaus – that were used primarily for fur trade.

Deciding on the right time to leave was a critical decision. In the game, players can choose to leave between March and July. They're warned that if they leave too early, their oxen won't have enough grass to eat. If they leave too late, they may not get to Oregon until winter.

"Most people chose to leave in late April or early May, and would usually be successful," Kreutzer said. "July was much too late."

Some parties who waited too long also got stuck in literal wagon traffic. Kreutzer said she's read about a wagon that was forced to wait in the mud for several days. Some people were then driven to anger, murdering other people in wagons. Others would be driven to insanity.

"I think it's safe to say there was a lot going on out there," Kreutzer said. "It wasn't an easy journey."


Don Rawitsch, one of the game's original developers, describes how he tried to bring this to life in the game. Initially, he had no idea Oregon Trail would achieve critical acclaim – let alone be played outside of the classroom he was student-teaching at the time.

"It was 1971. No one knew there would be PCs or a software market," he said.

Rawitsch was a college student wrapping up his senior year. Upon graduating, he hoped to become a social studies educator. When his supervisor assigned him to a classroom to teach a unit on the Western movement in the 19th century, he thought he could engage students by creating a board game. But two of his fellow teachers, Bill Heinemann, Paul Dillenberger, told him to throw away the dice and cards. They thought Oregon Trail would be better suited for the classroom's mainframe computer. And they were right.

The game was a hit, but after the semester was over, Rawitsch didn't expect it to reach a wider audience. Things changed when he was hired by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC).

From left to right: Oregon Trail game creators Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, Paul Dillenberger pose (in jean jackets, naturally) with the code for the game in 1995.


Courtesy of Don Rawitsch

"Their purpose was to deal with the fact that we could see computers were coming into popularity and day-to-day use. They wanted to be ready for that," Rawitsch said. Shortly after he was hired, he offered to load the code for the Oregon Trail game into the computers of a Minnesota school district.

Rawitsch admits that because the first version of the game had to be made in just two weeks, there wasn't much time for historical research. This time, though, he set out to improve the accuracy of the new model – first, by obtaining a detailed map of the trail.

"I took down everything: mileage, the landmarks that settlers came upon in their trails, including forts, rivers and mountain ranges. I wanted to make sure that people were encountering these landmarks in places that made sense, geographically speaking," he said.

Commodity prices were also a topic of interest. Finding them wasn't easy, but Rawitsch hit the jackpot while researching at the University of Minnesota library. He came across reprinted versions of actual diaries from settlers who traveled along the trail.

Leafing through their pages, Rawitsch began to sort through the frequency of events like broken wagon wheels, outbreaks of disease and rainstorms. He tracked how many times those things happened over the course of a six-month journey and calculated them into percentages. Then, he manually entered those probabilities into the game's code.

"It didn't just rain randomly in the game," he stated matter-of-factly. "It rained x percent of the time for x percent of a player's turns." He used these probabilities to determine the "20 or so things" that could happen to a player during the game, from losing supplies to having a family member fall ill and die.


Rawitsch recalls watching old Westerns on TV in the 1950s and 60s. Often, he would observe episodes in which Native American characters would come thundering out of the mountains on their horses. They were depicted in a villainous manner, ready to attack, while the white pioneers – the "heroes" – served as their innocent counterparts merely passing by on trains.

As he learned while reading the diaries of people who traveled along the trail, this portrayal was highly inaccurate – and seemingly created with a white audience in mind.

Kreutzer agrees. "Most encounters between settlers and Native Americans were peaceful and didn't erupt into violence. But the settlers didn't write about the mundane, they wrote about arguments, threats and conflict, which may have changed some perceptions," she said.

When conflict did arise, it was usually for good reason. Settlers brought along deadly diseases like measles and small pox. They also caused resources along the trail to dwindle. Animals such as bison were hunted for their meat alone – a waste in the eyes of Native Americans, who considered every part of the animal to be sacred. They were then forced to peel bark off trees and feed it to their ponies so they wouldn't starve.

When writing the game, Rawitsch attempted to show Native Americans pointing settlers in the right direction on the trails, as well as helping them find and grow food. He didn't entirely omit their hostility – a decision that upset some critics.

"Certainly because the settlers were taking over land that didn't belong to them, there was reason for the Native Americans to be upset," he said, likening parts of the settlers' journeys to thinly-veiled trespassing.

This particular subject is the only thing Rawitsch would change if he made a new "Oregon Trail" game today — he said he would like to work with others to create a version from the Native American perspective. For now, though, he acknowledges the game's strengths and weaknesses, hoping that other educators do the same. He encourages them to use the game as a starting point, and integrate it with other types of instruction.

"Why not get a hold of one of those Westerns from the 1960s and ask students if that's an accurate portrayal of life in the West? Or if it's from the imaginations of television companies? It would allow kids to think critically and do their own research on what's accurate and what isn't," he said.
