This spring, I started a West Coast-centric American literature course. The professor asked us to write a one-page commentary about our first exposure to the mythos of the American West— it could be as obscure, creative, or straight-forward as we wanted.
The Oregon Trail — circa late ’80s/early ’90s — was the first thing that popped into my head and onto the page.
When I was in elementary school, I attended an after-school program that received a generous donation of a used Apple II and the accompanying 1985 edition of Oregon Trail. On a floppy disk, of course.
Oh, the waitlist would be hours (sometimes stretching into the next day’s session, even) for a turn to play, a team of three students at a time managing the controls for a single round.
It was magical, and generally fatal for the ill-named, computer-generated pioneers involved. If you went to elementary school between the late seventies and mid-nineties you know exactly what I mean.
And you know exactly what it was like in 1848 — watching that little ox and wagon blip across a black background, over a perfectly flat green field, fording squiggly royal blue rivers (and dying on them, should you happen to actually survive the trek and get sent down the River of Doom).
I will admit that while I may have been among the most enthusiastic players, at eight years old, I was not necessarily the most successful: I bought a lot of oxen, a moderate amount of food, and almost no spare parts (I figured if I didn’t know what a wagon tongue was, I probably wouldn’t need it).
Now I had a more practical friend, Eliza Thornberry (if you don’t get that reference, it’s only because you were deprived of children’s cable programming in the ’90s), who was more successful than the rest of us. She invested in wiser things a Matt’s General Store, like wheels and axles. She chose professions that were reasonable in the game-world — like a farmer. Eliza Thornberry was a survivor (sometimes).
I wasn’t always so lucky. I always chose ‘banker’, because it was the closest I could get to ‘accountant,’ and I thought if anyone could rock the Oregon Trail, real or floppy disk, it would be my accountant father. Unfortunately, the banker and the rest of his party (probably named something ridiculous like Sparkle, Barf, and Bobo, which we all found funny in instances like, “Barf has been bitten by a snake.”) generally ended up ten feet under the Oregon Trail rather than at the end of it.
I also always chose to depart in July, my birthday month, but unfortunately that four-month trip has you in middle America under the scorching summer sun, and to the West coast sometime around December — just in time to freeze to death in the Sierras. Whoops.
But let’s face it, that game was nearly impossible to win anyway. Can someone please tell me why, if I had four healthy oxen and an entire wagon, I couldn’t take more than 49 pounds of a half-ton buffalo I managed to hunt?
And then there were the diseases!
I always died of dysentery. Or typhoid. I was also disgusted when, years later, I learned what dysentery actually was. Gross.
Looking back, between the communicable deadly diseases, random injury, starvation, and river floods, the game stimulated more of a death march then westward migration. (This is why everyone lives in L.A., and no one lives in Oregon. Don’t say I never learned anything from this game.)
How ’bout you? What was your first experience of the mythos? John Wayne (I’m looking at you, Grandpa B!) perhaps? Alternatively, what was your Oregon trail strategy? Did you survive? Was it because you bought a wagon tongue?
College Kate 