I decided to replay Oregon Trail today, after listening to the podcast Ben Franklin’s World. The host, Liz Covart, interviewed Rinker Buck about his book The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey. Buck retraveled the Oregon Trail with his brother, driving a team of mules and a covered wagon. The interview and ideas were intriguing, so I started where he got his inspiration: the game Oregon Trail.

Spoilers, I died. Three times. The farthest I got was just past Fort Boise, the only survivor of my party. Basically, traveling the virtual Oregon Trail with me is a bit like traveling virtually with Tom Hanks. Bad things happen, but without Wilson.

The podcast did get me thinking, though, and changed how I played. Buck makes a compelling argument for mules instead of oxen and how to think about the supplies you carry. I never starved, but lost some oxen along the way. The game doesn’t offer a mule option, even though they are recommended as pack animals along the way, so I was unable to prove his point.

In the half hour or so I spent with the two of them in my ear, I learned about religion and division on the Trail, tragedy and loss, and opportunists. We all load up our wagons to the brim in the game, similar to what our pioneering ancestors did — he explains that many overdid it and found themselves abandoning supplies along the way to lighten the loads. I tried less supplies more hunting, focusing on deer and elk, not buffalo and was continually scolded by the game for hunting, even though I was careful to only shoot one animal per stop. I never starved, but those darn biting snakes…

He also made me ponder the America he met along the way, as he had to find places to stop every day that could accommodate mules. He told Liz about staying in state parks and at rodeos, and of people who heard about him and sought him out to offer hospitality. He met the America we often have as our self-image, open and hospitable. And that was a little heartwarming.

Here’s the link to the episode: https://benfranklinsworld.com/episode-077-rinker-buck-oregon-trail/

I’m adding the caveat here that I have not read his book, yet. I did add it to the reading list I keep, unoriginally titled “Things I Want to Read.” Happy Trails!

Over the past week, I had the opportunity to spend several hours playing Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (whose henchmen never seemed to get snakebites or measles, unlike my avatar traveling to Oregon). Even with late ’80s and early ’90s graphics and functions, I was completely drawn in and engaged.

Carmen Sandiego provided a healthy geography lesson, as we tracked criminals around the world, guessing their next location based on a series of hints. These hints also worked a level of information analyses, as the player was required to determine the characteristics of the criminal to get a warrant. Even if you caught up in time, no warrant and you failed — a little bit if legal training in there as well.

And then I hit the Trail and learned how to die…

My first run was most successful, dying of dysentary at The Dalles. I’ve had dysentary and even with modern medicine it was pretty miserable, I have the greatest sympathy for the sufferers without antibiotics. My next run ended before FT Laramie courtesy of a snake, followed by an attempt ending in measles. If there ever was a great game to advocate for vaccination, this is it. Historically, I believe the ways to die and probability of doing so before arriving in the Willamette Valley seem to be accurate. the only one I was surprised not to see was scurvy, unless the periodic discovery of wild fruit was assumed to have staved it off.

Oregon Trail as a learning tool, even in its roughest form, has value, as in my short lives as a pioneer I received a geography lesson, lessons in budgeting and supply management, risk management, disease, and history. I particularly found it interesting when the Native American said we should not shoot the bison as they were vital to his people — I found myself hunting deer for some time after that. The “Talk” button provided background on the places; short clues to the challenges of the pioneers, their successes and failures; and a Laura Ingalls Wilder Easter egg.

Oregon Trail 2020 is a game I would play, converted to a first person perspective and with better graphics. Some of the options could include more in depth explorations of the places, such as climbing Chimney Rock or walking around a frontier fort and meeting the people. This would be a great opportunity to introduce Native American stories or those with more diverse backgrounds, such as the Buffalo Soldiers. The map the Trail itself and your progress should have updated graphics. One change I would not make is the tracker tells you have far you have gone, and how far to the next landmark but not to the end. At first, this was frustrating not to know, but then the pioneers would not have have a good idea either, and the unknowing grew on me as a part of the experience.

I also want to name my oxen. This sounds small, silly and superficial. I went through 16 oxen in three tries, of which I died before only two of them. The oxen were a critical part of the journey (play and see what happens when you have none). I was thinking of this as reading about the Donner Party, different trail and lots of bad choices, the author of the book commented that when they reached the point the oxen had to be slaughtered it was hard on them as they had been through so many hardships together at that point, the party was emotionally attached to the animals (Michael Wallis, The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny).

Update: Played The Oregon Trail Deluxe, 1992.

The emancipation of millions of enslaved people during and following the Civil War led to a wide variety of outcomes for them as individuals, families and communities. The stories of these people and their struggle to adapt and fight for the rights of full citizenship have been told in many ways, including Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet and in the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930’s. In the years since many plantations were divided or sold, and in many cases effectively ceased to operate as entities, many of them have become tourist attractions, for the gracious houses and lovely gardens. A trend in the past decade has been to add the stories of the enslaved to the narrative from Charleston’s Middleton Place to the more recent acquisition of McLeod Plantation down the road from it. Both locations strive to include the lives of the enslaved people who worked and built lives there.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/17/us/charleston-race-one-girls-view/index.html

This project seeks to develop a tool to identify where the enslaved people came from, and equally important, their fates after emancipation. Conceptually, the project would focus on the South Carolina Lowcountry as a test platform. Several archival and databases are available as a resource, to include the following:

http://www.informationwanted.org

http://www.hastac.org

http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/

https://www.ccprc.com/1447/McLeod-Plantation-Historic-Site

https://www.middletonplace.org

http://www.draytonhall.org

https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/

https://www.archives.gov

The very idea of creating a database can be as terrifying as the month of October, awash in pink and orange. Development of historical databases can provide an important analytical tool and serve to highlight relationships that are not readily apparent — and conversely disprove them. To make the best use of a database, the user needs to have an understanding of the issues peculiar to developing ones for historical use.

Inconsistency and changes in the spelling of names can change how data is retrieved. Take my name for example, Kristin. Variations on spelling include Kristen, Krysten and so forth. My spelling is not the most frequently used, but the Kristen variant is. Building a database record, or searching for one for the name requires both recognition that there are alternate spellings and that a name can be easily misspelled.

Changes in the landscape and boundaries over time have to be accounted for in an historical database as well. Landscape changes due to erosion and accretion, mining, and development are some ways the land can physically change, causing data records that include features of the terrain to become more difficult to enter and locate correctly.

The fluidity of town, county, state and country boundaries and names can add a level of difficulty in database construction and use and requires a familiarity with the changes over time. If you are interested in early 18th century Maine, look at Massachusetts for data as it was part of that colony.