The Real Oregon Trail: Beyond Dysentery and the Apple II Game

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2019

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you were a middle schooler in the United States anytime after 1985 and had a study hall with an Apple II, there is a very high chance you played Oregon Trail. After setting out from Independence, Missouri, you led your pixelated wagon across the frontier, hunting bears, fording rivers, and more likely than not, dying of dysentery.

The real Oregon Trail sprang up in the 1830s, when America was going through the worst economic slump it would see until the Great Depression. A mixture of financial urgency and a sense of destiny--Manifest Destiny--convinced tens of thousands of Americans to trek over 2,000 miles from Missouri’s western edge to Oregon Country.

But how can families cross the desert? Or the Rocky Mountains? Or descend the Columbia River? And what about the British HBC’s hold on Oregon Country? Many tried this dangerous path, including fur traders, missionaries, explorers, and early wagon trains that dared to blaze this trail before its heyday of the 1840s-1860s.

Joined with us today to talk about the Oregon Trail is history professor and podcast Greg Jackson. He's the host of the show History That Doesn't Suck

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast. The unscripted show that celebrates unsung
0:07.9	heroes, myth busts historical lies, and rediscoveres the forgotten stories that changed our
0:14.7	world. I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:22.8	If you are a middle school student in the United States sometime between the mid-80s and
0:26.2	the mid-90s and you were bored in your computer lab, there's a very good chance you played
0:30.9	Oregon Trail. It was a very simple game where you would load up your wagon, you would
0:35.2	get supplies that you needed, you would hunt buffalo and squirrels along the way, and
0:39.7	the way that you would hunt was basically to spin around in a circle and shoot your gun,
0:43.8	which for those of you who don't hunt, that's not a safe way to do that, you would try
0:47.6	to forward rivers, but typically you would die along the way of starvation, or you would
0:52.1	get a message that would pop up that would famously say, you have died of dysentery.
0:57.1	The Oregon Trail took off at a time of America's worst economic slump that it saw until the
1:01.6	Great Depression. After President Andrew Jackson and during the Presidencies of William
1:06.3	Henry Harrison and others, many people could no longer afford to stay where they were
1:11.2	in the East Coast, and the financial urgency and also a sense of decity, manifest decity
1:17.2	specifically, drove them west. Many Americans wanted to physically occupy the
1:21.7	West as a physical bulwark against outside intervention from the English, from the Russians
1:27.5	and others. So tens of thousands of Americans tracked over 2000 miles from Missouri's Western
1:33.3	Edge in Independence to Oregon Country, and this path was known as the Oregon Trail.
1:38.6	In this episode, I'm going to be talking with History Professor Greg Jackson, who's
1:42.6	the host of the History that doesn't suck podcast about the Oregon Trail, and get down
1:47.2	into the details of what it looked like to travel on it. How can families cross the
	...

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