How Accurate Was The Oregon Trail Game? The Real History Behind America's Most Famous Video Game | Sarah Keyes

Bob Crawford (0:00)

So, the old hippie bumper sticker, strangers are just friends we haven't met yet, does not apply. You didn't see that on the back of a wagon.

Sarah Keyes (0:09)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they would not put that on the wagon. It would be more like, if you're a stranger and you can read this, you're too close.

Bob Crawford (0:18)

It's stranger danger.

You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers.

Sarah Keyes (0:29)

Leave a message.

Bob Crawford (0:31)

Hey there, American History Hotliners. Bob Crawford, thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline. It's the show where you ask the questions. The best way to get us a question is to record yourself in a voice memo on your phone or better yet, film yourself and send it to americanhistoryhotline.gmail.com. That's americanhistoryhotline.gmail.com.

We got a great question for you today. Our question today comes from Crystal.

Sarah Keyes (1:02)

Hey Bob, this is Crystal. I played the Oregon Trail game in elementary school growing up.

I want to know how realistic it is to the real thing.

Bob Crawford (1:12)

Did that many people die on the Oregon Trail?

Sarah Keyes (1:16)

I want to know. Can you tell me?

Bob Crawford (1:17)

Thanks.

Well, I got to tell you Crystal, I am ashamed to admit that I missed the Oregon Trail craze. I don't know what I was doing then. I don't know what I was up to or into. However, I have a lot of friends who love that game and they talk about it constantly. It seems to come up again and again.

But from what I've heard, they seem to have had a lot of characters who died of dysentery when they played Oregon Trail. So I hope the game wasn't too realistic. Anyway, I do have the perfect guess to answer your question. Joining me now is Sarah Keyes, a Yale historian and author of the book American Burial Ground, A New History of the Overland Trail. Sarah, thanks for joining me today.

Sarah Keyes (2:06)

Thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Bob Crawford (2:10)

Sarah, were you a fan of the Oregon Trail video game? Did you play it when you were younger?

Sarah Keyes (2:16)

I was a fan and I did play it, but I was really bad at it and so I died a lot. Often a dysentery, sometimes drowning in a river, all those horrible things that can happen to you in the game.

Bob Crawford (2:31)

Well, okay, so let's just back up for a second. You call it, in your book, you call it the Overland Trail. Most of us know the Oregon Trail. Is there a difference?

What's the time period and general route the trail takes?

Sarah Keyes (2:49)

Yeah, sure. So I used the word Overland Trail to include the Oregon Trail along with a number of other routes that immigrants took via foot and wagons in the mid-19th century. So we're really talking about three decades, which is a really long time for a migration, 1840s, the 1850s, and the 1860s.

People took different routes depending on where they wanted to end up. So if you were going to Oregon, you were on the Oregon Trail. If you wanted to go to the California Goldfields, you were on the California Trail. There's also trails farther south that cut through Texas, New Mexico, places like that.

The funny thing is that people at the time, even when they headed out on these huge journeys, they weren't sure all the time where they wanted to end up. They're literally standing in what's now Wyoming saying, do I go north to Oregon or do I head a little bit south and get to California? What really unites this migration together is less the specific road and more their destinations on the Pacific Coast. How do you get to this wondrous world on the Pacific Coast? This network of routes is what I used to describe as the Overland Trail, and the Oregon Trail is one of those routes, and it's the one that gets attached to the game. So a lot of people remember that one the most even today.

Bob Crawford (4:27)

So I believe the Oregon Trail began and starts in Independence, Missouri. Yeah, go ahead.

Sarah Keyes (4:38)

Oh, yeah. Yes, definitely. There's a number of sort of these departure points on the western edge of the United States. So Independence, Missouri is one. Council Bluffs is another.

St. Joseph, Missouri is also a well-known jumping off point. And the funny thing about these towns is that they're fighting for each other, for immigrants to come through, because it's a really good thing to have all of these travelers coming through and buying supplies from your trading posts and paying to camp on your farmland and all of this. And so, you know, connecting back to the concern about death, these jumping off towns will say like, oh no, you should definitely come to Independence because there's no way we have cholera, but Council Bluffs, you don't want to go there.