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Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service. The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on 3 December 1971. One of these students, senior Don Rawitsch, had the idea to create a computer program for a history class he was teaching, and recruited two of his friends, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, both of whom were students teaching math, to help. Visit the Oregon Trail Settlers and Records wiki page to find even more pioneer records.Īlready have a FamilySearch account? Discover your relative’s pioneer stories with the FamilySearch pioneer feature.The Oregon Trail was created in 1971 by three student teachers at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in the HP Time-Shared BASIC environment running on an HP-2100 minicomputer. There are several other archives with pioneer-related records, though they may not all be free-to-access. Here are some of the collections available on FamilySearch: You can search through pioneer record collections to see where your pioneers may have travelled in the west. With the great number of pioneers who traveled the Oregon Trail, it is entirely possible your ancestors may have been among them. Did Your Ancestors Travel the Oregon Trail? This lack of space for provisions added to the already treacherous journey. While handcarts were cheaper, they allowed less space for possessions and provisions.
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These pioneers used lighter, cheaper handcarts instead of covered wagons. Pioneers that came from poorer backgrounds, however, could not afford the required animals or wagons. Many groups substituted horses, mules, or even cows for the required wagon teams. As more travelers flocked westward, the demand for pioneer provisions increased in some cases, oxen became scarce.
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However, not everyone had a wagon with teams of oxen. They were hardy and strong and could graze along the trail. This importance, on its own, is accurate oxen were the favored animals for the journey west. Players starting their journey in The Oregon Trail know how important it is to purchase multiple yokes of oxen. Pioneers who attempted to cross rivers on their own spent a great deal of time planning and preparing. They faced the same challenge: pay the toll for a ferry or find another way across-and maybe lose your life, your livelihood, or your family in the process. While fording rivers in The Oregon Trail game is a quick decision, that wasn’t the case for the pioneers. Still, most players agonized over the choice for less than a minute. Paying for the ferry was expensive-but trying to ford it yourself could result in the loss of valuable supplies or party members. Players of The Oregon Trail will remember that encountering a river was risky.
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Fording Rivers Was Tricky on the Oregon Trail Travelers leaving from Independence, Missouri, on the actual Oregon Trail were typically organized into caravans called “companies” or “wagon trains.” These groups could be over a hundred wagons long, although most of the time they consisted of 20 to 40 wagons, a number that was far more manageable. Realizing the many dangers of crossing the plains, most pioneers elected to travel together. This situation of a single pioneer family would have been rare, with the exception of eventual homesteaders, who still lived in a relative proximity of growing number of neighboring homesteaders. The Oregon Trail puts you in charge of a family of five and then sends you off to survive the frontier alone.