For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote The Oregon Trail in two weeks in 1971 for a history class. Its 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, became a staple of American classrooms — buying oxen, fording rivers, hunting buffalo and, all too often, dying of dysentery — and the series has sold more than 65 million copies. The game was built around real landmarks of the real trail, a 2,170-mile wagon route that some 400,000 emigrants travelled to Oregon and California, mostly between 1846 and 1869, across the homelands of many Native nations.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
