What if The Oregon Trail were made for grown-ups? This is the R-rated Oregon Trail.
The Oregon Trail was a wonderful game — and it went to great lengths to be accurate.
On the trail from the 1840s to 1869, people really did shoot buffalo,
ford rivers, and trade beads.
But there were some things they just couldn’t teach kids.
People had really dumb accidents. When you chose to be a banker or farmer, in
the game, you probably focused on the money. But a banker and farmer have something in
common: these people knew nothing about traveling
the trail. And that meant they shot themselves. A lot.
People shot themselves and then just had to wait by the side of the road, hoping a doctor
might come along. Guns fell off the back of wagons and fired.
And little kids — the age of Oregon Trail players — were constantly getting crushed
under wagon wheels. Soldiers were newbies too. They chased after
buffalo and were so dumb that one guy literally rode his horse into a river. Which meant they
needed a lot of medical care. The problem is that
medicine was terrible Doctors prescribed stuff like cornbread, bacon,
and whiskey -— and whiskey was the most common of them all.
People combined whiskey and opium pills for almost every ailment.
A little girl got a snake bite? Pour whiskey on it.
That was if you were lucky. Clueless doctors left people with gangrene and maggot-filled
legs. And for the venereal diseases? At Fort Laramie,
you got boiling water on the penis. Which brings us to
the parties were wild Independence, MO is where the Oregon Trail
began. But
the people were so drunk they were falling off the port city’s steamboats. Ferry rides
were canceled because of hangovers. Drunks bought whiskey by giving away their
buckskin pantaloons. Next to beloved Fort Kearney
was Dobytown, a city with 6 saloons
and a fine establishment known as the “Dirty Woman Ranch.”
What one miner wrote shows the mentality: “Gambling & gambling rules the camp. Dance
tonight. Men danced in women’s clothing to represent the sex.”
People loved whiskey so much they drank it using buffalo stomachs as a cup. Yes,
the trail was disgusting And you didn’t just hunt buffalo. Women
had the job of collecting buffalo chips. Don’t know what buffalo chips are? People sang songs
about women gathering them. They were buffalo...waste. Try cooking your mince pies, bread, and meat
over buffalo dung. And you can leave out the infamous cannibalism of the Donner party and
still find interesting cuisine. Dog eating happened, including the occasional
puppy. It was reported as more common among Indians than Easterners, but everyone got
hungry. In 1844, they served dog with the head still
sticking out of the kettle, teeth in tact.
Kids played around too. One game included butting their heads against a slaughtered
ox’s stomach and bouncing off it. They stopped when a kid got his head stuck inside.
All that meant there were bones and corpses, everywhere.
Sometimes you’d find a dead baby buried in the hollow of the tree.
We all left graves in Oregon Trail. But a permanent stone grave was actually an optimistic
scenario. You were lucky if you got a post. There were so many bones, people wrote messages
on them, and you could probably use them like mile
markers. If you were buried, your bones were almost
guaranteed to be dug up by wolves. And for some people, that was
the end of the trail But don’t be sad.
The Oregon Trail didn’t have to end with death from disease
or dying on a river. Most people think it ended in 1869 with the
completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. While that was being built, a town followed
behind it to cater to the workers. It had gambling and booze and prostitutes
that crossed the country. And it was one of many “helltowns” that
brought parties to the travelers who weren’t so wholesome.
The name of the town is even the source of a famous expression.
And it should be the title of the next Oregon Trail game.
They called it Hell on Wheels.
Not everything that happened on the Oregon Trail was incredibly depressing.
I found a couple of examples that were actually sort of sweet.
One comes from Edwin Bryant. He went out to California in the 1840s.
And he witnessed a wedding in the woods.
The couple got married —they didn't have fancy cake, they didn't have candles.
But they did have love and a crowd. And that was all that mattered. And he writes that...
After the wedding, the happy pair was left to the enjoyment of their "connubial felicities."
So even on the Oregon Trail, you have the occasional connubial felicity.
which we can all use. However, I also found some examples of
guys who snuck into their girlfriend's tent and then got shot. So, you win some you lose some.