I spent a year or two as the computer lab teacher at my kid’s school, back in the late 90s, and as thus was quite familiar with Oregon Trail. It, along with Math Blasters and Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego?, was one of the key early educational programs, and I must say, it rocked. No matter how careful you were about picking the right route, and packing some pickles among your provisions (scurvy!), there was always that random element of the unanticipated. Oh, hey, looks like you are ten miles from the Oregon coast of your dreams. Snake bite! You dead. And of course, the boys spent all their funds on bullets so they could shoot stuff. They never made it, and they didn’t much care.
I got the same vibes with this account of a harrowing account of the same journey, but with added grown-up emotions. Lucy Mitchell, remarried widow with three older daughters and two younger children, reluctantly sets off on this pilgrimage at her husband’s urging. Her marriages have been practical ones, but one could do worse. And then, midst journey, she meets James MacLaren, once a trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose beloved indigenous wife of several years has vanished, and whose three children die of smallpox, no matter what he does. So you know where this goes. It was, by the end, a grim desperate slog of a journey, but my favorite bits were the adolescent girls discovering their newfound freedom from convention.
Crossing the river Platte, one of their company’s wagons is in danger of capsizing, and Mrs. Watts went in herself, whooping and splashing in her yards of dress. . . But no one was drowned – not even the crated hens that rolled under not once but twice, and rode to shore still fixed in their crates. They reach shore, the usual army of sheep, goats, dogs, and children; the women around her drifting into accounts of recipes for which none had ingredients any longer, nor would likely in their lives again.
