When Rivers Were Trails Answers The Oregon Trail

A teacher in Duluth told me last year that she still runs The Oregon Trail in her fifth grade classroom every spring. The kids love it. They name their wagon parties after each other, they lose oxen at river crossings, and someone always dies of dysentery to great applause. When I asked what the unit taught about the people whose land the trail crossed, she paused and said, honestly, "Not much. They show up to trade."

That is the problem in a sentence. For millions of American children since the 1970s, The Oregon Trail has been the first and sometimes only interactive picture of westward expansion, and it is told entirely from the wagon seat. Native people appear as guides, traders and obstacles, never as the ones whose world is being broken open. In 2019 a different game took the same basic shape and turned it around, and I think every classroom that still runs the original should know it exists.

Two journeys, two directions

The Oregon Trail began in 1971 as a teaching program written by three student teachers in Minnesota and was later distributed widely by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. The version most people remember came on Apple II computers in schools during the 1980s. You lead a settler family from Missouri to Oregon in 1848, buy supplies, ford rivers, hunt, and try to keep everyone alive.

When Rivers Were Trails was released in 2019 by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, with Anishinaabe designer Elizabeth LaPensée leading the design and Michigan State University's games lab building it. You play an Anishinaabe person displaced from the Fond du Lac area of Minnesota in the 1890s, travelling west toward California. You manage health and supplies the way Oregon Trail players do. The difference is in who you are, why you are moving, and who you meet.

The game's journey happens during the allotment era, when federal policy was breaking up reservation land into individual parcels and opening the remainder to white settlement. Our piece on why the allotment era still shapes reservation land explains the policy itself. In the game, it is the reason you are on the road at all.

What the game does differently

The changes go beyond swapping the main character, and they are worth looking at one by one because each is a design decision a teacher can talk about.

The stories come from many voices. The encounters along the way were written by a large group of Indigenous writers from different nations, more than twenty by the project's own account. A meeting with Ojibwe relatives reads differently from an encounter in the Plains, because different people wrote them from their own communities' knowledge. The Oregon Trail, by contrast, has a single settler narrator's voice throughout.

Wellbeing replaces mere survival. In The Oregon Trail, health is a number that drops with bad weather and bad food. When Rivers Were Trails tracks wellbeing in a fuller sense, and what restores it includes ceremony, relationships and the land itself, not just rations and rest.

The land has relationships. Hunting in The Oregon Trail is target practice, and you can shoot far more bison than you can carry. That design choice has been criticised for years as a small echo of the real slaughter of the herds. In When Rivers Were Trails, how you take from the land matters, and the game responds to it.

Government agents are part of the danger. Settler games treat the federal government as background. Here, Indian agents, passes and policy are some of the obstacles you navigate, which is historically accurate for Native people travelling in the 1890s.

The common response I disagree with

When I mention this game to teachers, a frequent response is that they should simply retire The Oregon Trail and replace it. I understand the impulse, and for some classrooms it may be right. But I think it misses the most useful thing these two games offer together.

Played side by side, they let students see that a story about the same landscape and the same decades changes completely depending on who is telling it. That is the central skill in reading history critically. Removing the settler version removes the contrast. Students should notice that in one game the river is an obstacle to cross, while in the other the river was a road long before any wagon arrived, which is where the second game's title comes from.

What I would retire is running The Oregon Trail alone, without context, as if it were neutral. Our piece on what schools still get wrong teaching this history goes into the wider pattern.

A two-session plan a teacher could actually run

Since that conversation in Duluth, I have helped two teachers try this. Here is the outline that worked best, adjusted for a class of about 25 with shared computers.

1. First session: play The Oregon Trail for about 30 minutes in small groups. Each group keeps a list of every Native person or community they meet and what role that person plays in the story.
2. Same session: spend 10 minutes comparing lists across groups. Most will show traders, guides, and the occasional warning.
3. Second session: play When Rivers Were Trails for the same length of time, again in groups, keeping a list of every settler, agent or official they meet and what that person does to the traveller.
4. Same session: put the two sets of lists side by side and ask one question. Whose journey does each game treat as the main story, and how can you tell?
5. Optional follow-up: invite a local tribal education department or Native speaker to talk with the class about travel, land and language in your own region.

The second teacher, who works in a district near Bemidji, told me the most striking moment was a student pointing out that in The Oregon Trail, nobody ever asks who the land belongs to. That observation came from the students, not from a worksheet.

I should add a limit. Neither game is a substitute for learning from the specific nations whose homelands are near your school. The game's writers came from many communities, and their stories are not interchangeable with the history of your local area. Our page on reclaiming Indigenous language is a reasonable place to start thinking about what local learning might look like.

One step for this week

If you teach, homeschool, or have a child who has played The Oregon Trail at school, download When Rivers Were Trails, which the foundation has made freely available, and play the first twenty minutes yourself. Then ask your child, or your students, which Native nations lived where your school now stands. If nobody knows, that is the next lesson to plan. More on games and these histories is collected in our games section.