The Last Word On Nothing

This post originally appeared March 17, 2016

The first time I played the Oregon Trail computer game – a parody of American westward expansion inflicted on countless school kids – was this winter. I was snug in bed, as befits a prospective pioneer facing one of history’s largest human migrations. Up to 500,000 settlers set out along the Oregon and California Trails in the mid-19^th century. For my own treacherous 2,000-mile trip, I chose to be a banker from Boston, because I had just seen The Big Short and longed to inflict virtual revenge on the financial sector. I named this banker Beverly, since the game gave me no option to be a woman. Beverly’s sundry family members would be Pot Roast, Potato, Death, and – improbably in this bunch at least – Steven.

Predictably, Death was first to die. She drowned along with two oxen not long after we embarked from Missouri, when I tried to ford a river instead of paying the toll for a ferry. Steven, meanwhile, was plagued by misfortunes that will be familiar to all who’ve played this game. First he was exhausted, then broken-armed, then grappling with dysentery, then lost, then down with cholera. I finally ended his misery by crashing the raft bearing our covered wagon into a rock on the Columbia River, drowning us both near the end of the line in Oregon.

The game is a culty 1970s simplification of a complex historical event that contributed to the violent displacement of indigenous people and laid the foundations for today’s urban Northwest. But Americans have been preoccupied with valorizing and simulating the pioneer experience almost since the United States began colonizing the West Coast. More…