The History of The Oregon Trail 58
Rick Zeman writes "Those of us of a certain age recall The Oregon Trail with fondness as the pioneering educational game that had the audacity to make learning fun! This article takes a look at the history behind the game, even going back to its initial text-based offering, showing how some programming magic pulled a generation of kids together. Quoting: '[F]or two weeks, the roommates holed up in a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School, where the school’s teletype was stored, and spent their evenings programming. Using Rawitsch’s historical knowledge, Heinemann and Dillenberger developed a series of algorithms, punching hundreds of lines of code into the teletype. But just because they created the program didn’t mean they could breeze through it. When Heinemann tried The Oregon Trail for the first time, he died of pneumonia midway!'"
Re:Very educational game (Score:5, Informative)
While it is a common to think that the settlers were responsible for hunting buffalo to near extinction, it really was a combination of a deliberate program by the U.S. Army to hunt buffalo (where they wouldn't even take the hide or meat.... leaving the animals to rot on the ground where they were killed) and the fact that much of the range of the buffalo was consumed by cattle... creatures that pretty much fill the same environmental niche.
The deliberate hunting of buffalo was done explicitly to drive the plains Indians into reservations by destroying their food sources. I'm not defending this practice as I consider it to be a war crime and unethical in so many ways, but it was a measured and purposeful act that killed far more buffalo than anything taken by the wagon trains going over the various westward migration trails.
The buffalo herds were so vast and the unoccupied land at the time of the game so large that it would be like somebody with a single fishing rod depleting the fish stock of the south Pacific Ocean. Bullets and weapons also offered protection not just from "Indians", but also a large number of "highwaymen" that hung out on the trails (often dressed up as native tribes to shift blame).
I'll also note that the pioneers also ate berries, nuts, roots, and pretty much anything else that they found along the trail. They even went fishing in many of the streams that they found along the path too. Why do you think all of this kind of food gathering was such a bad thing?