Players starting their journey in The Oregon Trail know how important it is to purchase multiple yokes of oxen.

Pioneers who attempted to cross rivers on their own spent a great deal of time planning and preparing. They faced the same challenge: pay the toll for a ferry or find another way across-and maybe lose your life, your livelihood, or your family in the process.

While fording rivers in The Oregon Trail game is a quick decision, that wasn’t the case for the pioneers. Still, most players agonized over the choice for less than a minute. Paying for the ferry was expensive-but trying to ford it yourself could result in the loss of valuable supplies or party members. Players of The Oregon Trail will remember that encountering a river was risky. Fording Rivers Was Tricky on the Oregon Trail Travelers leaving from Independence, Missouri, on the actual Oregon Trail were typically organized into caravans called “companies” or “wagon trains.” These groups could be over a hundred wagons long, although most of the time they consisted of 20 to 40 wagons, a number that was far more manageable. Realizing the many dangers of crossing the plains, most pioneers elected to travel together.

This situation of a single pioneer family would have been rare, with the exception of eventual homesteaders, who still lived in a relative proximity of growing number of neighboring homesteaders. The Oregon Trail puts you in charge of a family of five and then sends you off to survive the frontier alone.

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