TITLE
Oregon Trail: How three Minnesotans forged its path
AUTHOR
Jessica Lussenhop
PUBLICATION
City Pages
YEAR
2011
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Don Rawitsch rolled out a four-foot-long piece of white butcher paper on the living room floor of his Crystal apartment. He glanced at an open map of the United States frontier from the 1800s. Then he traced a squiggly line from the right side of the paper to the left.By the time his roommates Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger returned home, the line had become a series of squares leading across a map of the western U.S. Rawitsch was scratching out words on a stack of cards. “Broken wagon wheel,” said one. “Snakebite,” said another.
[…]
What he had so far was a board game tracing a path from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The students would pretend to be pioneer families. Each player would start with a certain amount of money and buy oxen, clothes, and food. Students would advance with the roll of a die, along the way encountering various misfortunes: broken limbs, thieves, disease. In roughly 12 turns, the kids would simulate the 2,000-mile journey that thousands of pioneers made to the West Coast in the 19th century.
He called it “Oregon Trail.”
GAMES MENTIONED
The Oregon Trail
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Paul Dillenberger
Bill Heinemann
Don Rawitsch
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January 19, 2011