Niagara posted a thread yesterday on the Oregon Trail computer game. Has anyone here visited sites on the Trail?
Niagara's thread is here - https://www.democraticunderground.com/10182302532 - with some cool background on the game, which was originally designed for Minnesota schools in the 1970s. A number of Loungers remembered it. I'd gone to school in St. Paul, but in the 1960s when my dad worked for KSTP, before the game existed, and had never heard of it before Niagara's post, though Wikipedia has a lot on it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(series) - and there are other links in Niagara's thread.
I had heard of the Oregon Trail, of course, though my ancestors who emigrated from Germany came over decades after those wagon trains had made that dangerous trip west. I've mentioned in other posts here that my grandfather's farm was in northeast Kansas, on the northern edge of the Flint Hills. Fairly close to Alcove Spring, which I'd played in when I was a kid.
Wikipedia has an article on Alcove Spring - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcove_Springs - using the alternate spelling of the name.
Across the road from the Alcove Springs park is another park commemorating the Oregon Trail and features history, wagon swales and a D.A.R. marker memorializing Sarah Keyes, a member of the Donner Party who died in 1846. The exact location of her burial is unknown.
Alcove Springs was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.[1][3]
My parents didn't tell us about the Donner Party. Probably thought that tragic story wasn't appropriate for young kids. But we knew wagon trains had stopped there, leaving marks easy to see on the ground, and carvings in the rocks. We played under that waterfall.
My grandfather's farm nearby included two spring-fed streams (their origins, which we never saw, not on the farm), with rocks similar to those you see in the photo of Alcove Spring that Wikipedia used. But the larger stream, which flooded fairly often, had carved into the north side of the wooded limestone hill the farmhouse was built on the south side of, leaving a cliff over a wide bend in the creek, with fallen boulders up to a couple of feet across in shallower water at the edge of the creek below. We oldest grandkids (two of my siblings and I with two of our cousins, whose dad, my mom's brother, had a farm near my grandfather's) used to climb across that cliff, often holding on to tree roots (years later I decided I'd never let children do that), so it never occurred to us not to play in Alcove Spring, and I imagine kids still do.
Some links about Alcove Spring:
From the National Park Sevice, with video and a 19th century painting:
https://www.nps.gov/places/000/alcove-spring.htm
https://www.nps.gov/places/000/alcove-spring-swales.htm
Another link, with photos. including one showing a steep hillside (this part of Kansas is NOT flat) -
https://kansassampler.org/8wondersofkansas-geography/alcove-spring-near-blue-rapids
TripAdvisor page with lots of photos/reviews:
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g38581-d3427840-Reviews-Alcove_Springs-Blue_Rapids_Kansas.html
Video about preserving the park:
Curious about whether other DUers have been to other stops along the Trail.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I lived along the trail, or portions of it, in southern Idaho. I was a few miles from Goodale's cutoff. which traveled through and along the Snake River Plain, across parts of what is now the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. But I have been to the Silent City of Rocks where many remnant signs of the wagon trains exist. There are many spots in SE Idaho around Soda Springs and Lava Hot Springs that were mentioned in some of the travelers' journals, places you can find today.
I've probably seen about three hundred miles of the trail in the western states, many points along the way.
Beautiful country, but it's hard to imagine crossing it in a wagon.
https://visitidaho.org/travel-tips/experience-the-oregon-trail-in-idaho/
https://www.nps.gov/oreg/planyourvisit/idaho.htm
Rocky Ridge was another Oregon Trail landmark. It’s touted as a Mormon Trail landmark these days, but way back when, EVERYBODY had to cross it, at least until the Seminoe cut-off was opened.
The Ridge isn’t much to look at: just rock strata eroded to ground level and tilted to one side, but it must have been one hell of a wheel-buster and had to be crossed very slowly and very carefully. It doesn’t phase anyone with present-day off-road rubber tires, but those didn’t exist in the 1840’s, the 1850’s, and the 1860’s.
I’d wanted to get out and linger a bit but there were one, two, three bus-loads of present-day Mormon pilgrims at the site and there wasn’t anyplace to park.
