Every Wednesday in Mrs. Keller鈥檚 fifth-grade classroom at Dunsmuir Elementary in Northern California, my friends and I clamored for a spot at the computer to play The Oregon Trail, a historical game set in the year 1848 that follows the journey of pioneers traveling via wagon train from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon鈥檚 Willamette Valley. In real life, the 2,170-mile trip took six months. Many of the 400,000 settlers who attempted the trek to the Oregon Territory didn鈥檛 make it. Scholars estimate that there were ten graves for every mile of the trail.

Originally called Oregon, the game was first released 50 years ago, in 1971,听as an educational text-only game for schoolchildren in Minnesota. In 1985, a group of engineers and designers led by Phillip Bouchard completely reconceived the game and released the version that is widely recognized today. Over the next few decades, that version spawned dozens of iterations and updates, spin-off theater productions, card games, WWE references, and even a parody game called Organ Trail. What began as an interactive history lesson became the one of the most widely distributed educational听games of all time.

By the time I moved to far Northern California in 1987 as a kid, the history of the Oregon Trail and its implications were cloaked by an updated image of the West. Not as the site of a land grab, but as a destination to discover yourself. My mother was part of a new generation of seekers who, like the original settlers, left the Midwest to pursue a western utopia.

We landed in Mount Shasta City, a town at the base of Mount Shasta, a dormant volcano considered 鈥渃osmic鈥� by my mother and her ilk and sacred by the Wintu, Karuk, Achomawi, Atsugewi, Modoc, and Shasta tribes, as well as other Indigenous groups with ties to the region. Located just south of the Oregon border, the region was an odd mix of don鈥檛-tread-on-me libertarians and 1970s New Age holdovers, some of them even descendants of the white pioneers who鈥檇 come west on the Oregon Trail and branched off at Fort Hall for the California Trail. It was a place where gun rights got more airtime than equality but crystal shops outnumbered dry cleaners, where respecting the land meant both maiming and preserving it. The one thing they all had in common was a desire for autonomy. Some from the government,听others from the bounds of the material world.

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote 鈥淭he Significance of the Frontier in听American History,鈥� an essay that articulated a national fetishization of the frontier. He argued that westward migration was foundational to American identity and laid the framework for the evolution of its society. 鈥淎merican social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淭his perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.鈥� After Mexico ceded California to the U.S. in 1848, Turner declared the frontier to be gone鈥攂oth literally and conceptually.

Frontierism is about space. Not only physical land and the promise of power via its occupation, but psychic space. A frontier supposes that it is possible to become new, somewhere else. That somewhere out there is a place where an individual, a people, even an entire nation might assuage its spiritual gnawing,听its hunger for more. The most insidious notion, one that has sustained itself from Manifest Destiny to today, is that if somewhere along the way you鈥檝e lost who you are, it is not only your right but your imperative听to go out and find it. Even if that means taking it from someone else.

In fact, there is nothing more American.

In The Oregon Trail, each wagon train was allowed five members. We typed their names onto the screen in arcade classic font, maybe throwing in a family cat or secret crush written in a code decipherable only by friends. We stocked up on supplies at the general store: ammunition for hunting, extra clothes for cold mountain nights, wagon wheels, axles, and tongues in case of an accident. And food. We had $800 to buy everything we might need. It was a gamble. Stockpile too many bullets and you鈥檇 be out a spare axle. Spend more on food than clothes and you might freeze to death in a flash blizzard. We also had to choose professions听for our new lives in Oregon, assuming we鈥檇 make it that far. Carpenter, farmer, or banker. It was hard to imagine what roles would be most valuable in the new world.

Every day on the trail, we made choices. What portions to ration out: Filling, meager, or bare-bones? What pace to keep: Slow, moderate, or grueling? I often chose grueling because I liked the way it sounded. Grueling鈥攍ike a hot breakfast cereal my wagon-train family might scarf down along a barren rocky hillside. It was fun to push our avatars to the brink.听Between Missouri and Oregon City, there were 12 stops, some natural landmarks, others military forts. At each, we could purchase supplies or 鈥渢alk鈥� to characters. I talked to everyone I could. Some shared practical info (make sure your oxen are in good shape for the mountain pass), some made inane chitchat鈥攖he plains are beautiful but so boring. Between landmarks, our digital wagons rolled on unless we entered [8] to stop and hunt, [7] to try and trade, or [2] to rest, which was always a good idea after the text box at the bottom of the screen announced that Secret Crush had cholera or there had been a fire in the wagon, destroying half the ammo and killing Cat.

We rolled through what are now the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho, land that, at the time of the game, was divided into unorganized territory, Oregon Country, and Mexican Territory. When food was running low, we stopped to hunt, always killing more than the 100 pounds we were allowed to carry back to the wagon. Hunting became sport atop sustenance. Bears. Deer. Rabbits. On the plains, bison.听It was the only real interactive component after choosing our supplies鈥攖he only random moment that we felt we had control over.

In the game, as in life, making it to the West was the baseline. To earn a spot on the leaderboard, you had to score higher than the travelers before you. To win, you had to beat out explorer Stephen Meek, a fur trapper and guide who pioneered an alternative route into Oregon called the Meek Cutoff. Bouchard鈥檚 logic for expanding the game鈥檚 definition of success was, of course, to keep players playing even after they鈥檇 beaten it. But this also, perhaps even unintentionally, acted as a built-in metaphor for the frontier itself. It wasn鈥檛 enough to arrive. The real goal was to obtain land, to spread. Even after we鈥檇 reached the frontier鈥攁s individuals, communities, a nation鈥攖here is always more to see or gain.

After the war of 1812, a sense of unification鈥攆rom sea to shining sea鈥攂ecame imperative in selling the growing American colonial project to the citizens of a newly minted U.S. Now fully emancipated from Britain, East Coast intellectuals strove to cultivate a national cultural identity in a place that was anything but unified. Native American life, particularly its relationship to the land, was听 as part of a true and pure American identity. Meanwhile, state-sanctioned genocide and violent policies like the 1830 Indian Removal Act ravaged听the Indigenous听population and forced the survivors off of ancestral lands and onto reservations. Historian explains听that by 鈥渃arving a nation out of the wilderness,鈥� colonists and settlers were demonstrating 鈥渢he ardent nationalism common to empire builders.鈥�

Between 1830 and 1840, the U.S. government relocated more than 70,000 Native people from the Southeast to the West to create more land for white settlers. Eventually, those settlers moved west too; the , which led to an economic depression, combined with flood and disease in the Midwest, gave way to Oregon Fever, a mass migration spurred by a utopian vision of farmland in the West. It was touted as a place ripe for cultivation with few of the problems of the East. By going, they were doing their duty as Americans to expand the frontier鈥攁 jingoistic rhetoric with godly Manifest Destiny overtones. As Charles Wilkinson writes in The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe in Western Oregon,听鈥淐onsciously or unconsciously, the settlers operated on what was for them a 鈥榟igher law,鈥� that unsettled, untilled land was God-given for those who would work it.鈥�

After 1841, settlers flooded in by the thousands, some breaking away at Fort Hall to head south to California, which was still a part of Mexico. Oregon became an official U.S. territory in 1848. Two years later, Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act. A precursor to the Homestead Act, it stated that any white man or mixed-race half-white Indigenous man, 18 or over, who鈥檇 arrived in Oregon听before 1850 and was a citizen (or declared his intention to become one within a year) could claim up to 320 acres of land if he lived and worked on it for four years. His wife could claim another 320 acres. Native Americans weren鈥檛 granted U.S. citizenship until 1924.

The Act was the primary vehicle for disposal鈥攖ransfer to state or private ownership鈥攐f what was considered the region鈥檚 public lands. It also explicitly barred Native, Black, Hawaiian, or Asian people from becoming landowners in the territory. Native communities, many established听there for thousands of years, were pressured to cede the land they inhabited and resettle elsewhere or sign treaties, many of which would eventually be broken. Between 1850 and 1855, more than 7,000 claims were made by settlers on close to three million acres in Oregon.

In of Oregon鈥檚 General Land Office, Champ Clark Vaughan, a former program manager with the Bureau of Land Management, writes, 鈥淭he Land Donation Act was a teleological means to eradicate Native Americans from Oregon soil, either by relocation or elimination.鈥�

To Turner, the Western frontier was a solid thing鈥攁 line to push forward, an edge. All had been conquered. But those who migrated west later鈥攕ome of them, like my mother, hippies and freethinkers, meditators and back-to-the-landers鈥攚ere still seeking a frontier. When they ran out of land, they simply turned to the sky.

Bowling Green State University sociology professor Madeline Duntley studies what she calls frontier esotericism, a theory that links colonizer ideals like the frontier and conquering wilderness to the obscure practice of seeking enlightenment via western geographies, where land becomes a portal for spiritual ascension.听In her at Mount Shasta, she recounts the story of a man named Guy Ballard who traveled west from Chicago in the 1930s and started the global religious 听after purportedly encountering a divine being on Mount Shasta 鈥渃hanneling鈥� its messages to willing believers. Over the next several decades, other spiritual movements sprang up in the area, all centered on the land as a portal to divine knowledge, often accessible through human 鈥渃hannels鈥� who encountered some divine entity or message. By deeming themselves channels, these men,听always white, became self-appointed conduits for enlightenment.

Ballard and his kind created an entire culture and economy around rendering Mount Shasta a spiritual and religious wellspring. They were, as Duntley puts it, spiritual prospectors who occupied psychic space already home to Native mythologies, such as the Pit River Tribe story of Mis Misa, a spirit that lives within the mountain (which they call Akoo-Yet) and keeps the earth at a proper distance from the sun. Or the Wintu genesis story of emerging from the sacred spring on Mount Shasta鈥檚 Panther Meadows, a steep meadow running from 7,500 feet up to timberline. When the Wintu people emerged from the spring, they couldn鈥檛 speak or move. The salmon gave them their voices.

In 2019, over 30 Native artists, writers, and designers created a Native-centered version of the game. In , Native travelers set out for California, but unlike white settlers for whom land was a guaranteed carrot at the end of the trip, their chances to maintain land diminish the farther west they go.

Growing up in Mount Shasta, surrounded by proto-QAnon conspiritualists听and constant talk of ascended masters, life often seemed like a game.听Playing The Oregon Trail was soothing. It both confirmed that reality was indeed a concrete thing with consequences and laid bare just how absurd and tenuous it all was. I could do everything right鈥攂ecome a banker, shoot all my food, keep my family warm鈥攁nd still, LucyKat932 would die from dysentery. Whether the destination was Oregon or enlightenment, it remained always out of reach.

Like the original settlers, my mother and her peers journeyed west expecting to find themselves鈥攐r at the very least, freedom from the suburban ennui of middle-class Midwestern life. They may seem worlds apart, those toiling through the grit and exhaustion of the Oregon Trail and those who concerned themselves with ethereal endeavors. But they were looking for the same thing. More. As I got older, I harbored a certain cynicism about this鈥攈olding their generation uniquely responsible for murky spiritual wrongs that I felt viscerally, long before I had the precise language of appropriation or colonialism or capitalism.

Earlier this year, I tracked down and played through the original version of The Oregon Trail, available through .听I still died from dysentery just outside Fort Hall, but I noticed things I hadn鈥檛 seen back in Mrs. Keller鈥檚 classroom,听things we didn鈥檛 understand as we hunted for more deer than we could carry or hired a Shoshone guide to help us cross the Snake River: the human cost of romanticizing pioneerism. The fallacy of being 鈥渢he first.鈥� In the West, violence and spirituality鈥攆rontierism and godliness鈥攈ave been inextricable.

In a , three Indigenous historians were hired to make the game more historically accurate. In the intro, they wrote, 鈥淔or Indigenous Peoples, westward expansion was not an adventure but an invasion.鈥�

Now the game is more honest. But the original version of The Oregon Trail, imperfect as it is, is important to revisit. The pixelated avatars we assumed every Wednesday remind us that ideas can be just as ambitious and murderous as individuals. That colonization isn鈥檛 a destination, but an appetite. One that, contrary to Turner鈥檚 thinking, marches steadily on.

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