http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013309150027

For students, it's or bust Written by Kylie Pine Willamette Heritage Center Sep. 14 statesmanjournal.com

Are you brave enough?

To those brave enough to stick it out, we invite you to join us Saturday for the second Live.Oregon Trail Live II What: Live re-enactment of “Oregon Trail” video gameWhen: Saturday — noon, teams register; 1 p.m. competition begins Where: Willamette Heritage Center at the Mill, 1313 Mill St. SE Cost: $30 for a team of four; or $50 day-of if spots are available. Admission for spectators is $5, $3 for ages 12 and younger, and free for babies and toddlers.Tickets: brownpapertickets.com/event/437000Ages: AllInformation: A Survey Map of Salem in 1852 shows the reach of the Methodist Missionaries landholdings. David Leslie and oregontraillive.com or (503) 585-7012 Josiah Parrish were both missionaries with , and John B. McClane was missionary Lewis Judson's Learning about the Oregon Trail is a long-standing rite of son-in-law. / Bureau of Land Management passage for Oregonians. Classroom hours spent building paper Conestoga wagons or making pilgrimages to preserved pioneer houses or wagon ruts, leave lasting impressions of romance and adventure. Phrases like “Manifest Destiny” and the pastel murals and majestic sculptures lining the walls of the state Capitol reinforce this mystique.

In the 1970s, educators in Michigan developed a computer game intended to teach students about the rawer realities of life on the Oregon Trail. Players were assigned to a wagon train and put through the paces of getting themselves to Oregon. They had to hunt for food and could die of anything from typhoid to dysentery. Over the years this beloved game, now utilizing platforms such as Facebook and the Wii, has introduced local history to new generations in a fun and interactive format.

This month, you can test your trail smarts at the second annual Oregon Trail Live, a live action version of this classic computer game. As we get ready to “relive” the pioneer experience, we started wondering: Exactly what did those pioneers find when they arrived in Salem?

The start of the Oregon Trail is traditionally celebrated as 1843, although there were wagon trains that arrived before then. Over the next few decades, more than 350,000 individuals crossed the prairie to an Oregon area, which stretched from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean and the California border to 54’40° latitude, covering the modern-day states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of British Columbia.

Here are some things you may not know about the Salem area when Oregon Trail emigrants started arriving:

Oregon Trail emigrants not the first in Salem: Despite the Bierstadt paintings to the contrary, the was not just empty wilderness. The Kalapuya people had been living here for thousands of years, shaping the landscape with fire, creating the oak savannah, which new emigrants encountered upon entering the Willamette Valley.

Page 1 of 1 Sep 15, 2013 01:31:58PM MDT http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013309150027

For students, it's Oregon or bust Written by Kylie Pine Willamette Heritage Center Sep. 14, 2013 10:46 PM | statesmanjournal.com

Additionally, earlier waves of fur trappers and missionaries had step-up homes and farms. The most populous area of the Oregon Country in the early 1840s was the region, north of Salem, where retired trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company settled with their families and established farms. Methodist Missionaries (most arriving by boat, not overland), led by Jason Lee, set up a mission station in 1841, the area that would become Salem.

Much of the land that sits under downtown Salem was claimed by the Methodist Church and passed to individual missionaries who stayed in Oregon after the mission closed in 1844. The Rev. David Leslie owned land from the Willamette River to 12th Street and from McGilchrist to Mission Street. His house, located about where the Bush House stands today, was purchased by Asahel Bush and his wife, Eugenia Zieber. William Willson owned downtown and the land that became the capitol grounds (which now bear his name: Willson Park). Although the missionary land monopoly influenced settlement patterns in and around Salem, the missionaries themselves provided aid to settlers who arrived hungry and with few resources after the long journey.

Views of Salem, 1843: The buildings and industry of the Methodist Mission dominated the landscape in Salem in 1843. A sawmill and grist mill and a three-story house stood on the banks of Mill Creek across from the present day Boon’s Treasury. There is a big wooden sign commemorating them, and you can still see the house, now known as the Lee House, relocated to the Willamette Heritage Center. To the southeast were the three-story mission school building and the duplex that housed the faculty of the school, straddling present day 12th Street on the grounds of and the Willamette Heritage Center. The school burned in the 1870s, but the Parsonage building still stands on the grounds of the Center.

Not yet part of the : Pioneers were called “emigrants” because they were leaving the United States for land that was jointly claimed by Great Britain and the United States. The Oregon Country wouldn’t become a territory of the United States for another five years and statehood was 16 years away.

Not everybody was excited to be here: Lansford Hastings, who wrote a guidebook to Oregon published in 1845, describes at least one disgruntled emigrant, a Mr. Richardson who claimed Oregon was “…not as productive as New England; 15 bushels of wheat to the acre was an extraordinary crop; corn and potatoes did not yield the seed planted; rain fell incessantly five months of the year; the remainder was unblessed even with dew; and the Indians and whites residing there, had the fever and ague, or bilious fever; that what little of human life was left by these causes of destruction, was consumed by (mosquitoes) and fleas.” Apparently, that description was enough to make two of Hasting’s party turn around and head home.

Page 1 of 1 Sep 15, 2013 01:33:21PM MDT