Kent City — Kelsey Elsner’s journey along the Oregon Trail was not an easy one. One of her children died of pneumonia. Another child suffered a broken leg. And, while fording a river, her wagon washed away and her animals drowned.
Fortunately, Kelsey was traveling in a wagon train with classmate Aryia VanderBent. Although Aryia was suffering with intestinal disease, she made room in her wagon for Kelsey to hop aboard, and they were able to successfully finish their journey to the American West.
“Some people didn’t make it — they just died because, I guess, there were so many diseases out there,” Kelsey said of completing the trail. “I didn’t really think about that before we started. I thought it would be easy and we just needed enough food to get by, or something like that. But there were a lot of diseases you could get.”
Kelsey, Aryia and their classmates recently finished a month-long simulation of traveling the Oregon Trail in their eighth-grade U.S. History class at Kent City Middle School. Playing the roles of 19th-century American settlers, they learned what life was like along the 2,170-mile trail while tackling challenges on their way to Oregon.
“I needed them to understand how hard it was for people that were traveling west on the trail,” said teacher Giselle Tauriainen. “It’s all content that we’re learning anyways, and this just makes it more interactive.”
To complete miles along the trail, students could pick from 43 different interactive assignments, each worth a different point value. They could build a model of a covered wagon, read about the history of the gold rush, cook food based on pioneer recipes, make trading cards featuring famous people of the time, write an essay on the meaning of “manifest destiny” and more.
Many assignments also centered on the Native American populations out west, allowing students to learn about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears.
“Anything that was possibly happening out West in the 1800s, there’s something they could do or make to learn about it,” Tauriainen said.
Facing the Unexpected
But the teacher didn’t make it easy for her young pioneers. Every day, they faced what Tauriainen called “frontier fates.” With a roll of the dice or luck of the draw, students would encounter something unexpected along the trail, like a rattlesnake bite. In that case, they’d have to quickly research home remedies for rattlesnake venom and write a short paper on how to treat the person. If their wagon became stuck in a river, students would have to do a coin toss to see if they could get it unstuck or if the wagon would be lost in the water, like Kelsey’s.
Eighth-grader Isabella Pennock said her favorite chosen assignment was making food for her wagon train group. To earn high points, she made both flapjacks and beef jerky, using only ingredients available on the trail — meaning a high salt content for a makeshift preservative.
“The food was kind of bad, but it was edible,” Isabella said. “I think I was surprised to see how they cooked their food and the ingredients they used. And they had a lot of dried food. Everything was really salty because that’s pretty much all they had, like, salt and some seasonings.”
Added Kelsey: “They had to keep it good for a long time, so they added a lot of salt in the food. It was pretty nasty.”
Then, Isabella was met with a frontier fate: She burned her hands while cooking, meaning she had to research and write a short essay about burns and how to treat them.
Isabella said the simulation made it easier to imagine life as an 1800s pioneer.
“I think I realized, the stuff we had to write and do was only a little of the actual things that the pioneers had to face,” she said. “We only faced so many bad things, when they had to face way more.
“I know we didn’t face them completely, like real life, but we got some type of experience trying to get (to Oregon) and the teamwork that we built to do that. So we were just like, that must have been really hard for them to get there.”
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