Read The Oregon Trail 1 – The Race to Chimney Rock free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Jesse Wiley's The Race to Chimney Rock is the first Oregon Trail book, a choose-your-path adventure for 8 year olds where your reader is the pioneer.
It's 1850. Your family is in Independence, Missouri, loading a covered wagon for a two-thousand-mile walk to Oregon, where Pa dreams of a farm of his own. Your first target is Chimney Rock. Get there within six weeks and you'll reach the mountains before the winter snow.
Every few pages you make the call. Set off in April to beat the crowds, or wait a month so there's grass for the oxen? Spend the last few dollars on food or spare wagon parts? Hire the Osage guide, or trade with the merchant? Then you turn to the page it tells you and find out what happens.
Because it's all written as "you", your reader is right there on the trail. There are blisters, a dog called Archie, a little brother and sister to look out for, and an awful lot of bacon. It's packed with real details too (dried vegetable cakes, fires made from buffalo chips, fording freezing rivers), and there's a guide to the trail at the back.
What makes it so hard to put down is that the choices are genuinely tricky. Both options usually sound sensible! Kids end up arguing with the book, flipping back to try the other path, and discovering just how many ways the trail could go wrong.
The wrong choice can end your journey on the spot. You might drown crossing a river, die of dysentery after drinking dirty water, or be badly hurt by a bear. They're told simply and quickly, and there's always a page number to go back and try again. But it's you who dies, which can land differently for a sensitive child.
For a reader who likes to be in charge of the story, it's a brilliant adventure with real history underneath. It's also perfect for sharing, with a grown-up and a child arguing over which way to go.
If they make it through, Danger at the Haunted Gate is the next leg of the trek, with quicksand, a tornado and a buffalo stampede between the family and Devil's Gate.
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