The Oregon Trail 2 – Danger at the Haunted Gate

Jesse Wiley's Danger at the Haunted Gate is a pick-your-own-path pioneer adventure for 8 year olds, and YOU are the one walking beside the wagon.

What happens

It's 1850. You and your family have already walked almost six hundred miles along the Oregon Trail. You've got blisters, you're sick to death of bacon, and Chimney Rock is shrinking behind you. Next stop is Devil's Gate.

Every so often you get a choice. Take the risky shortcut through the bluffs or the long way round? Swap the family cow for a pair of pack mules? Follow the hunters or head back to camp? Then you jump to wherever your answer sends you.

Only one route gets you all the way there. The rest end somewhere else entirely, and that's where the fun (and the danger) is. You might lose your oxen, get tricked by a trader, or settle down happily near a fort and never see Oregon at all.

A heads-up for parents. Plenty of those endings are deaths, and because it's told as "you", it's YOU who dies. Dysentery. A lightning strike. A buffalo stampede. In one, your hurt dog dies in your arms as wolves come closer. None of it is gory, but it's very matter-of-fact.

For a child who gets upset by that sort of thing, this might be one to read together. If your reader is the sort who laughs at dying of dysentery and flips straight back to try again, they'll love it (and they'll think very hard about which water to drink).

It's really good at making the Trail feel real. Pa trades his carpentry for a cow. Ma turns milk into butter just by hanging it off the jolting wagon. Everyone's rushing to reach Independence Rock in time for a big Fourth of July party. And your friend Joseph has a grim story about how Scotts Bluff got its name.

What to read next

It's the second of the Oregon Trail books. It works on its own, because the opening fills you in on everything so far. But if your reader wants the whole journey from the beginning, The Race to Chimney Rock is where the wagons first roll out of Independence, Missouri.