The Oregon Trail 3 – The Search for Snake River

Jesse Wiley's The Oregon Trail 3 - The Search for Snake River is a pick-your-own-path adventure for 8 year olds where nearly every choice can end the journey.

This one puts your reader inside the story. You are the young pioneer. It's 1850, your family's wagon is somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, and you've already walked fifteen miles a day for over two months.

It's the third of four books, so the family arrives with a history. Ma, Pa, little Samuel, Hannah and Archie the dog have all come this far together, and you've picked up a best friend in the wagon captain's daughter.

The first big decision comes within pages. Two sets of wagon ruts, one wooden post with names nailed to it, and a choice between a week-saving shortcut across fifty miles of desert or the longer road with a river to ford.

Pa turns and asks you what you think. Then the page tells you which page to turn to.

After that it's oxen with broken legs, a forest fire coming up the mountain, a rattlesnake, a flash flood that empties half the camp, and hot springs that turn out to be hot enough to cook a steak.

Here's the thing to know before you hand it over. You die in this book. Not always, but often, and it's said plainly. You die of dysentery. You die of scurvy, with your gums bleeding and your grown-up teeth coming loose. A forest fire takes the rest of your wagon train while you shelter in a cave.

Each of those endings stops, tells you to go back to a particular page, and starts again. That framing does soften it, because a dead end really is just a dead end.

Still, some children find "THE END" in those circumstances genuinely upsetting, and there's no warning before any of them arrive. Worth reading a couple of the bad endings yourself first.

For a child who likes being in charge, though, this is brilliant. They'll go back. They'll try the other road. They'll work out that the boring cautious choice is often the one that keeps everybody alive, which is a rather good thing to learn from a book.

It's decent history too, without ever sounding like a lesson. Buffalo dung for campfires. Shoes wearing through. Traders at the fort charging four times what Pa paid in Missouri.

Your reader doesn't have to start here, but it reads better in order. The first Oregon Trail book sets off from Independence with the same family and aims for a landmark called Chimney Rock.