OH yeah, Chickens are a much smarter investment for pioneering.
There were a lot of settlers who were ill equipped and lacked skills for either the journey or homesteading. There are old cast iron stoves in museums that were chucked out of a wagon mid journey to Oregon because they were more trouble than their worth. And many people either along the way or after the first winter died.
Hunting for food alone would have been a bad choice because game on the plains is much harder/different than say squirrel hunting in the woods of Ohio. In my defense, I was probably 7 when I first played Oregon Trail and hunting for food was also appealing in the game because of the mini-game involved. Only, IIRC, it wasn’t really because it was hard to hit anything! (Honestly, probably pretty realistic, now that I think about it.)
If I were an insurance company, I’d offer a small bonus to any agents who forward local news videos showing people driving around cars stuck in a hazard, and end up stuck in the hazard themselves. I’m pretty sure most policies exclude coverage for intentionally damaging the vehicle.
Paying a claim to that idiot is like acknowledging that you’re never going to challenge fraud.
I read a book on the Oregon Trail that said that there were merchants in Kansas City and Topeka who made a lot of money following after those who set out on the trail with too much stuff, and collecting the furniture and heavy, bulky items that got chucked out on the side of the trail for resale to the next batch of immigrants headed west.
There is another book that details all of the unmarked graves along the trail, and the later efforts to identify the occupants.
There was some study that found that 80% of men thought they were above average drivers, and 40% felt they were better drivers than anyone they knew. So, not just Californians who think they have skills above and beyond
On the Oregon trail topic, “The Indifferent Stars Above” was an excellent though brutal account of the Donner Party’s misfortunes. Good read if you’re snowed in at a Tahoe ski cabin
There’s a spot at the bottom of our street 1 block down that always floods in hard rain after a couple of hours. You can get around it by driving through our neighborhood up to the highway. Last time we got heavy rain and the water ponded over a foot deep there, DH and I stood at the foot of our street and tried to wave people off the flooded road and up through our subdivision. Maybe 1 in 5 took the detour; the others were either jacked up trucks or people with more guts than sense.
At the last second before leaving the library with my boy, I grabbed Ordeal by Hunger (1936) about the Donner/Reed Party. Finished it just before our snow week last month which just happened to be at a cabin on the shore of Donner Lake, Truckee, Calif. It snowed that week, boy, it was cold. We also visited Donner Memorial State Park, where I learned more about those emigrants’ ordeal and bought and read The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny. All I kept thinking was, I don’t know how they did it (at least the half of them that survived). Brutal.
We also happened to stumble upon the family plot of the Reeds. Here are James and Margaret’s stones.
I’m pretty sure he just got stuck. I honestly felt so bad for this guy.
Why? Why would you feel bad for this fool? Was he deceived somehow by the pool of deep water with other stalled cars and a vehicle already stuck in it ahead of him? Did someone wave him onward with encouragements of “It’s not so bad, you can do it!”
in the SF Bay Area, there’s a section of 880 Southbound about Hayward around Thronton Ave under the railroad tracks that always gets flooded when it rains really hard. Way back in the days I used to commute from SF to Fremont, so 880 was a frequent road, and that week, my boss lent me his Grand Cherokee since my own car was in the shop. Let’s just say I did survive my trip past those waters that evening (and no, it did not flood the car)
