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The Oregon Trail 5th Edition

2001Windows

The Oregon Trail 5th Edition: Adventures Along the Oregon Trail (2001) builds on Oregon Trail II, with fishing, plant gathering and an animated story.

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The game starts right away and downloads the rest while you play.

What is the 5th Edition?

The Oregon Trail 5th Edition: Adventures Along the Oregon Trail is built on the design of Oregon Trail II, so you can travel in any year from 1840 to 1860. You choose your route at each junction, look around the landmarks and talk with the people you meet.

The Montgomery children

It also tells an animated story. Three children, Parker, Cassie and Jimmy Montgomery, set out from Missouri in 1848 to find their father in Oregon. He has broken his leg and cannot come back for them, so he sends a trail guide, Jed Freedman, whom the game also calls Captain Jed.

An animated newspaper from Independence, April 1848: Montgomery Family Travels West. Jed Freedman guides children to reunion with their Pa in Oregon City. A drawing shows Jed with the three children.
The story of the three Montgomery children plays as you travel.

Parts of their story play now and then as you travel, and at the campfire Captain Jed tells stories about the Donner Party, the California Gold Rush and the Santa Fe Trail.

On the trail

Landmarks appear as photographs, with choices for what to do there: rest, move on, or see who is around. You can trade with the people you meet and haggle over the price, and a guidebook describes each landmark on the way.

South Pass, photographed: a woman cooks over a campfire. Talk to this person, look for someone else, or finish looking around. It is May 29, 1843, and 923 miles are behind you.
At each stop you can look around and talk to people.

Hunting, fishing and gathering

The 5th Edition includes fishing and gathering wild plants, where you have to tell the edible ones from the poisonous ones. The game has a page about each plant to help you decide what to keep.

The gathering result: you picked four pounds of edible sunflower seeds and one pound of edible sow thistle leaves, and threw away poisonous henbane berries and snow-on-the-mountain leaves.
Throwing away the poisonous plants matters as much as finding food.

History

The 5th Edition came out in 2001 for Windows and Macintosh under The Learning Company name. It was made by the company's education division, which the Irish company Riverdeep bought that same year.

When PC Gamer ranked the versions of The Oregon Trail in 2020, the 5th Edition came seventh, and the review called its new animated scenes bad.

The Oregon Trail 5th Edition (2001), a screen from the original release

Playing it here

The version on this site is version 2.10 of the 5th Edition for Windows, installed in Windows 95 and running right in your web browser. It opens straight into the game once Windows has loaded, without the Learning Company menu that came with it. It is free, and you do not need an account to play.

The game came on one CD, and it is already in the player. As a guest, your saved games stay in this web browser. If you are 13 or older, an optional account keeps them for you.

Notable systems

  • Built on the design of Oregon Trail II
  • Fishing and gathering wild plants
  • Any starting year from 1840 to 1860
  • An animated story about the three Montgomery children
  • Campfire stories about the Donner Party, the Gold Rush and the Santa Fe Trail

More from the game

18 frames from The Oregon Trail 5th Edition, at the resolution it originally ran at. Pick one to see it at full size.

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