Oregon Trail Q & A

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	This Is Not A FAQ In fact, it's kind of the opposite of a FAQ -- this is a place where you can go with rarely asked questions about the Oregon Trail. When your local librarian gives up and the world's search engines just aren't finding what you need, ask us. We don't guarantee that we'll come up with an answer, but seeing as we're in the history biz, as it were, we usually find a good question worth investigating for its own sake. By the way, this is also not an effort to collect e-mail addresses for fundraising or marketing purposes. If you submit a question, we'll need your e-mail address to get back to you, but we promise not to spam you or sell your address. The optional state and ZIP code information is just to give us a general idea of where you're from. What We'll Try To Answer We hope to assist students, teachers, and homeschoolers who have been stumped by questions about the Oregon Trail and the early period of settlement in the Pacific Northwest. Teachers looking for lesson plans should try looking through the links available at [www.over-land.com]. What We Won't Answer It is not our intent to provide a resource for scholars in search of primary source material or historiographic talking points, and there are areas of inquiry which are beyond the scope of this service. Genealogical inquiries are simply too numerous and labor-intensive for us to attempt to answer... Requests for comprehensive histories of people, places, or events (which is to say, we won't do your research for you) Questions about other overland trails, though we'll try to answer general questions about emigrant wagon trains Questions about the history of the Pacific Northwest after Oregon achieved statehood in 1859 Questions relating to the location of or rights to documents and photographs from the 1800s Questions relating to the potential value of artifacts or documents from the 1800s Questions from desperate students who put off doing their homework until the last minute What We Already Know We Can't Answer To the best of our knowledge, there are no surviving diaries written by African-Americans on the Oregon Trail. We don't have plans for covered wagons, but there are several small businesses in the U.S. which make replica horsedrawn vehicles. Some sell plans through their Web sites. There are no known emigration songs from the Oregon Trail, but you might take a look at www.trailband.com For the most part, it is unclear what varieties of many staple crops were raised in Oregon during the period of settlement Ask Away! Your e-mail address: State/Province/Country: ZIP or postal code: