"Seven Alone", 1974s Oregon Trail-Like Live-Action Movie

By | March 15, 2022

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"Seven Alone" was released in 1974. (amazon)

In 1974, the same year that the Oregon Trail computer game debuted, a film production company called Audio Service released a live-action family movie called Seven Alone. The film was the fictionalized version of a true story of a thirteen-year-old boy, John Sager, who, in 1843, led his six younger siblings some 2,000 miles along the famous Oregon Trail in search of a better life. Seven Alone was definitely a tragic story, but it gave its audience a good idea of the hardship of the Oregon Trail and ended at a happy moment rather than continuing the story to its even more tragic end. Let’s look at the seventies movie, Seven Alone, and the true story on which it was based. 

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The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium put Oregon Trail on school computers starting in 1974. (kroc.com)

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In the early 1970s, when Seven Alone and the computer game, Oregon Trail, came out, the current trend in America was one of nostalgia for the pioneer era. Books, television shows, and movies about westward settlers and the Old West were quite popular. Even peasant tops and prairie dresses were in style. It was in this atmosphere that Audio Services Company decided to produce a movie based on the 1844 written memoir of Catherine Sager Pringle, Across the Plains