The Oregon Trail, orginally titled Oregon Line, is one of the 26 songs Woody Guthrie wrote for the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941. You can find it in Roll On Columbia: the Coumbia River Collection, a compilation of those songs edited by Bill Murlin and published by Sing Out! in 1991. You can hear Woody sing The Oregon Trail on the CD that Sing Out! released along with the compilation, or on an old Folkways LP.

Several of the songs Woody gave to the Bonneville Power Administration were ones he had recycled. Woody's earlier version is called Dry Spell On the Plains. It has the same tune and nearly the same words as The Oregon Trail, but it does not contain any reference to the Pacific Northwest. You can find Dry Spell On the Plains in The Nearly Complete Collection of Woody Guthrie Folk Songs, published by Ludlow Music in 1963. Lot's of luck trying to locate a copy!

--- Steve