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The statement "The first fax was sent while people were still traveling the Oregon Trail" is intriguing but not quite accurate in terms of timing.
The Oregon Trail was most heavily traveled between the 1830s and 1860s, a period when the idea of fax machines was far from conception.
The first successful fax transmission, however, took place much later, in 1865, when Alexander Bain in Scotland sent a facsimile of a handwritten document. By the time the Oregon Trail was in use, telegraphy and other forms of communication were already established.
Fax technology evolved significantly in the late 19th and 20th centuries, with the modern version of the fax machine, based on scanning and transmitting documents via telephone lines, becoming commercially available in the 1960s. So, while fax technology emerged in the 19th century, it was not in use during the height of the Oregon Trail era.