The Real History of the First Thanksgiving

Them = Europeans

In the spirit of the holiday season, and more importantly, for the sake of history, knowledge, and truth, I present to you the real history of the first Thanksgiving. The story of the first Thanksgiving most of us have heard and studied in history class growing up is merely a myth.

I will first summarize the main points I wish to convey should you not want to read this whole post, but I do recommend that you read it in its entirety.

Summary:
1. The Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to colonize the American landmass.
2. The Native Americans were not the uncivilized ones: they were healthier, cleaner, and had better technology and resources.
3. Some settlers were peaceful, while some were violent (i.e., they enslaved and killed Natives).
4. Ninety to ninety-six percent of Natives in New England were killed due to a pandemic caused by European disease, to which they were not immune.
5. Many Europeans saw this as a gift from God, confirming in their own minds their rightful claim to the land (I'm sure that's just how Jesus would feel after millions of people had just died!).
6. Successful European colonization was largely due to existing Native farming techniques and technology.
7. English "settlers" in Jamestown, Virginia, actually came for treasure, not to establish colonies.
8. There were instances in which the Natives were enslaved, poisoned, killed, and even eaten by Europeans.
9.  Our modern holiday dates back only to 1863 when Thanksgiving was proclaimed a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in an attempt to boost national morale.
10. If there actually was a large feast shared by Pilgrims and Natives, all of the food was likely provided by the Natives.
11. Pilgrims weren't part of the story of Thanksgiving until 1890.


Typical mythic account of the first Thanksgiving from U.S. History textbook The American Tradition:

"After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in December and were not prepared for the New England winter. However, they were aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter. After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated the first Thanksgiving."

We see here a classic tale of the first Thanksgiving. This particular one does in fact portray the Natives as helpful and friendly, which is true of at least one tribe, the Wamponoags. Other descriptions depict the Natives as savages that threatened the way of life of the Pilgrims. Either way, we'll go through known facts and see how it really was.

Before the so-called pilgrims, Spaniards, French explorers, Dutch explorers, and African slaves (brought by the Spanish) all made settlements in the newly discovered land in the 1500s, before the widely believed original settlement date of 1620. The English settlers escaping England to start a new life of religious freedom in the "New World" didn't do it all on their own due to their strong morals and hard work. They would have accomplished very little or possibly nothing without the help of the Native Americans (commonly referred to as "Indians," but Indians are of course from India, not North America).

The Natives were a very healthy people and were never before exposed to European diseases (the majority of which were transmitted from livestock to humans). The Natives even tried to teach the Europeans to bathe. Europeans rarely bathed because they believed it was unhealthy. Also, as a side note, they rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it was immodest. In 1617 (notice this is just before 1620), a pandemic swept across southern New England. The disease, believed by historians to be the bubonic plague, viral hepatitis, smallpox, chicken pox, or influenza, was spread to the Natives by English and French fishermen who fished the Massachusetts coastline. Within three years, 90 to 96 percent of the Natives were wiped out. This is also the primary reason the Spanish and Portuguese were successful in conquering everything from Mexico to the whole of South America. (I highly recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which explores this historical time period as well as how the entire human race developed.)

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which are known to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. While these indeed affected European settlers as well as Natives, Europeans typically recovered. The English Separatists (who escaped England seeking religious freedom), already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired quest of morality, inferred that God was on their side. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." A letter of his to a friend from 1634 survives. He wrote: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared out our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection..."

James Loewen says, "These epidemics probably constituted the most important geopolitical event of the early seventeenth century" (2007, p. 76). Their net result was that the English faced no real Native American resistance. The plague did, however, prompt the "legendarily warm" reception the settlers received from the Wampanoags. They sought to ally with the pilgrims because the plagues had greatly weakened their villages and they feared invasion from rival tribes.

Based on what most of us have learned of early America, European conquest of the Americas seemed inevitable. But at the time this was not the case. Historian Karen Kupperman suggests that the impact of European diseases on the American population is the reason Europeans were able to successfully settle the land of New England. The reason being the farming technology and knowledge of the Natives was much more advanced than that of the Europeans. In other words, had established, functioning farms not been left by the Natives who died due to disease, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly, if at all.

Plymouth is often touted as the birthplace of American culture, but that is only because the real first settlements—Jamestown in Virginia and early Spanish settlements on the east coast—hardly had cheery stories to accompany their births. In the words of the first history of Virginia, written by a Virginian: "... the chief Design of all Parties concern'd was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming more at sudden Gain, than to form any regular Colony." So, the Europeans who came to Virginia just wanted treasure, not necessarily to colonize the "New World." The Virginians' relations with Natives was anything but friendly. Historical accounts reveal that the English in Virginia took Native prisoners and forced them to teach colonists how to farm. In 1623, in an attempt to negotiate a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River, an English officer offered a toast to symbolize 'eternal friendship,' whereupon the Native chief and over 200 followers dropped dead of poison. There are even accounts of cannibalism, which was largely a result of the English digging random holes in search of gold instead of properly learning how to farm, thus creating a desperate need to eat, even if it was human meat. Additionally, some settlers would end up renting themselves out to Native families as servants. So, the nice little story we're all used to hearing about the origins of European settlement in America is one that was chosen because the actual story does not provide the heroic founders a great nation requires.

All of this brings us to discuss Thanksgiving. The archetypes associated with this holiday—God on our side, a civilization triumphantly rising from a wild landscape, order from disorder, hard work, strong Pilgrim morals—are perpetuated from Eurocentric history textbooks and absorbed into the collective psyche of all Americans. As we can see, however, that pleasant little story about America's beginnings isn't so pleasant after all, or completely true. The mild absurdity of the story can be highlighted simply by the widely accepted notion that the Pilgrims shared their feast of turkey, corn, squash, pumpkin, and more with the Natives. In fact, if anything, it was the other way around. All of those foods, and many others that may have been present, are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and, if there actually was a giant feast shared between Pilgrims and Natives, the food would therefore have been provided by the Natives.

Moreover, the celebration of an autumnal harvest is hardly original: such a tradition has been present in India for centuries. Our modern holiday dates back only to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday during the Civil War in an effort to boost patriotism and thus troop morale. It wasn't until the 1890s that the Pilgrims were even included in the story of the tradition.

So, how does knowing this change how we feel about Thanksgiving? Well, my hope is that Americans realize the real truth of how our nation began, and at the very least have some empathy for the Native Americans, whose land was simply taken from them and never given back. We have plenty to be thankful for, and for that we should all feel fortunate.

"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history." - James Loewen

References

Loewen, J. (2007). Lies my teacher told me (2nd ed.) New York, NY: Touchstone.

Kupperman, K. (2007). The jamestown project. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.