Pilgrims, Squanto and Thanksgiving: Separating Myth and Reality

Whenever Thanksgiving approaches, our thoughts inevitably turn to the Pilgrims and the happy feast they shared with their native American friends when they brought in their first harvest in the Fall of 1621.  After all, we learned in school about the Puritans and Squanto, pumpkins and turkeys.  It must be true.

In fact, what you learned in school may be just the myths that surround Thanksgiving, rather than the reality.  The best way to get facts instead of stories is to go back to the sources, the journals written by the Pilgrims themselves, or their contemporaries.  They may be a bit long-winded and repetitive in places, but they are far more reliable than third-hand accounts cobbled together to fit a pre-conceived legend.

These two journals are recommended reading:

Mourt’s Relation.  A Relation or Journal of the Proceedings of the  Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England (attributed to Pilgrims William Bradford and Edward Winslow)

Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford

Cover of Of Plymouth Plantation

Here is a selection of the truths you will find, and the myths that will be busted.

Puritans and Pilgrims.  Aren’t they the same thing?

Puritans and Pilgrims are definitely not the same people.  The Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 and settled in the Cape Cod area.  The Puritans arrived between about 1629 and 1640, in a large number of vessels, and settled in the Massachusetts Bay area. 

Puritans were dissenting English Protestants who believed they could reform the English church from within.  The Pilgrims had diverged from their Puritan brethren and formed their own church.  They broke away completely, started again, because they had given up hope of reforming the church.  They were known as Separatists (although they referred to themselves as ‘saints’), and large numbers of them tried to find religious freedom by fleeing to Holland before eventually coming to America.

Not all of the settlers on the Mayflower were Separatists.  Some were non-religious adventurers just looking for a new life.  Nevertheless, we call them all Pilgrims.

Squanto was the Pilgrims’ best friend, wasn’t he?

Yes, Squanto did show the settlers the best ways of tending their crops and catching fish under local conditions.  But his motives may not have been totally altruistic.  He was sent to the Pilgrims by the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit at a time when the settlers were weakened by death, disease and malnutrition towards the end of their first difficult winter.  So the native Americans felt they had little to fear and much to gain by a treaty with the newcomers.  Squanto did help to negotiate the treaty, but later he endangered it by apparently fostering deliberate misunderstandings between the two sides. 

In November 1622 he died of a fever, so his influence extended over a period of less than two years.

The first Thanksgiving was in November 1621.  They ate turkey and pumpkin.

Well, was it the first?  The Smithsonian reminds us that the native Americans held harvest celebrations long before the arrival of Europeans, and that Europeans held thanksgiving services in Newfoundland in 1578 , in Maine in 1607 and in Jamestown in 1610.

As for what was on the menu in Plymouth in the Fall of 1621, Edward Winslow’s letter in Mourt’s Relation tells us that they ate fowl, but he does not specify turkey.  Massasoit and his men brought deer.  That’s the entire menu, as far as historical facts are concerned, and anything else is just speculation.

To explode even more myths about Thanksgiving, visit the Oyate web page.

No matter what did or didn’t happen in 1621, it does not change the genuine values and traditions that lie behind the loving celebrations of this very special day.