November 25, 2009 • 11 mins
Nowadays, Thanksgiving has become an official holiday, complete with its own trappings of tradition and mythology. But how much of the conventional Thanksgiving story is true? Join Sarah and Katie as they take a closer look at the first Thanksgiving.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And if you're
in the United States, you're getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving.
(00:20):
I'm really excited about all the eating, I'm not going
to lie and the two days off work. Right. Um,
But when you were in elementary school, you probably learned
a pretty picturesque story about the first Thanksgiving. You might
have even dressed up as a pilgrim or a Native American,
put some buckles on your shoes or a feather in
your cap, and celebrated a big feast with your class. Actually,
(00:44):
I've got to go off on a brief family tangent there.
My eight year old brother Stephen, learned about Thanksgiving last year,
you know, in his class, and he came home with
a very graphic place match that he made for my mother.
Lucky Mom. That's these Pilgram's violently, you know, shooting all
these turkeys and there's a lot of blood. Stephen, you
(01:07):
know how you feel about Thanksgiving, And he gave us
the whole story, and after that day he's never eaten turkeys.
So when we give him his dinner at Thanksgiving, we
just tell him it's chicken, and so far he hasn't
caught onto the fact that it comes from the same
plate as the turkey. So, Stephen, if you hear this
podcast in a few years, I'm really start Well. One
thing Stephen can be happy about is that the turkey,
(01:32):
which was the focal point of his drawing, apparently is
a vital part of this myth. It's not something that's
made up, so at least that much of this idealized
Thanksgiving story is true, even though plenty of it is not.
So let's start with some of the real stories. Background.
In sixteen o seven, British Protestants break from the Church
(01:55):
of England and they sail to Holland, where they're a
little more religiously tall aren't because Spain and the Spanish
Catholics have been harassing them for so long. And they
stay there for twelve years until they run out of money,
and then they get a nice offer from English merchants
who will give them money to sail to the New
World and uh settled down start a little town, which
(02:20):
they do. Of course. They sail on the Mayflower, a
cargo ship used in the wine trade, and they were
either a hundred and one or a hundred and two
of them. We keep finding different numbers. We thought there
was a baby born. Yeah, we're wondering if Mayflower history.
But they're aiming for near Virginia, but they end up
in Cape Cod because of winds. And we were saying,
(02:43):
what a sad, sad course change that would be if
you were arriving the winter in New England and half
of them die in this New England winters. So again
not a fortuitous change, of course, but the settlers who
make it through the winter set up a pretty comfortable
place in the Plymouth Colony, which is in Massachusetts. And
(03:06):
they're actually not Pilgrims. That's our first point of deep. Yeah,
I'm going to debunk that they're not Pilgrims because the
term pilgrim lumps together separatists and non separatists. Um, so
we're just going to call them settlers if that's okay
with everybody, and um we can even go further. And
they call themselves first comers, which is a little misleading
(03:29):
to that kind of makes it sound like they're the
first people, uh, first European people settling in what will
be the United States, and of course they're not. First
we had the Rowanote colony, and then second we had
the Jamestown Colony, which Sarah and I discussed in our
Pocahontat podcast. Yeah, so the first Comers is really just
(03:52):
marking the beginning of a wave of subsequent settlers arriving
through the sixteen twenties, and Pleteth is in Okay place
to live if you're one of the people who makes
it through the winter, better than very early Jamestown's a
lot better than Jamestown. They have seven houses, there's a meetinghouse,
and there are some structures for food and storage, but
(04:12):
there's still kind of desperate for supplies and they pilfer
from uh the nearby Native Americans, the Wampanoags, who have
been in the region for twelve thousand years. So the
Wampanoags are not particularly impressed with the settlers initially at least,
but a Wampanoagg named Squanto, who you've probably heard of,
(04:33):
and an Abenaki named Samoset are very friendly and they
show the settlers had a harvest corn and fertilized crops
with fish, which are valuable skills to have in the
new world, and this starts the beginning of pretty friendly
relation between the Wampanoag and the settlers. They make an
alliance by March of sixty one UM, offering each other
(04:55):
protection from other tribes in the area. The Wampanoagg's teaching
the settlers fishing, hunting, and farming um tailored to the seasons.
That was an important thing for them to learn to
roll with how the the year progressed. And this is
a nice thing that's in line with the myth, the
idea that the settlers and the Native Americans could be friends. Yeah,
(05:18):
it's it's in line with the elementary school story. And
then it's weirdly out of line with what you're more
likely to learn in high school or something where the
you sort of imagine the settlers and the Native Americans
clashing right from the start until until the end. Basically,
but for this first generation at least, and we should
(05:41):
say this just this piece between them does not last long,
but for a generation it's there. So after a successful
spring and summer of trying out these new farming techniques
that they've learned, the settlers decide to have a harvest
celebration in the fall of sixty one and they're going
to go out and hunt wild game and make a
(06:03):
big feast for everyone. But the Wampanoag leader, Massive Slot,
thinks that the gunfire means war and takes ninety men
to the settlers to get an explanation. What were you
doing shooting in the woods the other day? And when
you have ninety people behind you, there had better be
a good explanation. And so they say, you know, we're
(06:24):
hunting for a feast. And then once once they get
that explanation, the uh Native Americans are like, okay, well
we'll hunt for a feast two and we'll all have
one together. So this Thanksgiving meal is a bit different
from what you and I would have. For one thing,
it started, it went from about what three days to
(06:44):
a week? Yeah, different accounts put it between a week
and three days. And there were ninety Wampanoags and fifty
three settlers, which even with my huge Catholic family, we
don't quite measure up. And the food they have is
also a little different. They had turkey, Indian worn pumpkin,
which makes sense, does sound pretty standard, chestnuts, eels feels.
(07:07):
My family does not have eel for Thanksgiving. Most years.
Mine also doesn't have swans, seals, cranes, eagles, or corn, porridge,
goose duck. Those those sound okay. Venison, onions, radishes, plums, parsnips, leaks,
dried currants. It kind of gets good again towards the
(07:27):
end of that list. There's just an odd interli maybe
between eel and eagle. But the settlers would have seasoned
their meat with cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg, sauces and
pepper and dried fruit, so it sounds kind of tasty.
It sounds for the most part. And they didn't have forks,
so this is not quite medieval times because they did
(07:50):
have spoons and knives and big napkins that they used
to grab the hot food and they ate whatever was
in front of them, which there was no passing. Mother
wouldn't be proud of that. And the highest people, and
people were highest in the hierarchy, got the best food.
So maybe if you really liked somebody and you were
kind of high up, you could send a dish down
to them, maybe some eel past the eel, please. And
(08:13):
there was entertainment as well. It wasn't all just gluttony.
They played blind Man's Bluff and a pin game for
the kids. There was target shooting for the adults, dancing
and singing, so altogether it really sounds like a lovely time.
And the Native Americans probably would have had to establish
their own lodging too, because they lived a ways outside
(08:34):
of the settlement. So everyone's just hanging out for days,
eating and having fun. And some of the illustrious people
who would have been there were Massa Squat Squanto, Governor
William Bradford, Captain Miles Standish, and William Brewster, who was
the religious leader. So there there'd be the guys who
would get the really good dishes set in front of them.
(08:55):
And Sarah said this to me earlier, and she's like, oh,
you know, it's like having a celebrity at dinner, like
school into and she points and I didn't even think
about it and just turned around into the other department.
I was pointing it, and I have to live with that.
Most of our information about this feast in sixteen twenty
one comes from Edward Winslow's A Journal of the Pilgrims
at Plymouth, And again we're not using the term pilgrim,
(09:17):
but he can if he wants to. But well, this
was certainly a monumental feast, and this is what we're
essentially celebrating when we celebrate Thanksgiving. Wasn't really the first
religious Thanksgiving? That happened in Plymouth two years later in
sixteen twenty three, following a two month drought. And where
(09:39):
this all got kind of mixed up was with the
writer editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the Goadies Ladies
book and also authored Mary had a Little Lamb. Interestingly
a woman of many literary talents, but she thought that
the sixty one feast was Thanksgiving. But it's understandable why
(10:00):
she mixed things up a little bit, because what we
celebrate today is a combination of two distinct celebrations, this
religious Thanksgiving and also a harvest ritual where you you know,
celebrate abundance. Yeah, and we also have another Thanksgiving um,
the religious Thanksgiving on record that's earlier than both of these,
(10:22):
and that's sixteen nineteen when the British settlers under Captain
John Woodley celebrated their Safe Passing Um in the Berkeley
Plantation in Virginia near the Charles River. So that's to
further muddy what the water is a little we just
have a lot of early celebrations to go along and
balance the starving time and all those other wonderful religio settlement. Settlement,
(10:47):
it was Abraham Lincoln who gave us, and by us,
I mean the United States our national holiday for the
last Thursday of every November. So happy Thanksgiving gob will
go will y'all. And if you'd like to learn more
about this first Thanksgiving and all sorts of interesting facts
about turkeys, you can go and search for everything you
(11:08):
wanted to know about the First Thanksgiving on our home
page at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think,
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com homepage
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And if you're
in the United States, you're getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving.
(00:20):
I'm really excited about all the eating, I'm not going
to lie and the two days off work. Right. Um,
But when you were in elementary school, you probably learned
a pretty picturesque story about the first Thanksgiving. You might
have even dressed up as a pilgrim or a Native American,
put some buckles on your shoes or a feather in
your cap, and celebrated a big feast with your class. Actually,
(00:44):
I've got to go off on a brief family tangent there.
My eight year old brother Stephen, learned about Thanksgiving last year,
you know, in his class, and he came home with
a very graphic place match that he made for my mother.
Lucky Mom. That's these Pilgram's violently, you know, shooting all
these turkeys and there's a lot of blood. Stephen, you
(01:07):
know how you feel about Thanksgiving, And he gave us
the whole story, and after that day he's never eaten turkeys.
So when we give him his dinner at Thanksgiving, we
just tell him it's chicken, and so far he hasn't
caught onto the fact that it comes from the same
plate as the turkey. So, Stephen, if you hear this
podcast in a few years, I'm really start Well. One
thing Stephen can be happy about is that the turkey,
(01:32):
which was the focal point of his drawing, apparently is
a vital part of this myth. It's not something that's
made up, so at least that much of this idealized
Thanksgiving story is true, even though plenty of it is not.
So let's start with some of the real stories. Background.
In sixteen o seven, British Protestants break from the Church
(01:55):
of England and they sail to Holland, where they're a
little more religiously tall aren't because Spain and the Spanish
Catholics have been harassing them for so long. And they
stay there for twelve years until they run out of money,
and then they get a nice offer from English merchants
who will give them money to sail to the New
World and uh settled down start a little town, which
(02:20):
they do. Of course. They sail on the Mayflower, a
cargo ship used in the wine trade, and they were
either a hundred and one or a hundred and two
of them. We keep finding different numbers. We thought there
was a baby born. Yeah, we're wondering if Mayflower history.
But they're aiming for near Virginia, but they end up
in Cape Cod because of winds. And we were saying,
(02:43):
what a sad, sad course change that would be if
you were arriving the winter in New England and half
of them die in this New England winters. So again
not a fortuitous change, of course, but the settlers who
make it through the winter set up a pretty comfortable
place in the Plymouth Colony, which is in Massachusetts. And
(03:06):
they're actually not Pilgrims. That's our first point of deep. Yeah,
I'm going to debunk that they're not Pilgrims because the
term pilgrim lumps together separatists and non separatists. Um, so
we're just going to call them settlers if that's okay
with everybody, and um we can even go further. And
they call themselves first comers, which is a little misleading
(03:29):
to that kind of makes it sound like they're the
first people, uh, first European people settling in what will
be the United States, and of course they're not. First
we had the Rowanote colony, and then second we had
the Jamestown Colony, which Sarah and I discussed in our
Pocahontat podcast. Yeah, so the first Comers is really just
(03:52):
marking the beginning of a wave of subsequent settlers arriving
through the sixteen twenties, and Pleteth is in Okay place
to live if you're one of the people who makes
it through the winter, better than very early Jamestown's a
lot better than Jamestown. They have seven houses, there's a meetinghouse,
and there are some structures for food and storage, but
(04:12):
there's still kind of desperate for supplies and they pilfer
from uh the nearby Native Americans, the Wampanoags, who have
been in the region for twelve thousand years. So the
Wampanoags are not particularly impressed with the settlers initially at least,
but a Wampanoagg named Squanto, who you've probably heard of,
(04:33):
and an Abenaki named Samoset are very friendly and they
show the settlers had a harvest corn and fertilized crops
with fish, which are valuable skills to have in the
new world, and this starts the beginning of pretty friendly
relation between the Wampanoag and the settlers. They make an
alliance by March of sixty one UM, offering each other
(04:55):
protection from other tribes in the area. The Wampanoagg's teaching
the settlers fishing, hunting, and farming um tailored to the seasons.
That was an important thing for them to learn to
roll with how the the year progressed. And this is
a nice thing that's in line with the myth, the
idea that the settlers and the Native Americans could be friends. Yeah,
(05:18):
it's it's in line with the elementary school story. And
then it's weirdly out of line with what you're more
likely to learn in high school or something where the
you sort of imagine the settlers and the Native Americans
clashing right from the start until until the end. Basically,
but for this first generation at least, and we should
(05:41):
say this just this piece between them does not last long,
but for a generation it's there. So after a successful
spring and summer of trying out these new farming techniques
that they've learned, the settlers decide to have a harvest
celebration in the fall of sixty one and they're going
to go out and hunt wild game and make a
(06:03):
big feast for everyone. But the Wampanoag leader, Massive Slot,
thinks that the gunfire means war and takes ninety men
to the settlers to get an explanation. What were you
doing shooting in the woods the other day? And when
you have ninety people behind you, there had better be
a good explanation. And so they say, you know, we're
(06:24):
hunting for a feast. And then once once they get
that explanation, the uh Native Americans are like, okay, well
we'll hunt for a feast two and we'll all have
one together. So this Thanksgiving meal is a bit different
from what you and I would have. For one thing,
it started, it went from about what three days to
(06:44):
a week? Yeah, different accounts put it between a week
and three days. And there were ninety Wampanoags and fifty
three settlers, which even with my huge Catholic family, we
don't quite measure up. And the food they have is
also a little different. They had turkey, Indian worn pumpkin,
which makes sense, does sound pretty standard, chestnuts, eels feels.
(07:07):
My family does not have eel for Thanksgiving. Most years.
Mine also doesn't have swans, seals, cranes, eagles, or corn, porridge,
goose duck. Those those sound okay. Venison, onions, radishes, plums, parsnips, leaks,
dried currants. It kind of gets good again towards the
(07:27):
end of that list. There's just an odd interli maybe
between eel and eagle. But the settlers would have seasoned
their meat with cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg, sauces and
pepper and dried fruit, so it sounds kind of tasty.
It sounds for the most part. And they didn't have forks,
so this is not quite medieval times because they did
(07:50):
have spoons and knives and big napkins that they used
to grab the hot food and they ate whatever was
in front of them, which there was no passing. Mother
wouldn't be proud of that. And the highest people, and
people were highest in the hierarchy, got the best food.
So maybe if you really liked somebody and you were
kind of high up, you could send a dish down
to them, maybe some eel past the eel, please. And
(08:13):
there was entertainment as well. It wasn't all just gluttony.
They played blind Man's Bluff and a pin game for
the kids. There was target shooting for the adults, dancing
and singing, so altogether it really sounds like a lovely time.
And the Native Americans probably would have had to establish
their own lodging too, because they lived a ways outside
(08:34):
of the settlement. So everyone's just hanging out for days,
eating and having fun. And some of the illustrious people
who would have been there were Massa Squat Squanto, Governor
William Bradford, Captain Miles Standish, and William Brewster, who was
the religious leader. So there there'd be the guys who
would get the really good dishes set in front of them.
(08:55):
And Sarah said this to me earlier, and she's like, oh,
you know, it's like having a celebrity at dinner, like
school into and she points and I didn't even think
about it and just turned around into the other department.
I was pointing it, and I have to live with that.
Most of our information about this feast in sixteen twenty
one comes from Edward Winslow's A Journal of the Pilgrims
at Plymouth, And again we're not using the term pilgrim,
(09:17):
but he can if he wants to. But well, this
was certainly a monumental feast, and this is what we're
essentially celebrating when we celebrate Thanksgiving. Wasn't really the first
religious Thanksgiving? That happened in Plymouth two years later in
sixteen twenty three, following a two month drought. And where
(09:39):
this all got kind of mixed up was with the
writer editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the Goadies Ladies
book and also authored Mary had a Little Lamb. Interestingly
a woman of many literary talents, but she thought that
the sixty one feast was Thanksgiving. But it's understandable why
(10:00):
she mixed things up a little bit, because what we
celebrate today is a combination of two distinct celebrations, this
religious Thanksgiving and also a harvest ritual where you you know,
celebrate abundance. Yeah, and we also have another Thanksgiving um,
the religious Thanksgiving on record that's earlier than both of these,
(10:22):
and that's sixteen nineteen when the British settlers under Captain
John Woodley celebrated their Safe Passing Um in the Berkeley
Plantation in Virginia near the Charles River. So that's to
further muddy what the water is a little we just
have a lot of early celebrations to go along and
balance the starving time and all those other wonderful religio settlement. Settlement,
(10:47):
it was Abraham Lincoln who gave us, and by us,
I mean the United States our national holiday for the
last Thursday of every November. So happy Thanksgiving gob will
go will y'all. And if you'd like to learn more
about this first Thanksgiving and all sorts of interesting facts
about turkeys, you can go and search for everything you
(11:08):
wanted to know about the First Thanksgiving on our home
page at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think,
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com homepage
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