Thanksgiving, a holiday deeply symbolic in American culture, is often pictured through a simplified lens: Puritan Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a harvest feast in peace. However, the true story of Thanksgiving is not a single, static event, but a complex cultural construct that has evolved over centuries.
To truly understand this holiday, one must challenge the conventional narrative by acknowledging the existence of other, often forgotten, founding events. One of the most significant of these took place in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, more than half a century before the Pilgrims set foot in Plymouth.
The Contested Dawn of Thanksgiving in the New World
On September 8, 1565, the Spanish Admiral Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and 800 settlers landed on the coast of La Florida, establishing St. Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement in North America. Their first act ashore was a Catholic Mass of Thanksgiving for their safe voyage, celebrated by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales. After the Mass, Menéndez hosted a communal meal and invited the native Timucua people of the Seloy village as guests.
The Menu: A Cross-Cultural Exchange
This meal was not a harvest festival but consisted of provisions that had survived the long transatlantic journey. The Spanish likely served cocido, a stew made of salted pork and garbanzo beans, seasoned with garlic, and accompanied by hard sea biscuits and red wine. If the Timucua contributed, the menu might have included local foods such as wild turkey, venison, gopher tortoise, mullet, fish, corn, beans, and squash, creating a truly multicultural feast.
Thanksgiving: Meaning and Historical Context
This event is recognized as “the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement in the land.” It took place 56 years before the Plymouth event. Menéndez was a military figure tasked with expelling French Huguenots and establishing Spanish dominance, making the feast a strategic diplomatic act as well as a religious ceremony. The entire context was one of Spanish Catholic colonial expansion.
The fundamental difference in purpose between this event and the Plymouth celebration is crucial. The St. Augustine event was a liturgical thanksgiving for a safe arrival, a common maritime and Catholic practice. It was tied to a specific event: the successful completion of a voyage. In contrast, the Plymouth event was a harvest festival, a secular celebration of agricultural success and survival, tied to the annual cycle. This distinction explains why the St. Augustine event, despite being earlier, was an “isolated and ephemeral” act that did not create a recurring annual tradition. Plymouth’s harvest theme, being easily repeatable each year, provided the foundation for a lasting tradition.
Furthermore, Menéndez’s invitation to the Seloy tribe was not merely a gesture of goodwill; it was a calculated political act. As a colonial governor (Adelantado), his mission was to establish a permanent, defensible settlement. Securing peaceful relations with the native population was a tactical necessity. The shared meal, which followed a powerful display of European religious ritual (which the Timucua reportedly “imitated”), served to establish a relationship, assert cultural dominance, and create a temporary peace. This stands in stark contrast to the later romanticized image of a simple, friendly gathering.
The Harvest That Forged a Nation’s Myth – Plymouth, 1621
In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, having survived their first brutal winter, held a three-day feast to celebrate their first successful harvest. Governor William Bradford sent men “fowling” for birds. They were joined by about 90 men from the Wampanoag tribe, led by their chief, Massasoit.
The Authentic Menu: Debunking Modern Myths
Primary sources from Edward Winslow and William Bradford confirm the feast’s menu. It included venison (the Wampanoag brought five deer), a large amount of wildfowl (ducks, geese, swans, and possibly some wild turkey), and abundant seafood (cod, bass, clams, mussels, lobster, and eels). Native crops were central: flint corn (eaten as cornmeal porridge or bread), beans, and various squashes (including pumpkin, but not pumpkin pie). Importantly, many modern staples were absent due to a lack of ingredients: there were no potatoes, no wheat flour for pie crusts or bread stuffing, and no sugar for modern-style cranberry sauce.
The feast symbolized a temporary, strategic alliance. The Wampanoag, who had been devastated by a recent epidemic, sought an ally in the Pilgrims (with their guns) against their regional rivals, the Narragansett. Conversely, the Pilgrims were completely dependent on the Wampanoag and the English-speaking Tisquantum (Squanto) for agricultural knowledge and survival.
The popular portrayal of the feast is one of spontaneous friendship and cultural harmony. However, the historical context reveals a much more complex reality. This was not a simple dinner; it was the culmination of a fragile diplomatic and military treaty between two vulnerable groups. The Wampanoag were not passive recipients of hospitality; their contribution of five deer was a significant diplomatic gesture, and their presence in such large numbers (90 men) was a subtle display of their own strength. The feast was less about friendship and more about mutual assurance in a precarious political landscape.
A crucial point often overlooked is that the concept of a harvest thanksgiving festival was not a European invention. Long before the Pilgrims arrived, the Wampanoag held Thanksgiving-like celebrations, expressing gratitude in the form of feasts and ceremonial games. This reframes the event not as the Pilgrims “inviting the Indians” to their celebration, but as two cultures engaging in a shared, ancient practice of giving thanks for the land’s bounty, albeit for different reasons and from different spiritual perspectives.
The Plymouth story, emphasizing themes of religious freedom, perseverance against hardship, and a covenant with God, resonated deeply with the developing Protestant, Anglo-Saxon identity of the growing nation. The earlier Spanish Catholic event in St. Augustine, representing a rival colonial and religious power, was culturally and politically incompatible with this emerging national narrative.
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