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CHAPTER TWO

Before the Pilgrims

Although we are grateful to the English pilgrims who endured hardships and faced formidable risks to help colonize America, the Thanksgiving decreed by the Spaniard Don Juan de Oñate deserves equal credit and its own place in American history.

—Ann W. Richards, Governor of Texas, 1991

A few weeks before Thanksgiving Day 1991, anyone who happened to be strolling along Court Street in downtown Plymouth would have witnessed a curious sight: a group of unfamiliar men dressed in doublets, wearing odd-shaped metal helmets festooned with feathers, and brandishing swords. What brought a company of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores to the heart of this classic New England town, home of the Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers?

All became clear when one of the conquistadores opened his mouth and, in a smooth Texas drawl, started speaking heresy: Plymouth did not deserve to be called the home of the First Thanksgiving, he announced. The true First Thanksgiving in what became the United States of America, he said, took place in San Elizario, Texas, a town twenty miles south of El Paso along the Rio Grande. In April 1598, Spanish settlers and Native Americans broke bread together in a feast that deserves to be acknowledged as America’s First Thanksgiving.

Plymouth’s response? The conquistadores were duly “arrested,” jailed, and charged with “spreading malicious and false rumors and blasphemy.” After a mock trial, they were acquitted on the basis of insufficient evidence and released.

This little drama on the streets of Plymouth was, of course, a show—a good-natured publicity stunt orchestrated by Texan history buffs eager to draw attention to their hometown of San Elizario and the role it played in the early history of the United States. The next year, Plymouth returned the favor, dispatching a contingent of local selectmen dressed as Pilgrims to Texas. They, too, were “arrested,” “tried,” and “convicted,” then pardoned at the base of the gallows.¹

This was all good fun—not to mention excellent PR for both towns. As a matter of historical record, however, the Texans had a point. History shows that the Pilgrims weren’t the first Europeans to hold religious services of thanksgiving in the New World, nor were they the first European settlers to sit together with Native Americans at a thanksgiving table in the land that became the United States.

Most of the pre-Pilgrim thanksgivings were celebrated by European newcomers in parts of the country far from New England. More often than not, these were religious ceremonies called for the purpose of giving thanks for the Europeans’ safe arrival in North America. The Age of Exploration was also an age of prayer, and the safe conclusion of a dangerous journey was just one of many reasons for a Christian to kneel and give thanks.

The pre-Plymouth thanksgivings were mostly religious observances—Protestant prayer services or Catholic Masses. A couple of them included a festive component, in the form of a meal and perhaps some entertainment. At least one thanksgiving—at Popham Colony in present-day Maine in 1607—was in part a harvest festival.

Several of the early thanksgivings celebrated by Europeans in the New World were shared with Native Americans, who observed the religious ceremonies, contributed food to a meal, or assisted the Europeans in other ways. None apparently took the large role that the Wampanoag played in Plymouth in helping the English to thrive. As in Plymouth, relations between the Europeans and indigenous people would degenerate in the years that followed, but for a moment in time, ties between the two peoples were harmonious, if wary.

The motivation of the modern-day claimants to the title of First Thanksgiving is easy to explain as local pride coupled with an eagerness to highlight local history. But it is also true that success has many friends. San Elizario and other locations with events in their early history that might be deemed Thanksgivings hoped to ride on the coattails of the New England Thanksgiving that Americans know and love. It is easy to smile when a town publicizes itself as a competitor to Plymouth, but there is a serious aspect to such claims. They are reminders that all the newcomers to our shores felt grateful to be here and found ways to express their gratitude.

There are at least seven claimants for the title of “First Thanksgiving”—in Texas, Virginia, Florida, and Maine. The Big Three are San Elizario, Texas (1598); St. Augustine, Florida (1565); and Berkeley Plantation, Virginia (1619).

San Elizario, Texas. On April 30, 1598, an expedition traveling north from Mexico held a Roman Catholic service of thanksgiving along the banks of the Rio Grande. Led by the Spanish explorer Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar, the travelers had set up camp at what is now the dusty town of San Elizario.

Oñate, the son of a Spanish noble family, had been commissioned by King Philip II to seize the land north of the Rio Grande and claim it for the Spanish Empire. His expeditionary force included more than four hundred men, women, and children. Some were soldiers ready to fight to secure the Spanish claims; others were settlers prepared to take up residence in the uncharted territories of Nueva México. The settlers brought with them thousands of sheep, pigs, goats, cattle, mules, and horses for use in their new homes, and the expedition stretched for miles as it wended its way north from Santa Barbara in central Mexico toward the Rio Grande. By the time the travelers reached what is now San Elizario, they had been on the road for three months and had traveled hundreds of miles across the unforgiving terrain of the Chihuahuan Desert.

The expedition’s scribe, Captain Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, chronicled the journey in an epic poem, Historica de la Nueva México. Villagrá provides vivid descriptions of the San Elizario Thanksgiving and the circumstances leading up to it.²

By the time the expedition reached the Rio Grande, Villagrá writes, the travelers had been without food or water for four days. Their suffering was so intense that they “were almost all wishing for death.”³ Horses staggered into the river, drinking so much that two of the animals died when their full stomachs burst. Two additional horses, blinded by starvation, ventured too far into the rushing water and were swept away. The two-legged travelers also drank their fill. Thirsty men drank so much that they appeared to be drunk. In Villagrá’s evocative words, they were:

Stretched out upon the watery sand,

As swollen, dropsical, gasping,

As they had all been toads . . .4

Having assuaged their thirst, the toad-travelers rested under the cottonwood trees along the river for ten days, gathering strength and preparing to move on.

But before they resumed their journey, Oñate called for a day of thanksgiving, ordering that a makeshift church be created in a clearing in the woods. He commanded that the clearing for the thanksgiving Mass be large enough to hold the entire expeditionary force and an unspecified number of Indians.

When the appointed day arrived, Franciscan missionaries who were traveling with the expedition sang Mass, and Oñate read a proclamation known as La Toma—the Taking—declaring that he was claiming all the land north of the Rio Grande for Spain. Then a play—a “great drama,” writes Villagrá—was performed for the benefit of the Indians, depicting how all of New Mexico welcomed the arrival of the Catholic Church. It was the first play performed in what is now the United States.

Villagrá characterizes the Spaniards’ relations with the Indians as peaceful and friendly. The “great numbers of barbarian warriors” were helpful to the Spanish, and the Spanish were respectful and kind to the warriors, “showing ourselves agreeable friends.”⁵ The Indians directed the Spanish to a safe place for the expedition to cross the river: “the “passage,” or el paso, which gave its name to the city that grew up there. The poet also describes in colorful detail a feast that took place while Oñate’s expedition was resting at San Elizario—though possibly not on the day of thanksgiving itself. The Spanish shot cranes, ducks, and geese for the meal, and the Indians contributed fish. The meat and fish were cooked on spits and in the coals of a great bonfire. The day after their thanksgiving ceremony, the Spaniards packed up and moved on.

Historica de la Nueva México was published in 1610, but it took almost four centuries for the San Elizario Thanksgiving to become well known. In the late 1980s, local history buffs in San Elizario took up the story and used it to promote their town as a tourist destination. They inaugurated a festival that included re-enactments of La Toma and the Thanksgiving feast; they initiated a friendly competition with Plymouth about which town deserved to call itself the home of the First Thanksgiving; and they drummed up local media coverage, which in turn generated attention in the national press.

State politicians also took up the cause. In 1990, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution proclaiming that the First Thanksgiving in the United States had been held at San Elizario, not Plymouth. In 1991, Governor Ann Richards issued a proclamation declaring April 28, 1598 as “the first true Thanksgiving in the United States,”⁶ and, in what must go down in history as one of the biggest acts of Texas chutzpah, she called upon the governor of Massachusetts to follow suit. In 1995, Governor George W. Bush appointed a commission to plan activities to mark the quadricentennial in 1998 of Oñate’s colonizing mission. In 2001, Governor Rick Perry proclaimed April 30 as the official day of the First Thanksgiving for Texas.

In recent years, Texans have backed off a bit on the idea of San Elizario as the home of the true First Thanksgiving. San Elizarians still host a Thanksgiving festival at the end of April, with a re-enactment of the 1598 ceremony, but the proceedings focus broadly on the early history of the region. A recent festival included a scholarly discussion of the role of Franciscan missionaries, a history of viticulture in the Southwest, and a presentation on seventeenth-century musical instruments.

Al Borrego, president of the local Genealogical and Historical Society, sums up Texans’ new attitude on the First Thanksgiving when he asks: “Are we going to get the president of the United States to change the date of Thanksgiving?” Borrego answers his own question: “I don’t think so.” Besides, he adds, “I like turkey.”⁷

St. Augustine, Florida. Some years before the San Elizario conquistadores were parading down the streets of Plymouth to promote their 1598 First Thanksgiving, a historian was laboring quietly at his desk at the University of Florida in Gainesville researching earlier thanksgiving celebrations that occurred near present-day St. Augustine. Michael V. Gannon, a scholar of Florida’s colonial history, quotes Juan Ponce de León in the opening pages of his book The Cross in the Sand:

“Thanks be to Thee, O Lord, Who has permitted me to see something new,” said the Spanish explorer upon sighting the shore of the lush tropical land he would name La Florida. The year was 1513.⁸ Ponce de León may have been the first European to speak words of thanksgiving in what is now the United States.

Half a century after Ponce de León had “discovered” it, another Spanish fleet set sail for Florida, this time under the command of Captain-General Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. General Menéndez had two mandates from King Philip II. One was missionary, the other military: convert the Indians to Christianity, and secure Florida for Spain. The king was worried about a settlement by French Huguenots in Florida during the previous year. He saw the French settlement as a direct challenge to Spain’s rightful sovereignty over the peninsula and their Protestant religion as a threat to Roman Catholicism.

Menéndez’s fleet reached the coast of Florida in early September 1565, carrying eight hundred colonists. On September 6, he sailed into the harbor at the place he would name St. Augustine, anchoring just off the Timucua Indian village of Seloy. The fleet chaplain, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, kept notes of the voyage and described the sequence of events leading up to the day of thanksgiving called to express thanks to God for the Spaniards’ safe arrival.

An advance party made up of two companies of infantrymen disembarked and were “well-received by the Indians,” Father López wrote. The Timucua gave the Spanish a large house that belonged to a chief and was well situated alongside the river. Worried that the Indians’ friendliness might not hold, the Spanish went to work fortifying the house and building a trench around it to protect themselves from surprise attack. Two days later, on Saturday, September 8, General Menéndez was ready to come ashore.

The general’s landing was full of pomp and circumstance. The priest recorded how Menéndez stepped onto Florida soil “with many banners spread” and “to the sound of trumpets and salutes of artillery.” Father López, who had gone ashore the evening before, went to meet the general, carrying a cross and singing Te Deum Laudamus, or “Thee, O God, We Praise,” a Latin hymn traditionally sung on occasions of public rejoicing. A makeshift altar was set up in the sand. “The General, followed by all who accompanied him, marched up to the Cross, knelt, and kissed it,” Father López recounted. As a large number of Timucua watched, the newcomers celebrated a thanksgiving Mass. Afterward, the Timucua joined the Spanish for a meal at the invitation of General Menéndez. Professor Gannon describes the event as “the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land.”⁹

Historians who have analyzed the ship’s accounts say the menu was probably the Spaniards’ usual shipboard fare: salted pork, onions, garbanzo beans—possibly assembled in a bean stew called cocido and washed down with red wine. There is no record of what, if anything, the Timucua contributed, though some have conjectured that they would have offered something for the communal meal—maybe local game, possibly including wild turkey, which was plentiful at the time. The Timucua might also have brought seafood, maize, beans, nuts, and fruit.

Two decades passed before Gannon’s research on the St. Augustine Thanksgiving became widely known. In the mid-1980s, an Associated Press reporter, seeking a new angle for an article he was writing on the holiday, stumbled upon Gannon’s work, called him up, and then wrote about what happened in 1565. The AP story was picked up by the national media, and soon Gannon found himself with a new nickname, courtesy of New Englanders who were disgruntled that the Sunshine State was encroaching on their holiday. The Florida professor was now “the Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving.”

Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. The Commonwealth of Virginia’s claim to hosting the First Thanksgiving rests on an event that happened on December 4, 1619. On that day, the English ship Margaret dropped anchor in the James River at what was then known as Berkeley Hundred and is now called Berkeley Plantation. It is located twenty-four miles southwest of Richmond.

The Margaret was carrying thirty-six Englishmen—farmers, craftsmen, and other skilled workers—who were committed to building a successful settlement in the New World. They had departed England ten weeks earlier under a commission from the London-based Berkeley Company to settle eight thousand acres of land along the James River. These settlers hoped to avoid the fate of Jamestown, which had failed in part because the cavaliers and courtiers who went there in 1607 knew little about farming or other skills essential to the colony’s survival. The Margaret party’s captain, John Woodlief, was an experienced settler, one of the few survivors of the 1609–1610 starving time in Jamestown, when 80 percent of the colonists died.

After the new settlers rowed ashore, Captain Woodlief commanded them to kneel, and he led them in a prayer of thanksgiving for their safe arrival. This was done in accordance with the charter that had been issued by their sponsors in England. The instruction to hold such a service upon their arrival in Virginia was the first of ten orders listed in a letter that the Berkeley Company had handed to Captain Woodlief prior to the settlers’ departure from England. In addition to the instruction that the settlers give thanks on the day of their arrival, the letter further ordered them to make the date of their arrival an annual day of thanksgiving:

We ordain that the day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia should be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.¹⁰

The Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was a strictly religious affair, in keeping with other instructions the settlers received from their sponsor: Follow the rites of the Church of England, use the Book of Common Prayer, and attend daily prayers or forfeit supper. No Native Americans were present at the service, and there is no record of the settlers partaking in a festive meal.

As Virginians like to point out, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving service in 1619 was the first “official” Thanksgiving in the sense that December 4 became the date of an annual observance. The settlers carried on the tradition for two more years, but Berkeley Hundred was destroyed on March 22, 1622, in a coordinated attack by the Powhatan Indians on English settlements in Virginia. Many settlers died in the attack, including a large number at Berkeley Hundred. Soon afterward, the settlement was abandoned and the survivors returned to England.

The story of Virginia’s First Thanksgiving was lost to history for more than three hundred years. It was finally rediscovered in 1931 when Dr. Lyon Tyler, a retired president of William and Mary College and son of President John Tyler, was researching a book on early Virginia history at the New York Public Library. There he happened upon the Nibley Papers, a cache of documents that chronicled the Margaret’s voyage to Virginia and recorded the establishment, settlement, and management of the Berkeley Hundred. The Nibley Papers included the original instructions to Captain Woodlief to mark an annual day of thanksgiving. That “one little fact” made the rediscovery of the Nibley Papers “conspicuous in American history,” Tyler concluded. It proved, he crowed, that the Virginia Thanksgiving of 1619 anticipated the one in Plymouth by two years.¹¹

Dr. Tyler’s discovery of the Nibley Papers sparked a campaign to revive the Virginia Thanksgiving, which had last been celebrated in 1621. A Virginia state senator, John J. Wicker Jr., took up the cause in the late 1950s. He traveled to Boston, where he met with the governor of Massachusetts in an effort to persuade him that Virginia was the site of the true First Thanksgiving. (No luck on that score—no surprise.) Wicker’s enthusiasm for his cause drove him to don the garb of a seventeenth-century English settler and go on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to plead the case for Virginia to replace Plymouth as the home of the First Thanksgiving. In 1958, three hundred thirty-seven years after the third annual Thanksgiving Day at Berkeley Plantation, Virginians revived the tradition begun by the original settlers there and held a “Virginia Thanksgiving Festival.” (The Virginia Thanksgiving Festival is now an annual event, celebrated on the first Sunday of November.)

Four years later, in November 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation that, to most readers, would have sounded completely routine. It began:

Over three centuries ago in Plymouth, on Massachusetts Bay, the Pilgrims established the custom of gathering together each year to express their gratitude to God for the preservation of their community and for the harvests their labors brought forth in the new land. Joining with their neighbors, they shared together and worshipped together in a common giving of thanks.

Plymouth, Pilgrims, harvests, gratitude to God—all in keeping with the long string of presidential Thanksgiving proclamations. It contained nothing out of the ordinary. But John Wicker saw something wrong.

The Virginia state senator immediately shot off a telegram to Kennedy. “Your Presidential Proclamation erroneously credits Massachusetts Pilgrims with America’s First Thanksgiving observances,” he complained. “America’s First Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in Virginia in 1619, more than a year before the Pilgrims ever landed and nearly two years before the Massachusetts Thanksgiving.” He concluded: “Please issue an appropriate correction.”

Wicker received his reply three weeks later in the form of an apologetic letter from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the eminent historian who was then a special assistant to the president. “You are quite right,” Schlesinger informed Wicker, “and I can only plead an unconquerable New England bias on the part of the White House staff.” He promised that the error would not be repeated. The Richmond New Leader trumpeted Schlesinger’s apology with the headline: “President Concedes: Virginia Receives Thanksgiving Credit.”¹²

True to his word, Schlesinger made sure that JFK did not slight Virginia the following year. On November 5, 1963—seventeen days before his assassination—Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation, which began: “Over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and in Massachusetts, far from home in a lonely wilderness, set aside a time of thanksgiving.” Previous presidents had not seen fit to mention Virginia’s place in the history of Thanksgiving. Virginians were pleased to note that their state was named first, followed by the president’s home state of Massachusetts.

During a visit to Berkeley Plantation in 2007, President George W. Bush gave a tip of the hat to its claim on the First Thanksgiving: “The good folks here say that the founders of Berkeley held their celebration before the Pilgrims had even left port,” Bush told the crowd. “As you can imagine, this version of events is not very popular up north.”¹³

In addition to San Elizario, St. Augustine, and Berkeley Plantation, there are several other claimants to the title of First Thanksgiving.

Palo Duro Canyon, Texas. On May 29, 1541, a large troop of Spanish explorers held a ceremony of thanksgiving in the panhandle of Texas, probably at Palo Duro Canyon, not far from the present-day city of Amarillo. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado had led an army of one thousand five hundred men north from Mexico far up into what is now Texas. They were searching for gold and eventually traveled all the way to Kansas in their quest.

At Palo Duro Canyon, the explorers stopped to give thanks to God. A Franciscan missionary celebrated a thanksgiving Mass, while local people looked on in amazement, according to legend. The priest was Juan de Padilla, who was later killed by Indians, thus becoming one of the first Christian martyrs in the United States.

Fort Caroline, Florida. Next up are French Protestants. On June 30, 1564, a group of Huguenots celebrated a thanksgiving in their new settlement at Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River, near what is now Jacksonville. Like the Pilgrims, they were seeking religious freedom when they fled their homes in Roman Catholic France to establish a colony in the New World. Also like the Pilgrims, they established friendly relations with the local inhabitants, the Timucua Indians.

The Huguenot leader, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, wrote an account of the 1564 Thanksgiving in Florida:

I commanded a trumpet to be sounded, that, being assembled, we might give God thanks for our favorable and safe arrival. Then we sang a hymn of thanksgiving unto God, beseeching him of His grace to continue his accustomed goodness towards us, his poor servants, and aid us in all enterprises that might turn to His glory and the advancement of our King.

The French would have consumed most of their food supplies during their long voyage across the Atlantic, so it is possible that the meal that followed the Mass was provided largely by the Timucua. The Timucua were excellent hunters, according to the Jacksonville Historical Society, and they also maintained large granaries in which they stored food they had grown, such as corn, beans, and squash. Their diet was rich in seafood, including oysters, shrimp, and mullet, along with the occasional alligator, which they preferred to eat smoked.¹⁴

The year after the Huguenots gave thanks in Florida, their colony was wiped out by Spanish raiders sent by Philip II. These were the same men, led by General Menéndez, who celebrated a thanksgiving upon their arrival in Florida in 1565. The king had issued orders to “hang and burn the Lutherans,” the word “Lutheran” being a catchall Spanish term for Protestants. Menéndez obliged.

Popham Colony, Maine. New England has just one rival to Plymouth for the title of First Thanksgiving. That event took place in 1607, at an English settlement founded where the Kennebec River meets the Atlantic Ocean—about twenty-five miles northeast of what is now the city of Portland. Arriving there in late summer, the Popham Colony settlers built Fort St. George and joined with local Abenaki Indians that autumn for a prayer meeting and feast of local seafood.

The colony of about one hundred Englishmen was named after its main financial backer, Sir John Popham, and his nephew, Captain George Popham, who served as the colony’s president. Half the settlers returned to England in December when it became clear that their winter provisions were inadequate. The others followed suit the next year. No one knows why the remaining colonists gave up and went home. Perhaps they didn’t want to face another harsh New England winter, or maybe relations with the Indians had soured. There also appears to have been a leadership vacuum after George Popham died in February 1608, and then, several months later, his successor decided to return to England upon learning that he had inherited an estate.

Popham Colony has been called the early American settlement that history forgot. Archeologists found the remnants of the settlement, including Fort St. George, only in 1994, working from a map that had been discovered in a library in Madrid in 1888.¹⁵

Jamestown, Virginia. In June 1610, the starving colonists of Jamestown held a Thanksgiving prayer service to give thanks for the arrival of an English supply ship carrying desperately needed food. The winter of 1609–1610 had been so severe that most of the colonists died. Fewer than one hundred of the five hundred original colonists survived.

There is one more thanksgiving celebrated by Europeans in the New World that bears mention as one of the earliest recorded in North America. It happened in Canada. The year was 1578, during the third voyage of Martin Frobisher, an English explorer who was seeking the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. The location of the event was just off the southeast corner of Baffin Island, now part of the province of Nunavut, in the area that would be named Frobisher Bay.

It was summer, but the subarctic weather was fierce, and Frobisher’s fleet of fifteen ships had been scattered. On July 31, 1578, after safely sailing past “a great island of ice” at the entrance to the harbor, Frobisher encountered two ships that he feared had been lost. The men “greatly rejoiced” at their “happy meeting.” Then they “highly praised God” and, falling to their knees, “gave Him due, humble and hearty thanks.” The minister traveling with them “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankful to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places” and “willed them to enjoy and accept thankfully whatsoever adventure his divine Providence should appoint.”¹⁶

In assessing the challengers for the title of First Thanksgiving, it is important to remember the obvious: The true First Thanksgivings in what became the United States were celebrated not by new arrivals from Europe, but by the indigenous people who had resided in North America for thousands of years. There is no written record of such events, but tribal traditions and ethnological research indicate that Native American tribes practiced thanksgiving rituals at the harvest season as well as at other times of the year. The Green Corn Festival still celebrated by a number of tribes is one example. One Indian authority describes it as a religious ceremony in which the early corn is presented as a sacred offering to the Great Spirit.

Pilgrim Edward Winslow provides an intriguing look at the spiritual beliefs of the Wampanoag and how they gave thanks in his book Good Newes from New England, first published in 1624. On his way home to Plymouth after caring for the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit while he was gravely ill, Winslow stopped overnight at the home of another Indian leader, Conbatant, whom he described as a “notable politician, yet full of merry jests.”

Winslow and Conbatant hit it off. They enjoyed each other’s company and their discussions ranged widely, facilitated by Hobbamock, the Wampanoag who served as the Pilgrims’ chief interpreter. At dinner, Conbatant, observing that Winslow bowed his head and spoke some words before and after the meal, asked what he was doing. He was praying, Winslow explained. A theological conversation ensued. Winslow described his Christian beliefs, which, he told Conbatant, dictated how he and his fellow Pilgrims at Plymouth lived their lives. He spoke of the Ten Commandments, of which Conbatant and his men expressed approval—all, that is, except the Seventh, the commandment against adultery, to which they objected on the ground of “too many inconveniences” in a man being tied to one woman.

“Whatsoever good things we had, we received from God,” who nourishes and strengthens our bodies, Winslow told Conbatant. That is the reason for bowing our heads and offering prayers of thanks before and after we eat, he explained. Conbatant and his men nodded their heads in agreement, saying they believed the same things. “The same power that we called God,” Winslow records, “they called Kiehtan.”¹⁷

These pre-Plymouth thanksgivings—Spanish, English, Huguenot, Native American—are all historically noteworthy, although none influenced the holiday that Americans celebrate today, except, perhaps, in the sense that they encouraged an attitude of gratitude and reinforced the custom of giving thanks to God. None of the early thanksgivings will supplant our familiar holiday either on the national calendar or in the hearts of Americans. Their significance lies in reminding us of our varied origins, the diversity of religious traditions in our pluralistic history, and the universality of the human wish to give thanks. They, too, are part of the American experience. The common thread among them is a desire to express gratitude to God even in the midst of hardship or misfortune.

Al Borrego of San Elizario could have been speaking for the partisans of all the competing First Thanksgivings when he said, “Our national Thanksgiving is not determined by when it happened. It’s based on what it’s about.”