Myth vs. History: The “First Thanksgiving”

Every November, American classrooms and family tables often recall a familiar story: English Pilgrims and friendly Native Americans coming together in 1621 to share a feast, peacefully marking the birth of a nation. In popular pageants, colonists wear tall hats with silver buckles, while Indigenous guests are portrayed wearing feather headdresses. While this traditional tale is deeply rooted in American culture, modern historians and Indigenous scholars emphasize that the historical reality was far more complex, politically driven, and precarious than the myth suggests.

To understand the events of 1621, one must first examine the geopolitical landscape of the region known to the Wampanoag people as Patuxet, which the English renamed Plymouth. Before the Mayflower arrived in 1620, European traders had already introduced devastating epidemic diseases to the New England coast. Between 1616 and 1619, these illnesses wiped out an estimated seventy to ninety percent of the coastal Indigenous population. When the English settled at the abandoned site of Patuxet, the surviving Wampanoag were grieving massive losses and facing pressure from their rivals, the neighboring Narragansett nation.

For the Wampanoag leader, Ousamequin (often referred to by his title, Massasoit), reaching out to the English was a calculated act of diplomacy and survival, not merely an expression of casual hospitality. In the spring of 1621, Ousamequin negotiated a formal mutual-defense alliance with the English settlers. Each group promised not to harm the other and agreed to come to each other’s aid if attacked. This political treaty provided the weakened Wampanoag with valuable allies and firearms, while offering the struggling colonists essential knowledge about local agriculture and survival.

Historical records of the famous autumn gathering in 1621 are remarkably scarce. In fact, historians rely primarily on a single, brief paragraph written by colonist Edward Winslow in a letter published in 1621, along with a few retrospective lines penned years later by Governor William Bradford. Winslow described a three-day harvest celebration where English settlers practiced firing their muskets, prompting roughly ninety Wampanoag men, accompanied by Ousamequin, to arrive at the settlement. Some historians suggest the Wampanoag came to investigate the gunfire to ensure the treaty had not been broken. Once gathered, the Wampanoag contributed five deer, and both groups feasted on venison, wild fowl, and maize.

Crucially, neither group considered this event a "Thanksgiving." To seventeenth-century English Puritans, a religious Thanksgiving was a solemn day of prayer, fasting, and sermonizing, not an outdoor harvest festival of sports and recreation. Furthermore, the peaceful alliance of 1621 did not last indefinitely. As more English colonists arrived over the following decades, they pushed deeper into Indigenous lands, leading to severe tensions that eventually erupted into King Philip's War in 1675—one of the deadliest conflicts per capita in American history.

The concept of the 1621 gathering as the "First Thanksgiving" was largely invented during the nineteenth century. Writers like Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for a national holiday to heal regional divisions, and in 1863, amidst the turmoil of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln officially proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day. Over time, Victorian writers fused Lincoln’s holiday with the 1621 Plymouth harvest, creating a simplified origin story of national unity that ignored the devastating impacts of colonization on Native peoples.

Separating myth from history does not mean erasing the harvest gathering of 1621. Instead, it allows for a more accurate understanding of the past—one that recognizes the agency, strategic diplomacy, and enduring presence of the Wampanoag nation alongside the complex realities of European colonization.