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Every year around this time, I write about turkeys – wild turkeys, Ben Franklin electrocuting turkeys, the Aztecs and domesticated turkeys, and even frozen turkey dinners.
This year we ponder the question: Was there turkey at the first thanksgiving?
The short answer: There were wild turkeys in North America in the 1620s, so there could have been turkeys at the first harvest festival, but turkeys were not the centerpiece of the meal.
The longer answer: In November 1620, the 102 settlers on the Mayflower (they weren’t called Pilgrims until Daniel Webster called them by that name in 1820), landed in what is today Provincetown. They moved to Plymouth a month later, where they hoped to establish a colony.
They spent most of the first winter aboard their ship, coming to land during the day to build houses. But they were ill-equipped for survival, and about half of the settlers died. The land around Plymouth was largely deserted because most of the Patuxet band of the Pokanonets (part of the Wampanoag confederation) had died from 1616 to 1619 of an unknown illness, probably smallpox or leptospirosis. (It is estimated that up to 90 percent of the people in coastal villages from Maine to Massachusetts died during this epidemic.) Bones and skulls littered the land because so many people died that there was no one left to bury the dead. The pilgrims took it as an auspicious sign from god that the land, which had been occupied for 10,000 years, was mostly deserted when they arrived.
Soon the pilgrims met Tisquantum (Squanto). He had survived the plague because in 1614 the English slaver Thomas Hunt captured him and 26 others, put them in chains and took them to slave markets in Spain. Tisquantum first worked in a monastery but then made his way to England. In 1619, Newfoundland fishers took him back to America. (European fishers had been visiting Newfoundland since the 1500s.) He soon discovered that all of his people in Patuxet had died, so he went to Rhode Island, home of Ousamequin (Massasoit was his title, not his name), chief of the Pokanoket Wampanoags.
Although many of Ousamequin’s people had died, the nearby Narragansetts had largely escaped the illness. They were threatening war. Ousamequin felt that the English (and their guns) might help keep the Narragansetts at bay. He decided to sign a peace treaty with the pilgrims. This treaty was honored for 50 years (one of the only treaties with indigenous Americans to be honored for long).
Tisquantum lived among the Pilgrims for 20 months, from 1621 to 1622, until his death in Monomoit (Chatham) of “the Indean feavor.” He taught the settlers how to plant corn, beans and squash, how to fish and how to hunt. With his help, the 52 remaining pilgrims had a successful first fall harvest.
Edward Winslow, one of the pilgrims, wrote of this first fall harvest:
In this little time … we have built seven dwelling-houses … We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings … which we have in great abundance … Our corn did prove well … and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, so that we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as … served the company almost a week … many of the Indians coming amongst us [including] their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor.
The 90 Wampanoag warriors had not been invited to the harvest celebration. They arrived at Plymouth in alarm after hearing the colonists’ firing their guns in celebration. The three-day feast convened to put these warriors at ease, and it was when the Wampanoags realized the gunfire was not hostile that they killed the five deer to contribute to the feast. The harvest feast was not repeated in subsequent years, though.
Winslow wrote:
We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us … we often go to them, and they come to us … and we for out parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are … very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.
For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer … our bay is full of lobsters in all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all winter; we have mussels and othus [oysters] at our doors … all the spring-time the earth sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs: here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as a damson.
They also found walnuts, acorns, partridges, geese, ducks, turkeys and more. They learned to make cornbread, called maizium. There were no potatoes at the first harvest feast: Potatoes came to North America from Europe via South America, and weren’t much cultivated until the 1700s.
Back to the wild turkeys. As the settlers prepared for the fall, harvest William Bradford wrote of the pilgrims:
They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter …. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl, there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck [8 quarts] of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
In other words, the pilgrims found game, including turkeys, and they did not starve after the first winter because Ousamequin’s people taught the pilgrims how to farm, how to trap fish in streams and where to hunt beaver and deer and fowl. We have to take the pilgrims’ writing with a grain of salt, however, because they were trying to convince more English to come to New England, and they were also trying to persuade financial backers. As more and more English settlers arrived, frictions increased between the settlers, who were trying to expand across the region, and the people who had lived on the land for thousands of years. From 1630 to 1643, around 20,000 English arrived in New England; by 1675, there were 50,000 English colonists. In 1675, war erupted, and the Wampanoags lost their independence and much of their territory.
Reader photo
Tony L. and his granddaughter Lucy spotted this candy-striped leafhopper at Kentucky’s Louisville Zoo in October.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day, and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
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