The first official Thanksgiving, despite its association with Pilgrims and Indians, didn’t occur until 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the fourth Thursday in November as the observance of Thanksgiving.

Still, America’s Thanksgiving holiday stems from the Plymouth Colony Thanksgiving dinner in October 1621, which was attended by approximately fifty English colonists and about ninety Wampanoag Indian men in the region now known as the state of Massachusetts.

Modern-day dinner guests would not recognize that first Thanksgiving without today’s staples of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, potatoes and sweet potatoes. The English didn’t regularly serve the latter, and in the Plymouth Colony there was little sugar—very costly in the seventeenth century—and few ingredients available for the pie crusts.

A letter written in 1621 by one Edward Winslow, who led the young Plymouth Colony, is the earliest known record of the three-day gathering that spawned our Thanksgiving holiday. After disappearing for 200 years, the letter was rediscovered in the 1800s, and printed in 1841 by Alexander Young, a Boston publisher. Young editorialized a bit, christening the event the “First Thanksgiving.”

Winslow made it quite plain in his letter that the three-day celebration was meant to celebrate the harvest, and not intended to be a repeat event. Days of thanksgiving, in any case, were in Winslow’s day days of fasting, not feasting. Still, the notion was both romantic and enticing. And after its appearance in Young’s printed account, that was the version of events that survived.

Thanksgiving did have an earlier official blessing than its establishment by FDR. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day a national holiday during his own presidency. It is thought by historians that magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, whose creation “Mary Had a Little Lamb” lives on today, suggested institutionalizing the national day of giving and that may have persuaded Lincoln of the idea’s benefit.

PHOTO CAPTION: “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe

GOLDEN AGE HISTORY INSPIRED BY: BUCKSKIN BRIGADES by L. Ron Hubbard, a novel that skillfully weaves together the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, its encounter with the Blackfeet Indians near Helena, Montana and the destiny of a white man living among the tribe, known as “Yellow Hair.”  (read more…)

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