The Real Story of Thanksgiving

The True Story of Thanksgiving
By: Brandon Ashlock

When most people think about the story of Thanksgiving they think about Native Americans joining the Pilgrims to consume turkey, green bean casserole, and cranberry sauce while eating side by side one another in a big happy feast. While some of this is true, much of the real story of Thanksgiving and the events that transpired after this monumental occasion has been left out of school's textbooks.

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The inaugural Thanksgiving was a three day event. Chuck Larsen, who wrote "The Plymouth Thanksgiving Story" on the webpage www.manataka.org stated that a peace agreement was made in which the native Wampanoags gave approval to the Pilgrims to build their new town of Plymouth on what was formally Patuxet, a Pokanokit Wampanoag nation's abandoned village. It had been deserted years before because all the village people had died from disease that the English explorers and slave traders had carried with them. 

Sadly, the peace agreement was short lived. As more and more English settlers came to the new land, the tensions started to mount. These new settlers did not need the assistance of the Native Americans like the early Pilgrims did. In his story "Introduction for Teachers," Chuck Larsen says that the new settlers started seizing land and claiming it as their own. They even started capturing and killing Native Americans, a lot of times just because the Natives would not convert to the Pilgrim's religious beliefs. 

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With all this chaos going on, the Pequot Nation, who had not agreed to the peace treaty, fought back against the English settlers. This would later be called the Pequot War and is one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought. In 1637 members of the Pequot Tribe gathered for their yearly Green Corn Festival. When all the Pequots had went to sleep, English and Dutch mercenaries surrounded and killed more than 700 unarmed men, women and children. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor declared "A Day of Thanksgiving" because of this tragic event.

After this attack on the Native Americans, many more followed. Heads of Natives were impaled on poles or kicked around in streets. Whole tribes where sold to slave traders. Bounties were paid for Native scalps. After each massacre a thanksgiving feast was held to commemorate the event. With so many of these massacres happening George Washington, as stated by Susan Bates who wrote "The  Real Story of Thanksgiving," suggested that there should only be one day of thanksgiving for the whole year instead of having a thanksgiving feast after each battle.

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Many years later during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. Ironically, this took place on the same day that he ordered troops to march against the Sioux in Minnesota.

Today Thanksgiving is a day to celebrate with friends and family with a huge feast. It is a day to be thankful for the many things that make up people's lives. But sadly the true story of Thanksgiving is not the glamorous fairy tail story that has been taught to many generations of Americans. Hopefully the true story will being to be taught so that people understand what really happened on this monumental occasion.