By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Wrestling with a myth is both an enlightening and difficult endeavor. Enlightening because almost always, the myth is not quite as idyllic as it sounds. Difficult because we want it to be.
And so it was when I encountered a favorite old myth—the original Thanksgiving story—during my first visit to Plymouth and Cape Cod in Massachusetts last summer.
The ideal of the Thanksgiving myth that I learned, primarily in school, was fellowship and friendship. It goes like this: Native Americans helped new arrivals to this beautiful land, taught them how to thrive here, and celebrated the new and unexpected relationship.
The fact that my mother (and later my wife and I) always made a delicious Thanksgiving holiday dinner—including turkey with gravy (see here for more about my gravy obsession) and all the fixins—to share with family and friends, made the myth even more appealing.
Like many myths, there is some factual basis to the story. The Pilgrims did leave England seeking religious freedom.
They went to Holland first, and then crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a grueling ten week voyage, headed to another destination, the Colony of Virginia. Bad weather forced their ship, the Mayflower, to anchor at the northern tip of Cape Cod.
My wife Vicki and I visited that very spot, at what now is called Provincetown, an eclectic seaside resort popular with artists and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Lively bars, restaurants, and even a drag show theatre occupy the town’s main street.
In the middle of that modern aesthetic, a 250-foot tall monument honoring the Pilgrims rises from the tallest hill. President Teddy Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for the imposing granite campanile in 1907, and President William Howard Taft dedicated it 3 years later.
At the base of the hill below the monument, a huge bas-relief commemorates the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Adult male pilgrims signed the document onboard in Provincetown Harbor on November 21, 1620, before sailing across Cape Cod and disembarking at Plymouth Rock.
The Mayflower Compact states (in relevant part):
[We] solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, covenant, and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
It’s a wonderful and virtuous aspiration—a civil body politic, for better ordering and preservation, and for the general good. But like many aspirations, it probably was more myth than reality in the implementation. In practice, it applied only to white Christian men.
That happened because, as one commentator has noted, “much of the power in Plymouth was guarded by the Pilgrim founders.” Still, as the commentator explained, “[T]he compact, with its fundamental principles of self-government and common consent, has been interpreted as an important step in the evolution of democratic government in America.”
The original version of the Mayflower Compact was lost, but its substance is recorded in Court’s Relation (1622), an account of Plymouth’s settlement written by Pilgrim leaders Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Winslow also wrote a now-famous letter for that same book:
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some 90 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, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”
According to the local historic association, the Plimouth Patuxet Foundation, “Later, in the 19th century, the [November 1621] event [described by Winslow above] entered American popular imagination as the First Thanksgiving.”
We traveled to the spot where all that happened too, at and near Plymouth Harbor on the west side of Cape Cod. Plymouth features a number of interesting related historical attractions, including a replica of the Mayflower (BTW, it’s very small).
The fate of the original Mayflower remains unknown, but perhaps not its landing site. Plymouth Rock, where the pilgrims are said to have arrived in November 1620, is near the Mayflower replica.
Contained within a pillared Greek-Roman temple-like structure, even the rock has a mythical quality to it. A 94-year-old local man first identified it in 1741 as the original landing spot, claiming his father (who arrived three years after the Pilgrims) told him about its location.
Plymouth also features a complex of museums—some of which we saw—operated by the Plimoth Patuxet Foundation and telling the story of the well-known events that occurred in the area. Formerly called the Plimoth Plantation, the organization added the tribal name in 2020 after over a year of contemplation.
At the time, the associate director of media relations and marketing said the museum had long spotlighted the native Wampanoag people, along with the Pilgrims, and so the name change was “about making sure that we are fully reflecting what we do here, and that includes and has long included the history and culture of the indigenous people of this region.”
The myth of the First Thanksgiving feast came under fire just before the pandemic in a 2019 book (This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving) written by George Washington University history professor David Silverman.
In a November 2019 interview about the book, Smithsonian Magazine asked Silverman to summarize the Thanksgiving myth. He responded, “The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit.”
Silverman also said the myth is “about Native people conceding to colonialism,” a bloodless gifting of their land to the settlers from England. He identified four “poignant inaccuracies” in this story.
The first is the misconception “that history doesn’t begin for Native people until Europeans arrive.” In fact, people had been in the Americas for least 12,000 years before then. The second is “that the arrival of the Mayflower is some kind of first-contact episode. It’s not. Wampanoags had a century of contact with Europeans—it was bloody and it involved slave raiding by Europeans.”
Third, about the feast, Silverman said, “Wampanoag leader Ousamequin (Massasoit) reached out to the English at Plymouth and wanted an alliance with them. But it’s not because he was innately friendly. It’s because his people have been decimated by an epidemic disease.” The Wampanoag leader saw the English as possible allies against his tribal rivals. “Hardly the stuff of Thanksgiving pageants,” Silverman noted.
Finally, Silverman criticized the Thanksgiving myth for not addressing either “the deterioration of this relationship culminating in one of the most horrific colonial Indian wars on record, King Philip’s War [1675-1678]” or the resilience of the Wampanoags who still survive today.
Four hundred years after that first Thanksgiving feast, The Washington Post ran an article with this provocative headline: “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.” This paragraph in the article was especially eye-catching, “Because while the Wampanoags did help the Pilgrims survive, their support was followed by years of a slow, unfolding genocide of their people and the taking of their land.”
It probably was never logical for an Irish Catholic like me to be inspired by the traditional Thanksgiving myth. The Yankees—descendants of the British settlers of New England—did not exactly welcome my ancestors with open arms when they arrived in Vermont two centuries after the Pilgrims.
Historians say the first large wave of the Irish migration to Vermont (where my ancestors eventually settled) occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century, at the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. The arriving Irish made Burlington the largest city in that state.
While visiting Burlington in 1835, the New England writer (and Puritan descendant) Nathaniel Hawthorne complained about “the great number of Irish” living there, who he described as “lounging” around the docks, as “swarming in huts and mean dwellings near the lake” and as “elbow[ing] the native citizens out of work.”
Perhaps infused with a touch of Yankee snobbery, it was a less-than-flattering literary description from the man who would go on to pen such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
Even though people like me may not have been welcomed at the original Thanksgiving feast, or at many Yankee feasts thereafter, I am glad I got to see the Pilgrim and Patuxet historic sites on Cape Cod, and to contemplate, even in small measure, the actual people and real stories underlying the myths that sprang from there.
I left Plymouth thinking that the real value of myth is aspiration. A myth can tell us who we want to be, or who we hope to be, and it provides a benchmark to show us how far we still must go to get there.
Besides the turkey gravy, I have always loved the Thanksgiving holiday because—according to my actual experience to date—it really has been based on fellowship and friendship, and on being grateful for the same as well as for many other blessings.
That’s a tradition I can easily continue, no matter what really happened at Plymouth over 400 years ago.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
