Governor William Bradford sent “four men fowling” after wild ducks and geese.
The feast was more of a traditional English harvest festival than a true “thanksgiving” observance. It is believed that the Pilgrims would not have made it through the year without the help of the natives. And the remaining colonists decided to celebrate with a feast – including 91 natives who had helped the Pilgrims survive their first year. But the harvest of 1621 was a bountiful one. At the beginning of the following fall, they had lost 46 of the original 102 who sailed on the Mayflower. The Pilgrims set ground at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. Only about one-third of the original colonists were Separatists. Most of those making the trip aboard the Mayflower were non-Separatists, but were hired to protect the company’s interests.
Seeking a better life, the Separatists negotiated with a London stock company to finance a pilgrimage to America. There, they enjoyed more religious tolerance, but they eventually became disenchanted with the Dutch way of life, thinking it ungodly. They had earlier fled their home in England and sailed to Holland (The Netherlands) to escape religious persecution. The Pilgrims who sailed to this country aboard the Mayflower were originally members of the English Separatist Church (a Puritan sect). However, since most school children are taught that the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621 with the Pilgrims and Indians, let us take a closer look at just what took place leading up to that event, and then what happened in the centuries afterward that finally gave us our modern Thanksgiving. The holiday has been a fixture of late November ever since. Lincoln became the first president to proclaim Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving can, however, be traced back to 1863 when Pres. There is little evidence that this feast of thanks led directly to our modern Thanksgiving Day holiday.
Although they did have a three-day feast in celebration of a good harvest, and the local natives did participate, this “first thanksgiving” was not a holiday, simply a gathering. Most stories of Thanksgiving history start with the harvest celebration of the pilgrims and the Native Americans that took place in the autumn of 1621.
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