First Thanksgiving (1621): Pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plymouth

The First Thanksgiving was a harvest celebration held at Plymouth Colony in the autumn of 1621, when about 50 English colonists and some 90 Wampanoag men led by Massasoit feasted together for three days. It is known from just one short eyewitness description. Over the next two centuries this modest event was transformed into the founding myth of the American Thanksgiving holiday.

Background: a colony that nearly failed

The colonists had arrived on the Mayflower in November 1620 and settled on the site of Patuxet, a Wampanoag village emptied by an epidemic around 1616–1619. Their first winter was catastrophic: about half of the 102 passengers died from disease, cold and poor food.

In March 1621 the colonists made contact with their Wampanoag neighbours. On 22 March the paramount leader Massasoit, whose personal name was Ousamequin, agreed a treaty of mutual defence with Governor John Carver. Massasoit’s people had been badly weakened by the epidemic and feared the powerful Narragansett to the west, so an alliance with the armed English made strategic sense to him.

Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, became the colonists’ interpreter and adviser. A Patuxet man who had been kidnapped in 1614 and taken to Spain and England, he spoke English and showed the settlers how to grow maize by planting it in hills fertilised with fish. That spring the colonists planted about 20 acres of maize and a few acres of English barley and peas.

What the sources actually say

Almost everything known about the gathering comes from a letter written by Edward Winslow, one of the colony’s leaders, dated 11 December 1621. It was published in London in 1622 in a pamphlet now called Mourt’s Relation.

Winslow wrote that after the harvest had been gathered, Governor William Bradford sent four men out fowling, so that the colonists might rejoice together in a special way. In one day they killed enough birds to feed the colony for almost a week. During the celebrations, among other recreations, the men exercised their arms, probably a display of musket drill.

Many Wampanoag came, Winslow continued, among them Massasoit with some 90 men. They were entertained and feasted for three days, and the Wampanoag went out and killed five deer, which they presented to the governor and other leaders. Winslow ended by stressing that, by God’s goodness, the colonists were far from want.

Bradford’s own history, Of Plymouth Plantation, written years later, does not describe the feast. However, it does record that in the autumn of 1621 the colonists had plenty of cod and bass, waterfowl, wild turkeys and venison, along with their maize harvest. Together, these two passages are the entire documentary record.

When and why it happened

Neither source gives a date. Because Winslow described it as following the harvest, and his letter was written in December, historians place it between late September and mid-November 1621. It was not linked to any particular day of the week.

Why Massasoit came with so many men is also uncertain. He may have been invited, or he may have arrived in response to the gunfire of the fowling party or the military exercise, ready to support his allies if they were under attack. Some historians favour the second explanation, but the sources do not say.

What is clear is that the event was a diplomatic occasion as well as a meal. Ninety armed Wampanoag men far outnumbered the surviving colonists, and sharing food over three days helped confirm the alliance made that spring. For the Wampanoag, harvest celebrations and gift-giving were long-standing traditions; for the English, harvest-home festivals were common in the countryside they had left.

What was on the table

Winslow mentions only fowl and five deer. The birds were probably ducks and geese, and possibly wild turkeys, which Bradford says were plentiful that autumn. Venison was certainly eaten, and maize, probably prepared as bread or porridge, was the main crop.

Other foods likely available included cod, bass, eels, lobster, clams and mussels, as well as nuts, squash, beans and wild berries. Cranberries grew locally, but cranberry sauce would have needed sugar, which the colonists had little or none of.

Several modern staples were almost certainly missing. Potatoes were not yet grown in New England, and without ovens, butter or much flour the colonists could not bake pumpkin pies. Meals would have been eaten outdoors or in small houses, with people standing, sitting on the ground or sharing a few tables.

The alliance after 1621

The friendship celebrated in 1621 had limits from the start. Tensions grew over Tisquantum, who tried to increase his own influence by playing the English and Massasoit against each other. He died of a fever in late 1622. In 1623 the Plymouth militia under Myles Standish killed several Massachusett men at Wessagusset after Massasoit warned of a plot, an attack that alarmed many Native communities.

Still, the alliance with Massasoit held for decades and protected Plymouth during its early years. It weakened as English settlement spread and colonial courts claimed authority over Native people. In 1675, more than a decade after Massasoit’s death around 1660, his son Metacom, known to the English as King Philip, led Native communities in King Philip’s War, one of the deadliest conflicts in colonial American history.

From harvest feast to national holiday

In 1621 the gathering was not called a thanksgiving. For the colonists, a thanksgiving was a solemn day of prayer and worship declared in response to a specific blessing. Plymouth’s first recorded religious day of thanksgiving came in the summer of 1623, when rain ended a long drought.

New England colonies and later states declared days of thanksgiving regularly, usually in autumn, but these had no connection to the 1621 meal. Winslow’s letter was largely forgotten until the nineteenth century. In 1841 the Boston clergyman Alexander Young reprinted it in his Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers and added a footnote calling the event “the first Thanksgiving”, the origin of the modern label.

At the same time the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for years for a single national Thanksgiving Day. During the Civil War, on 3 October 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving for the last Thursday of November. Pictures and school pageants of Pilgrims and Indians sharing a feast became popular from the late nineteenth century.

In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday a week earlier to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, causing a political row. In December 1941 Congress settled the matter by law, fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, where it remains.

Myths and facts

Myth: It was the first thanksgiving in America. Other claims exist. Spanish settlers held a thanksgiving Mass and meal at St Augustine, Florida, in 1565, Juan de Oñate’s expedition celebrated near El Paso in 1598, and English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia held a day of thanksgiving on 4 December 1619.

Myth: The Wampanoag were invited guests at a peaceful family meal. The sources do not say they were invited, and the event was also a show of strength and diplomacy between allies who had good reasons to watch each other closely.

Myth: The Pilgrims wore black with buckled hats. Plymouth colonists wore a range of colours, including browns, greens and reds, and buckles were not fashionable until later in the century. Early twentieth-century paintings also often gave the Wampanoag feathered headdresses of the Great Plains, which they did not wear.

Fact: The modern menu is largely a nineteenth-century creation. Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie became the standard Thanksgiving meal long after 1621, shaped by New England cookery and magazines such as Hale’s.

Remembering it today

Since 1970, Native activists have gathered on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth each Thanksgiving Day for a National Day of Mourning. It began after the Wampanoag leader Wamsutta Frank James was invited to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival; when organisers objected to his draft speech about the effects of colonisation, he and others held their own gathering instead.

Today two Wampanoag tribes are federally recognised, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), while other Wampanoag communities continue without federal status. Museums such as Plimoth Patuxet now present both English and Wampanoag perspectives on 1621, and many teachers describe the event as a harvest gathering between allies rather than as the birth of a holiday.

Timeline

• 1621, 22 March: Massasoit and the Plymouth colonists agree a treaty of mutual defence.
• 1621, spring: The colonists plant maize with Tisquantum’s guidance.
• 1621, autumn: About 50 colonists and some 90 Wampanoag men share a three-day harvest celebration.
• 1621, 11 December: Edward Winslow writes the letter describing the gathering.
• 1622: Winslow’s letter is published in London in Mourt’s Relation.
• 1623, summer: Plymouth holds its first recorded religious day of thanksgiving after a drought ends.
• 1841: Alexander Young calls the 1621 event “the first Thanksgiving”.
• 1863, 3 October: Lincoln proclaims a national day of thanksgiving.
• 1941, December: Congress fixes Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.
• 1970: The first National Day of Mourning is held at Plymouth.

Why it matters

The 1621 gathering was a short, practical moment of cooperation between two peoples who needed each other. Its later transformation into a national origin story shows how a few lines in a letter can become a powerful myth. Reading the real sources alongside Wampanoag history gives a fuller and more honest picture of how English colonisation in New England began.