History & Perspectives

The First Thanksgiving: What Really Happened in 1621?

The familiar story of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a peaceful feast is only part of the truth.

In 1841, historian Alexander Young was examining documents from the early Plymouth colony when he encountered a letter written by Edward Winslow in December 1621. It described a three-day harvest celebration attended by English settlers and Wampanoag men. Young added a footnote identifying the occasion as the first Thanksgiving.

That footnote helped give an obscure colonial gathering a place in American history. Yet Winslow, who attended the celebration, had devoted only a paragraph to it. He mentioned hunting, military exercises, food and visitors, leaving historians to reconstruct the occasion from very little evidence.

An alliance at the table

The English settlers had survived a disastrous first winter, losing approximately half the Mayflower's passengers. The Wampanoag had endured an epidemic between 1616 and 1619 that devastated communities along the New England coast.

Plymouth stood on the site of Patuxet, a Wampanoag settlement emptied by disease. Tisquantum, known as Squanto, had been kidnapped by an English captain in 1614 and taken to Europe. Returning years later, he discovered that his community had been destroyed. His knowledge of English subsequently made him an intermediary between the colonists and the Wampanoag.

In March 1621, the Wampanoag leader Ousamequin, called Massasoit by the English, negotiated a mutual-defense agreement with Plymouth. The Wampanoag faced pressure from the neighboring Narragansett, while the English needed allies, food and local knowledge.

By autumn, the alliance was holding. Approximately fifty-three English colonists were present at the harvest celebration. Winslow recorded Ousamequin arriving with about ninety Wampanoag men, making the Indigenous delegation considerably larger than the English gathering.

The Wampanoag contributed five deer, an impressive gift in a society where the exchange of food could carry diplomatic significance. The English supplied wildfowl, although Winslow never identified the birds. Turkey may have been eaten, but the famous menu of roast turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie is largely a later invention. There is no contemporary evidence of pumpkin pie at the gathering.

Winslow also mentioned military exercises involving firearms. Mashpee Wampanoag historian Paula Peters has suggested that the sound of gunfire may have drawn Ousamequin and his men to Plymouth. The surviving account does not establish why they arrived, leaving their presence open to historical interpretation.

How a harvest became a national story

The colonists did not establish an annual Thanksgiving holiday in 1621. Days of religious thanksgiving already existed, and the Plymouth gathering was remembered as a harvest celebration.

George Washington proclaimed a national thanksgiving observance in 1789. Decades later, editor Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for an annual holiday, and Abraham Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, during the Civil War.

Meanwhile, Young's 1841 footnote helped connect the Plymouth feast with the emerging national tradition. Nineteenth-century histories and schoolbooks gradually turned a brief colonial episode into a familiar scene of peaceful cooperation.

The years after 1621 tell a harsher story. As English settlement expanded, disputes over land and political authority intensified. In 1675, war broke out between colonists and Indigenous forces led by Metacom, Ousamequin's son. The conflict devastated Native communities across southern New England.

Since 1970, Indigenous people and their supporters have gathered in Plymouth for a National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, commemorating the consequences of colonization. Other Native Americans celebrate the holiday with their families.

The three-day gathering of 1621 was real, but the familiar Thanksgiving story took shape centuries later. Winslow left a paragraph describing what he saw. In 1841, Alexander Young supplied the name by which Americans would come to remember it.