What science and history teach us about the first Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a time to be with family and friends.
However, most of what we believe about Thanksgiving is almost entirely not true. Let’s take a look at the real historic and scientific happenings that eventually turned into our Thanksgiving.
The Mayflower pilgrims
Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower and landed in what is now Cape Cod in the northeastern United States in late 1620. The pilgrims were encouraged by the available land that had fresh water and lots of cleared land for houses and farming.
Things were not all great, though. The final landing spot ended up being well north of where they anticipated. It was far colder than they hoped, and the seeds they brought from England did not perform well in these conditions.
Because they did not have homes yet, most of the 102 pilgrims had to live the first winter on the ship with very little food and lots of illnesses. More than half did not survive the winter. The following spring, the surviving pilgrims needed to start farming but did not know how in this new climate and soil.
This is where Native Americans came in.
Native Americans taught the pilgrims how to grow crops such as squash, corn, and beans. This was kind, because their first food encounter consisted of the pilgrims stealing stored food crops from the Native Americans.
The pilgrims picked up the new skills and had a very successful crop by the next fall. They decided to celebrate their good fortunes with a feast, and experts are not certain if the Native Americans were really invited or if they came to the celebration out of curiosity after hearing celebratory gunshots.
Either way, the pilgrims either welcomed or allowed the Native Americans to stay. The feast likely consisted of little meat, certainly not turkey, and mostly corn and oysters.
Plagues paved the way
The fact that the pilgrims found cleared land for settlement was due to the severe misfortune of the Native Americans. The pilgrims were not at all the first to settle in what is now the United States.
Native Americans had many villages in the very same areas that likely numbered between 50,000 to 100,000 people. Pilgrims were not even close to being the first Europeans on this land. Europeans were coming to this land and even creating settlements many years before. This was bad for the Native Americans because the Europeans brought their germs.
Native Americans did not evolve with the germs that the settlers brought over and it was devastating. The land that was so clear and perfect for the pilgrims was only because nearly all the Native Americans from that village had died from an epidemic.
They were the ones who cleared all that land, but now they were gone. The pilgrims were so desperate for food that first winter that they resorted to taking food from the Native American graves.
Those Native American populations left were weakened by the recent epidemics, and that caused political conflict among the various tribes. Instead of sticking together, they fractured further and some sought to form an alliance with the European settlers.
It’s not all bad
Despite this not being the happy story most of us learned, there were some positive aspects of the true story. First, the harvest celebration (that wasn’t actually called Thanksgiving until the 1800s) really was a time of cooperation between the settlers and Native Americans.
Both groups taught the other new skills and a mutually beneficial trade system was set up. It wasn’t until later that the new colonies wanted more and more land, and forcibly took it from the Native Americans. At this point forward, relations between the new colonists and Native Americans turned ugly and the true history of the new colonists is not pretty. However, the original pilgrims were not involved in that.
The original harvest celebration was indeed a time to celebrate good fortunes and today’s Thanksgiving can and should be the same — a time to celebrate the things you are thankful for, just like the original Pilgrims did.
At the same time, it would be appropriate to give thoughts to the losses our Native Americans suffered as Pilgrims discovered this “new world."
Mike Szydlowski is a science teacher and zoo facilitator at Jefferson STEAM School.
TIME FOR A POP QUIZ
Why were the seeds brought over from England not very successful?
What is an epidemic?
Why were the Native Americans so much more weakened by disease than the Europeans?
How might things have been different if the epidemics did not hit the Native Americans?
What is one similarity between the pilgrims' celebration and our Thanksgiving?
LAST WEEK'S POP QUIZ ANSWERS
What is specific heat?
Specific heat is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 kg of a material 1 degree Celsius.
Put the following materials in order from lowest to highest specific heat: soil, water, grass, concrete.
Grass, soil, concrete, water
Write a sentence that explains the relationship between the specific heat of a material and how long it takes to heat or cool.
The higher the specific heat of a material, the longer it takes to heat up or cool down.
If a winter storm comes after a few days of warm weather, why do you want a round of sleet to fall before the snow if you are wanting a snow day?
Sleet contains quite a bit of ice and it takes a lot of energy away from the road to melt that ice.
If you see that temperatures are going to be really cold for a few days in early winter, why is it unlikely you will be able to ice skate anytime soon?
Water has the highest specific heat capacity, so it will take a long time before that water cools enough to make ice and enough of it to be safe to skate on.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: What science and history teach us about the first Thanksgiving
