by Elliot Ewert

Created on: October 08, 2009

Part I: Coronado's Commemoration

Most individuals you ask on the street will acknowledge that the first Thanksgiving celebration about which they learned in the second grade, and probably re-enacted for fawning parents, is not an accurate account of history. But press for details surrounding the holiday's origins from any non-historian, and you will only hear in return some partially formulated scenario that involves wide-brimmed, buckled hats, a ship called the Mayflower, and a magical Native American woman named Pocahontas (or was it Squanto?) teaching the Pilgrims how to stave off malnourishment through advanced agriculture. If, when your children ask you why they have to travel three states away one day of the year to fall victim to Aunt Irma's cheek pinching and tofu turkey, I recommend you read further if you wish to relate to them a story with more veracity than what was taught in your elementary school's curriculum.

This history of Thanksgiving is comprised of not one, but multiple narratives. The myth of Americana ab incunabulis portrays a ship of wayward religious separatists, trodden upon in their English homeland, running aground on a giant rock off the coast of Massachusetts that was already engraved with the numerals 1620. Disembarking, they are showered in wooden beads and mussel shells by a tribe of friendly Indians known as the Wampanoag. After weathering a harsh winter, the Puritans, as their Anglican contemporaries back in the British Isles labeled them, successfully planted and reaped a generous harvest in the following seasons and consumed heartily at a merry feast held on the fourth Thursday of November in 1621.

With apologies to the Plymouth colonists, the first Day of Thanks to be observed on the continent was inaugurated several generations prior. Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco Coronado, famed for a failed expedition to find the mythical Seven Cities of Gold that eventually took him all the way from northwest Mexico to present-day central Kansas and back again, recorded in his diary that he and his men celebrated a Mass of thanksgiving on May 23, 1541.

For days, Coronado's force of approximately 300 Spaniards and 1200 native servants and scouts had been meandering across a meteorologically unforgiving stretch of short grass prairie in the Texas Panhandle that Coronado named the Llano Estacado or Pallisaded Planes. The region had no trees for shelter from the desiccating effects of the sun, no water for refreshment, and no

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