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 population of natives for guidance, excepting a duplicitous Indian slave that Coronado dubbed El Turque (because, according to the half-cooked conquistador's parched perceptions, he sported the facial features of a man from Turkey). El Turque, whose poor advice may have been merely misinformed and foolish, but in greater probability was a disingenuous retaliation against his poor treatment at the hands of the gold-lusting Spaniards, had been leading Coronado's entourage on a wild turkey chase in search of the fabled City of Quivira, the most magnificent and splendid polis of Coronado's elusive Seven Cities. When Coronado smelled the foul odor of mendacity on the breath of El Turque's questionable counsel, the conquistador ordered that a subordinate caballero snuff out the buttinski's bogus rhetoric with a quick thrust of Toledo steel.
Having no contact with local Indians for days, and with dwindling supplies, Coronado's men made a final, feeble push into the Palo Duro Canyon. The night of their arrival, a violent hailstorm spooked many of their horses into a stampede that the soldiers never quelled. The next morning, most of the pack animals had either plunged to their deaths over the canyon's rim or disappeared into the yellow sea of prairie grass that deluged the entire landscape.
Faced with imminent starvation due to a loss of provisions and matrial, the Spanish cavalcade was rescued from demise only at the eleventh hour by a friendly confederation of Caddo Indian tribes known as the Hasinai, who generously distributed foodstuffs amongst the men. Coronado, who apparently would not let anyone else in his company take a turn at giving names to the new things they encountered, purportedly labeled the amicable natives Tejas, the Spanish cognate of the Caddo word te-haas, meaning those who are friends.
Both Coronado and the chief Franciscan monk accompanying the expedition, Juan de Padilla, interpreted the Indians' fortuitous intervention as divine providence. The following morning, Padilla called all members of the entrada to Mass. The worshippers prostrated themselves in prayer along the rim of the canyon. Looking across an expansive rift that was nearly 800 feet deep and six miles wide (up to 20 at certain points) the soldiers were no doubt in awe of God's power manifested in this extraordinary geographical feature. After the prayers were uttered, Coronado and his men consumed a celebratory feast of the provisions the Tejas had afforded them. Historians dispute whether the meal and accompanying religious service were ad hoc events per the request of Friar Padilla, or instead an attempt to celebrate the Day of Ascension, an important Catholic Holiday. A few revisionists have even gone so far to argue that the passing references to the consumption grapes and pecans, which cannot grow on the slopes of the Palo Duro, in certain historical texts composed years after the celebration's occurrence indicate that no such feast happened on the escarpment but instead much further south at the forks of the Brazos River, where agriculture more readily flourishes.
Be sure to continue following this series discussing the various Feasts of Thanks those early European arrivals in America celebrated in the century prior to the Pilgrims' famous fall fiesta.
Notes:
Coppedge, Clay. 2008. Thanksgiving as a Texas Thing. Texas Escapes. http://www.texasescapes.com/ClayCoppedge/Thanksgivin g-as-a-Texas-Thing.htm. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
Kingston, Mike. 1991. The First Thanksgiving?. Texas Almanac. http://www.texasalmanac.com/history/highlights/thank sgiving/. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
Moore, R. Edward. 1998. Caddo Cultures in Texas. Texas Indians. New Braunfels, TX: Texarch Associates. http://www.texasindians.com/caddo.htm. Retrieved September 28, 2009.
Winship, George Parker. 1990. The Journey of Coronado 1540-1542. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Introduction by Donald C. Cutter.