It shows a man dancing to celebrate his kill of a mountain sheep, which has a spear driven through its body. I know of a thanks-giving scene, thousands of years old, painted on the wall of a cave in a mountain in the desert of West Texas. We see it in the figures carved from stone and images painted or scribed on cave walls during antiquity. We see evidence embedded in the folk stories and ceremonies of people who still depend on wild animals and plants for their living. In fact, from a worldwide perspective, the concept of giving thanks appears to be universal and ancient, an expression of gratitude to the gods who delivered game and harvest to early hunters and foragers. The date for the first Thanksgiving in America is lost somewhere in pre-history. Credit for that event belongs to the Native Americans.Īmong others, the Indians who greeted the Pilgrims when they stepped onto Plymouth Rock had long conducted Thanksgiving festivals six times a year. The Jacksonville Thanksgiving, it is thought, was celebrated by Huguenots - French Protestants - who gave thanks for their new settlement.Īpparently, this was, indeed, the first European Thanksgiving in the United States.īut it was still not our very first Thanksgiving. The Spaniards and Indians shared salt pork and sea biscuits.įlorida’s school children are taught that the true first Thanksgiving took place near Jacksonville in 1564, more than half a century before the Pilgrim-Indian feast and 34 years before Onate’s celebration. Menendez invited the local Indians to the feast. The event was celebrated by Don Pedro Menendez’s colonists, who had just landed. The El Paso claim notwithstanding, Onate’s Thanksgiving was still not the first in America.įlorida residents point out that an earlier Spanish Thanksgiving occurred near what is now St. It was celebrated by Don Juan de Onate’s expedition upon reaching the river en route to colonize northern New Mexico for Spain. ![]() Some El Paso, Texas, citizens claim that the first Thanksgiving occurred on the Rio Grande on April 30, 1598, four centuries ago, a few miles downstream from their city’s modern location. So that must have been the first Thanksgiving, right? Wrong again. Virginia colonists had held a Thanksgiving two years earlier in celebration of the safe arrival of new colonists. They ate stuffed turkeys, baked ham, cranberry sauce and baked yams, then finished the whole thing off with a big slice of pumpkin pie. ![]() Remember the month of November in kindergarten or first grade? You learned that, during the fall of 1621, noble Pilgrims invited friendly and helpful Indians to a feast to celebrate a rich autumn harvest at a new colony called Plymouth, in what is now Massachusetts.
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