rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_907b98c3-06d0-56a2-acf1-425243eb3868.jpg" alt=""/>
Although we are grateful to the English pilgrims who endured hardships and faced formidable risks to help colonize America, the Thanksgiving decreed by the Spaniard Don Juan de Oñate deserves equal credit and its own place in American history.
—Ann W. Richards, Governor of Texas, 1991
A few weeks before Thanksgiving Day 1991, anyone who happened to be strolling along Court Street in downtown Plymouth would have witnessed a curious sight: a group of unfamiliar men dressed in doublets, wearing odd-shaped metal helmets festooned with feathers, and brandishing swords. What brought a company of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores to the heart of this classic New England town, home of the Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers?
All became clear when one of the conquistadores opened his mouth and, in a smooth Texas drawl, started speaking heresy: Plymouth did not deserve to be called the home of the First Thanksgiving, he announced. The true First Thanksgiving in what became the United States of America, he said, took place in San Elizario, Texas, a town twenty miles south of El Paso along the Rio Grande. In April 1598, Spanish settlers and Native Americans broke bread together in a feast that deserves to be acknowledged as America’s First Thanksgiving.
Plymouth’s response? The conquistadores were duly “arrested,” jailed, and charged with “spreading malicious and false rumors and blasphemy.” After a mock trial, they were acquitted on the basis of insufficient evidence and released.
This little drama on the streets of Plymouth was, of course, a show—a good-natured publicity stunt orchestrated by Texan history buffs eager to draw attention to their hometown of San Elizario and the role it played in the early history of the United States. The next year, Plymouth returned the favor, dispatching a contingent of local selectmen dressed as Pilgrims to Texas. They, too, were “arrested,” “tried,” and “convicted,” then pardoned at the base of the gallows.1
This was all good fun—not to mention excellent PR for both towns. As a matter of historical record, however, the Texans had a point. History shows that the Pilgrims weren’t the first Europeans to hold religious services of thanksgiving in the New World, nor were they the first European settlers to sit together with Native Americans at a thanksgiving table in the land that became the United States.
Most of the pre-Pilgrim thanksgivings were celebrated by European newcomers in parts of the country far from New England. More often than not, these were religious ceremonies called for the purpose of giving thanks for the Europeans’ safe arrival in North America. The Age of Exploration was also an age of prayer, and the safe conclusion of a dangerous journey was just one of many reasons for a Christian to kneel and give thanks.
The pre-Plymouth thanksgivings were mostly religious observances—Protestant prayer services or Catholic Masses. A couple of them included a festive component, in the form of a meal and perhaps some entertainment. At least one thanksgiving—at Popham Colony in present-day Maine in 1607—was in part a harvest festival.
Several of the early thanksgivings celebrated by Europeans in the New World were shared with Native Americans, who observed the religious ceremonies, contributed food to a meal, or assisted the Europeans in other ways. None apparently took the large role that the Wampanoag played in Plymouth in helping the English to thrive. As in Plymouth, relations between the Europeans and indigenous people would degenerate in the years that followed, but for a moment in time, ties between the two peoples were harmonious, if wary.
The motivation of the modern-day claimants to the title of First Thanksgiving is easy to explain as local pride coupled with an eagerness to highlight local history. But it is also true that success has many friends. San Elizario and other locations with events in their early history that might be deemed Thanksgivings hoped to ride on the coattails of the New England Thanksgiving that Americans know and love. It is easy to smile when a town publicizes itself as a competitor to Plymouth, but there is a serious aspect to such claims. They are reminders that all the newcomers to our shores felt grateful to be here and found ways to express their gratitude.
There are at least seven claimants for the title of “First Thanksgiving”—in Texas, Virginia, Florida, and Maine. The Big Three are San Elizario, Texas (1598); St. Augustine, Florida (1565); and Berkeley Plantation, Virginia (1619).
San Elizario, Texas. On April 30, 1598, an expedition traveling north from Mexico held a Roman Catholic service of thanksgiving along the banks of the Rio Grande. Led by the Spanish explorer Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar, the travelers had set up camp at what is now the dusty town of San Elizario.
Oñate, the son of a Spanish noble family, had been commissioned by King Philip II to seize the land north of the Rio Grande and claim it for the Spanish Empire. His expeditionary force included more than four hundred men, women, and children. Some were soldiers ready to fight to secure the Spanish claims; others were settlers prepared to take up residence in the uncharted territories of Nueva México. The settlers brought with them thousands of sheep, pigs, goats, cattle, mules, and horses for use in their new homes, and the expedition stretched for miles as it wended its way north from Santa Barbara in central Mexico toward the Rio Grande. By the time the travelers reached what is now San Elizario, they had been on the road for three months and had traveled hundreds of miles across the unforgiving terrain of the Chihuahuan Desert.
The expedition’s scribe, Captain Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, chronicled the journey in an epic poem, Historica de la Nueva México. Villagrá provides vivid descriptions of the San Elizario Thanksgiving and the circumstances leading up to it.2
By the time the expedition reached the Rio Grande, Villagrá writes, the travelers had been without food or water for four days. Their suffering was so intense that they “were almost all wishing for death.”3 Horses staggered into the river, drinking so much that two of the animals died when their full stomachs burst. Two additional horses, blinded by starvation, ventured too far into the rushing water and were swept away. The two-legged travelers also drank their fill. Thirsty men drank so much that they appeared to be drunk. In Villagrá’s evocative words, they were:
Stretched out upon the watery sand,
As swollen, dropsical, gasping,
As they had all been toads . . .4
Having assuaged their thirst, the toad-travelers rested under the cottonwood trees along the river for ten days, gathering strength and preparing to move on.
But before they resumed their journey, Oñate called for a day of thanksgiving, ordering that a makeshift church be created in a clearing in the woods. He commanded that the clearing for the thanksgiving Mass be large enough to hold the entire expeditionary force and an unspecified number of Indians.
When the appointed day arrived, Franciscan missionaries who were traveling with the expedition sang Mass, and Oñate read a proclamation known as La Toma—the Taking—declaring that he was claiming all the land north of the Rio Grande for Spain. Then a play—a “great drama,” writes Villagrá—was performed for the benefit of the Indians, depicting how all of New Mexico welcomed the arrival of the Catholic Church. It was the first
