characterizes the Spaniards’ relations with the Indians as peaceful and friendly. The “great numbers of barbarian warriors” were helpful to the Spanish, and the Spanish were respectful and kind to the warriors, “showing ourselves agreeable friends.”5 The Indians directed the Spanish to a safe place for the expedition to cross the river: “the “passage,” or el paso, which gave its name to the city that grew up there. The poet also describes in colorful detail a feast that took place while Oñate’s expedition was resting at San Elizario—though possibly not on the day of thanksgiving itself. The Spanish shot cranes, ducks, and geese for the meal, and the Indians contributed fish. The meat and fish were cooked on spits and in the coals of a great bonfire. The day after their thanksgiving ceremony, the Spaniards packed up and moved on.
Historica de la Nueva México was published in 1610, but it took almost four centuries for the San Elizario Thanksgiving to become well known. In the late 1980s, local history buffs in San Elizario took up the story and used it to promote their town as a tourist destination. They inaugurated a festival that included re-enactments of La Toma and the Thanksgiving feast; they initiated a friendly competition with Plymouth about which town deserved to call itself the home of the First Thanksgiving; and they drummed up local media coverage, which in turn generated attention in the national press.
State politicians also took up the cause. In 1990, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution proclaiming that the First Thanksgiving in the United States had been held at San Elizario, not Plymouth. In 1991, Governor Ann Richards issued a proclamation declaring April 28, 1598 as “the first true Thanksgiving in the United States,”6 and, in what must go down in history as one of the biggest acts of Texas chutzpah, she called upon the governor of Massachusetts to follow suit. In 1995, Governor George W. Bush appointed a commission to plan activities to mark the quadricentennial in 1998 of Oñate’s colonizing mission. In 2001, Governor Rick Perry proclaimed April 30 as the official day of the First Thanksgiving for Texas.
In recent years, Texans have backed off a bit on the idea of San Elizario as the home of the true First Thanksgiving. San Elizarians still host a Thanksgiving festival at the end of April, with a re-enactment of the 1598 ceremony, but the proceedings focus broadly on the early history of the region. A recent festival included a scholarly discussion of the role of Franciscan missionaries, a history of viticulture in the Southwest, and a presentation on seventeenth-century musical instruments.
Al Borrego, president of the local Genealogical and Historical Society, sums up Texans’ new attitude on the First Thanksgiving when he asks: “Are we going to get the president of the United States to change the date of Thanksgiving?” Borrego answers his own question: “I don’t think so.” Besides, he adds, “I like turkey.”7
St. Augustine, Florida. Some years before the San Elizario conquistadores were parading down the streets of Plymouth to promote their 1598 First Thanksgiving, a historian was laboring quietly at his desk at the University of Florida in Gainesville researching earlier thanksgiving celebrations that occurred near present-day St. Augustine. Michael V. Gannon, a scholar of Florida’s colonial history, quotes Juan Ponce de León in the opening pages of his book The Cross in the Sand:
“Thanks be to Thee, O Lord, Who has permitted me to see something new,” said the Spanish explorer upon sighting the shore of the lush tropical land he would name La Florida. The year was 1513.8 Ponce de León may have been the first European to speak words of thanksgiving in what is now the United States.
Half a century after Ponce de León had “discovered” it, another Spanish fleet set sail for Florida, this time under the command of Captain-General Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. General Menéndez had two mandates from King Philip II. One was missionary, the other military: convert the Indians to Christianity, and secure Florida for Spain. The king was worried about a settlement by French Huguenots in Florida during the previous year. He saw the French settlement as a direct challenge to Spain’s rightful sovereignty over the peninsula and their Protestant religion as a threat to Roman Catholicism.
Menéndez’s fleet reached the coast of Florida in early September 1565, carrying eight hundred colonists. On September 6, he sailed into the harbor at the place he would name St. Augustine, anchoring just off the Timucua Indian village of Seloy. The fleet chaplain, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, kept notes of the voyage and described the sequence of events leading up to the day of thanksgiving called to express thanks to God for the Spaniards’ safe arrival.
An advance party made up of two companies of infantrymen disembarked and were “well-received by the Indians,” Father López wrote. The Timucua gave the Spanish a large house that belonged to a chief and was well situated alongside the river. Worried that the Indians’ friendliness might not hold, the Spanish went to work fortifying the house and building a trench around it to protect themselves from surprise attack. Two days later, on Saturday, September 8, General Menéndez was ready to come ashore.
The general’s landing was full of pomp and circumstance. The priest recorded how Menéndez stepped onto Florida soil “with many banners spread” and “to the sound of trumpets and salutes of artillery.” Father López, who had gone ashore the evening before, went to meet the general, carrying a cross and singing Te Deum Laudamus, or “Thee, O God, We Praise,” a Latin hymn traditionally sung on occasions of public rejoicing. A makeshift altar was set up in the sand. “The General, followed by all who accompanied him, marched up to the Cross, knelt, and kissed it,” Father López recounted. As a large number of Timucua watched, the newcomers celebrated a thanksgiving Mass. Afterward, the Timucua joined the Spanish for a meal at the invitation of General Menéndez. Professor Gannon describes the event as “the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land.”9
Historians who have analyzed the ship’s accounts say the menu was probably the Spaniards’ usual shipboard fare: salted pork, onions, garbanzo beans—possibly assembled in a bean stew called cocido and washed down with red wine. There is no record of what, if anything, the Timucua contributed, though some have conjectured that they would have offered something for the communal meal—maybe local game, possibly including wild turkey, which was plentiful at the time. The Timucua might also have brought seafood, maize, beans, nuts, and fruit.
Two decades passed before Gannon’s research on the St. Augustine Thanksgiving became widely known. In the mid-1980s, an Associated Press reporter, seeking a new angle for an article he was writing on the holiday, stumbled upon Gannon’s work, called him up, and then wrote about what happened in 1565. The AP story was picked up by the national media, and soon Gannon found himself with a new nickname, courtesy of New Englanders who were disgruntled that the Sunshine State was encroaching on their holiday. The Florida professor was now “the Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving.”
Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. The Commonwealth of Virginia’s claim to hosting the First Thanksgiving rests on an event that happened on December 4, 1619. On that day, the English ship Margaret dropped anchor in the James River at what was then known as Berkeley Hundred and is now called Berkeley Plantation. It is located twenty-four miles southwest of Richmond.
The Margaret was carrying thirty-six Englishmen—farmers, craftsmen, and other skilled workers—who were committed to building a successful settlement in the New World. They had departed England ten weeks earlier under a commission from the London-based Berkeley Company to settle eight thousand acres of land along the James River. These settlers hoped to avoid the fate of Jamestown, which had failed in part because the cavaliers and courtiers who went there in 1607 knew little about farming or other skills essential to the colony’s survival. The Margaret party’s captain, John
