Thanksgiving Celebrated During the 17th Century

It is an usual belief that during the 1600's, accurately in the year 1621, the English colonists and the Wampanoag Indians got together and shared a wonderful fall harvest feast to celebrate the bounty from the plentiful earth. Nowadays this celebratory feast is considered as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the early days of the colonies. Although that long ago feast is regarded by a lot of people to be the first Thanksgiving celebration, it was, in reality, part of a long standing tradition of celebrating the seasonal harvest and giving thanks for a large bounty of crops that would last through the long hard winter. Numerous Native American groups of what would become known as America, including the Pueblo, Cherokee, Shawnee, Huron, Creek, Blackfoot and many others would hold large harvest festivals, consisting in ceremonial dances, races, games and some more joyful celebrations of gratefulness many centuries before the European peoples arrived.

Ever wonder what sort of food was laid out on the table at the harvest feast? Although a majority of historians can not be one hundred percent certain regarding what was served, it's a pretty safe bet to suppose that the pilgrims weren't sucking down pumpkin pie or building towers with the mashed potatoes. However, we can have an idea of the foods available to the colonists at that time; which are venison and several types wild poultry such as duck, goose or wild turkey. These have been mentioned in diverse written sources of the time. The best, and most circumstancial, description of the harvest feast of 1621 has been written by a man named Edward Winslow. Here is an excerpt from his story titled "A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth" that allowed historians to gather much of the information about this first Thanksgiving celebration:

"...Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty..." - Edward Winslow, 1595-1655.

Nowadays, the common Thanksgiving feast is centered on the turkey, but this was not the case at this early Thanksgiving feast. The food of the first settlers would have included a lot of different meats. Vegetable dishes were not a big part of the meals of the seventeenth century settlers. In the same way, the settlers did not have the huge choice of vegetables that we have today. Freezing methods did not exist; which means that the vegetable consumption was based on seasonal harvests. Because the settlers and Wampanoag tribe had no refrigeration in the 1600s, they dried a lot of their foods to preserve them. They would dry corn, wild boar hams, fish, venison, and many wild herbs.