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Subject: Of Pilgrims, Meals and Myths;Today's Thanksgiving and Turkey Bear Little
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 92 10:44:02 EST
Message-ID: <37.1992Nov26.104402@AmeriCast.com>
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Of Pilgrims, Meals and Myths;Today's Thanksgiving and Turkey Bear
Little Resemblance to the Originals<By Christopher B.
Daly<Special to The Washington Post<

PLYMOUTH, Mass. - Of all the misconceptions that Americans harbor
about their past, few are more pervasive than the idea that
Thanksgiving Day has some mystical connection to the stern fore-
bears known as Pilgrims and their taste for little other than
turkey.

In fact, according to the most recent historical research, those
English settlers clinging to life in a village abandoned by Wam-
panoag Indians at the edge of Plymouth harbor would have been
dumbfounded at sitting down to what often constitutes a modern
Thanksgiving dinner: domesticated Butterball turkey with a side
of jellied cranberry.

They probably would not know what to do with a fork, either, be-
cause forks did not come into widespread use until well after the
1620s.  The ascendancy of the turkey is just one of the many cu-
rious features of Thanksgiving, perhaps because it is a holiday
created by presidential decree.  The result is a sort of cultural
vacuum into which Americans have poured Victorian ideas about the
country's founding English stock, consumerism and plain legend.

Even the bird stuffed and trussed today bears little resemblance
to the wild fowl consumed in 1621, when the colonists shared a
feast with Native Americans.

The modern oven-stuffer is an ungainly bird bloated by breeding.
According to James Cardoza, a biologist with the Massachusetts
Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, the barnyard turkey is des-
cended from wild fowl discovered in the 1500s by Spanish explor-
ers in Central America.

The Spanish took some home to Europe, where they were tamed and
bred for white meat. They were called "turkeys," Cardoza ex-
plained, because Europeans wrongly thought that they were related
to peacocks, which they - again wrongly - thought came from Tur-
key.

The Plymouth colonists dined on the genuine Meleagris gallopavo,
the wild native bird proposed by Benjamin Franklin as America's
national symbol. As the settlers discovered, the wild turkey is a
tasty but elusive bird, capable of short bursts of flight at
freeway speed through dense forests.

For the wild turkey, the arrival of the English was a disaster.
By 1850, according to Cardoza, turkeys were eliminated from Mas-
sachusetts because of hunting and forest-clearing. By 1900, there
were none in their entire range north of Pennsylvania.

In the past few decades, however, the wild turkey has regained a
lot of ground. In the early 1970s, enough had returned to New
York state for Massachusetts wildlife officials to begin a res-
toration project.

Thanks to similar efforts, there are an estimated 3.5 million
wild turkeys in the United States today, in every state except
Alaska.

In the mid-1980s, Massachusetts officials released 25 birds in
the Plymouth County town of Middleboro. Since then, Cardoza said,
that population has expanded, and a few have been spotted on the
outskirts of Plymouth, although they would not be caught dead
near the Pilgrims' old settlement, now the center of a busy town.

In Plymouth today, the memory of the first settlers is kept alive
at Plimoth Plantation, a "living museum" devoted to recreating
daily life in the year 1627. Interpreters dress in period costume
and answer visitors' questions in an English dialect from
Shakespeare's time.

The museum staff includes many experts on the 17th century. They
are continually discovering facts about the past, they said, but
are certain of this: The original settlers of Plymouth Colony had
no intention of inventing a holiday.

The colonists had much more pressing affairs, uppermost being
survival. Of the 100 or so who crossed the Atlantic aboard the
Mayflower in the fall of 1620, only about 50 remained alive a
year later.  The survivors, mostly pious separatists from the
Church of England, may well have felt like thanking God for see-
ing them through to the harvest. But the feast marked today is
not what the settlers would have called a "Day of Thanksgiving."

The Plymouth colonists observed such days from time to time, as
church elders saw fit, to observe a particular act of God's pro-
vidence. The feast with the Wampanoags commemorated as the "First
Thanksgiving" clearly was a harvest feast of the sort held by
farming people. It also was a secular feast because it included
Indians, who were nonbelievers, and involved games, recreation
and a display of arms.

The Indian leader Massasoit brought about 90 of his people. The
two groups apparently feasted amicably, at least this one time,
perhaps only because the English still were so dependent on the
natives. In any case, the settlers made little mention of the
event and never made it an annual affair. Soon, in fact, the
settlers and natives were to begin killing each other.

The holiday next appeared in 1777, when the Continental Congress
declared the first national Thanksgiving, a solemn occasion pro-
claimed sporadically by presidents George Washington, John Adams
and James Monroe but abandoned after 1815.

The custom was revived in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln,
no doubt thankful for Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg
that July, declared a day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in
November. He made no mention of the Pilgrims and offered no
suggestions as to how the day should be observed.

After that, a Thursday in late November was declared a national
holiday by each president until Franklin D. Roosevelt fixed the
date on the fourth Thursday of the month.

In the late 19th century, as some Americans expressed concern
over increasing waves of immigration, the keepers of the culture
cast about for emblems of the country's English heritage. The
Plymouth colonists, now called Pilgrims, fit the bill. Thus began
the myth-making about the First Thanksgiving.

In this century, the day has taken on added dimensions. It has
evolved into a football festival and the official start of the
Christmas shopping season, though in recent years many retailers
seem to have advanced that date ever closer to Halloween.

Researchers admit to continuing puzzlement about why Americans
make such a fuss over turkey. After all, they might just as well
be dining today on venison, swan or cod.<02:29 11-26C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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