Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

“Profit” was the primary reason most Mayflower colonist made the trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, “Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history.” The Pilgrims hardly “started from scratch” in a “wilderness.” Throughout New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a park like environment. They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor and “brook of fresh water.”

Throughout New England, colonist appropriated Indian corn fields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock. This explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region – Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield – end in field.

Pilgrim-Indian relations started reasonably positive. Not all the native inhabitants had perished, and the survivors now facilitated British settlement. The Pilgrims began receiving Indian assistance on their second full day in Massachusetts. Plymouth, unlike many other colonies, usually paid the Indians for the land it took. In some instances Europeans settled in Indian towns because Indians had invited them, as protection against another tribe or a nearby competing European power.

The Pilgrims’ courage in setting forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first year the Pilgrims, like the Indians, suffered from diseases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half of them died. They did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its origin as the stricken Indian villagers. For at least a century Puritan ministers thundered their interpretation of the meaning of the plague from New England pulpits.

The Real Thanksgiving

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition.

The First Thanksgiving [1914] by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1850-1936), Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts