The Real History of Thanksgiving: What Happened in 1621 and How the Holiday Changed

The gathering remembered today as the “First Thanksgiving” was a three-day harvest celebration at Plymouth in 1621, but many details added to the story later are not found in the surviving historical record.

Every November, Americans sit down to one of the most recognizable meals in the country: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and enough leftovers to keep the refrigerator occupied for a week.

There is a real event underneath that story.

But the history is both more complicated and more interesting.

We have an eyewitness account of a three-day harvest celebration at Plymouth in the autumn of 1621. We know English colonists participated. We know Ousamequin, the Wampanoag leader commonly called Massasoit in English records, was there with about 90 men. We know the English hunted birds and the Wampanoag brought five deer.

Beyond that, some surprisingly large blank spaces remain.

The people at the gathering did not call it the “First Thanksgiving.” We do not have a complete menu. We do not know exactly why the Wampanoag arrived when they did. And the event only became the centerpiece of America's Thanksgiving origin story generations later.

To understand Thanksgiving, then, we have to separate the 1621 event from the mythology that eventually grew around it.

That turns out to be a much better story.

Did Thanksgiving really begin in 1621?

The famous Plymouth gathering happened in 1621, but it did not invent the practice of giving thanks, and the people who attended it did not call it the “First Thanksgiving.”

Harvest celebrations and ceremonies of gratitude long predated Plymouth.

Wampanoag communities already had their own cultural and seasonal traditions. English communities also observed harvest celebrations and religious days of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving observances had even occurred elsewhere in English North America before 1621.

An often-cited example comes from Berkeley Hundred in Virginia. Instructions issued in 1619 directed settlers there to commemorate the anniversary of their arrival as a yearly day of thanksgiving.

So 1621 was neither humanity's first harvest celebration nor colonial America's first use of the word “thanksgiving.”

What happened at Plymouth became important for another reason: Americans eventually chose it as a national origin story.

Plimoth Patuxet Museums notes that the 1621 celebration did not enter popular American imagination as the “First Thanksgiving” until the 19th century.

What was happening in Wampanoag country before the Mayflower arrived?

The Mayflower did not arrive in an empty wilderness. The English settlers entered Wampanoag homelands that already had a long history, established communities, political relationships, agriculture, trade, and previous contact with Europeans.

Those previous encounters had often been destructive.

In 1614, English captain Thomas Hunt kidnapped 20 men from Patuxet and seven from Nauset, intending to sell them into slavery. One of the Patuxet men was Tisquantum, often called Squanto in English-language accounts.

Even more devastating were the epidemics that struck Indigenous communities along the Northeast coast from roughly 1616 to 1619. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian describes this period as the Great Dying. Wampanoag communities were devastated, and Patuxet was among the villages emptied by the epidemic.

Tisquantum eventually returned to his homeland in 1619 and found that his community had been destroyed.

When the Mayflower colonists established Plymouth the following year, they built their settlement on the site of Patuxet.

That context matters enormously.

The English were not appearing in an untouched place. They were entering a Native political landscape that had recently suffered catastrophic population loss and years of disruptive European contact.

Long before Plymouth Colony, Patuxet was part of a populated Wampanoag homeland. Epidemics brought through European contact devastated communities across coastal New England before the Mayflower arrived.

Why did the Wampanoag and Plymouth colonists become allies?

The 1621 relationship was shaped by diplomacy and political strategy, not simply by strangers deciding to become friends.

Ousamequin was the leading sachem of the Wampanoag confederation. The epidemics that had recently devastated Wampanoag communities had weakened their position in relation to neighboring Native nations.

The newly arrived English were also vulnerable.

Their first winter was catastrophic. Roughly half of the Mayflower passengers died during the first months in New England, according to Plymouth records summarized by Plimoth Patuxet Museums.

Both groups therefore had reasons to consider an alliance.

In the spring of 1621, Ousamequin and Plymouth governor John Carver agreed to a treaty of mutual protection.

The Smithsonian's Native Knowledge 360° materials emphasize that the relationship needs to be understood in the context of diplomacy, negotiation, political alliance, and the pursuit of security.

That is a much more useful way of understanding what came next than imagining the Wampanoag as anonymous helpers who wandered into somebody else's story.

What actually happened at the 1621 harvest celebration?

The strongest evidence comes from Edward Winslow, who attended the gathering and wrote the only surviving eyewitness account of it.

Winslow's description appeared in a work now commonly known as Mourt's Relation.

He wrote that after the colonists had brought in their harvest, Governor William Bradford sent four men “on fowling” so that the community could celebrate.

According to Winslow, the hunters returned with enough birds to help feed the company for almost a week.

During the celebration, Ousamequin arrived along with about 90 men. The gathering lasted three days.

The Wampanoag went hunting and brought five deer, which Winslow says they presented to the governor, the military captain, and others.

Those are some of the firmest facts we possess about the event.

There was a harvest.

There was hunting.

There were English colonists and Wampanoag participants.

There were approximately 90 men accompanying Ousamequin.

There were birds and five deer.

And the celebration lasted three days.

What Winslow does not tell us is also important.

He does not call the gathering Thanksgiving.

He does not give us a seating chart.

He does not describe a giant turkey as the centerpiece.

He does not provide a full menu.

He does not tell us exactly why Ousamequin and such a large Wampanoag party came to the settlement at that particular moment.

Plimoth Patuxet Museums explicitly notes that we do not know for certain why the Wampanoag joined the gathering or everything that happened during those three days.

Edward Winslow's eyewitness account confirms a three-day harvest celebration involving Plymouth colonists, Ousamequin, and about 90 men, but it leaves many familiar details of the modern Thanksgiving story unmentioned.

What did they actually eat in 1621?

We know that the gathering included wildfowl and venison. Beyond that, historians have to work carefully from contemporary records, known foods, and period foodways rather than pretending a complete menu survived.

Winslow tells us that four English hunters went after birds and that the Wampanoag brought five deer.

That gives us the safest part of the menu.

Wildfowl and venison were there.

William Bradford also wrote that wild turkeys were plentiful around Plymouth that autumn. That means turkey is entirely possible.

Possible, however, is not the same thing as documented.

No surviving account says, “Here comes the Thanksgiving turkey.”

Food historians at the Smithsonian and Plimoth Patuxet have used contemporary records and knowledge of local foodways to discuss other foods that may have been available, including corn, squash, beans, seafood, shellfish, nuts, and native fruits.

Those are informed historical reconstructions.

They should not be presented as if Edward Winslow wrote down a menu and handed it to us.

What can be said much more confidently is that the feast would have looked very different from a modern American Thanksgiving dinner.

There is no evidence of mashed potatoes, sweet-potato casserole, green bean casserole, or modern pumpkin pie.

Potatoes were not part of the documented Plymouth meal. Modern pies required ingredients and cooking practices that did not match the circumstances of the settlement in 1621.

Cranberries grew in the region and were used by Native peoples, but that does not mean a bowl of modern sweetened cranberry sauce sat on the table.

The safest approach is wonderfully simple:

We know they ate birds.

We know they ate deer.

We know far less about the rest.

History occasionally refuses to give us the recipe.

Wildfowl and venison are documented in the surviving account. Other foods can be reconstructed from the period, but no complete menu from the 1621 gathering survives.

Was the 1621 gathering really the “First Thanksgiving”?

Calling the 1621 Plymouth gathering the “First Thanksgiving” is a later American interpretation, not the name the participants gave the event.

That distinction doesn't mean the gathering was invented.

It happened.

The problem comes when a real three-day harvest celebration is made to carry several centuries of later traditions on its back.

Plimoth Patuxet Museums dates the event to sometime between September 21 and November 9, 1621 and notes that it entered American popular imagination as the “First Thanksgiving” during the 19th century.

By then, Thanksgiving traditions were already developing across the United States, and Americans were increasingly interested in telling national stories about their colonial past.

The Plymouth gathering fit beautifully.

Eventually, generations of schoolbooks, paintings, magazines, holiday decorations, advertisements, pageants, and popular entertainment compressed a complicated encounter between two societies into a much simpler tableau:

Pilgrims.

Indians.

Turkey.

Friendship.

Thanksgiving.

The real event is more interesting because the people involved were making decisions in a world filled with political uncertainty.

The Wampanoag had survived disastrous epidemics and previous exploitation by Europeans.

The Plymouth colonists had barely survived their first winter.

Their alliance served purposes for both communities.

The meal happened inside that political relationship.

It wasn't a greeting card.

What happened to relations between the Wampanoag and the English after 1621?

The 1621 gathering was not the beginning of centuries of peaceful coexistence. English colonization continued to expand, and relations between Native nations and colonial settlements grew increasingly strained.

This is one of the places where traditional Thanksgiving storytelling often simply stops.

The dinner ends, the curtain closes, and the Wampanoag disappear from the narrative.

They did not disappear.

More English settlers arrived. Colonial settlements expanded. Land pressures increased. Earlier agreements existed alongside growing conflict.

By the 1670s, the region was engulfed in the devastating conflict commonly called King Philip's War, named by the English for Metacom, a son of Ousamequin.

That war belongs to a later chapter of New England history, and Thanksgiving does not need to become a complete history of colonization to acknowledge it.

But stopping the Wampanoag story in 1621 creates a false impression.

Wampanoag history continued.

Wampanoag communities continue today.

And the meaning of Thanksgiving is not the same for everyone.

Why do some Native Americans observe a National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving?

Since 1970, Indigenous people and supporters have gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for a National Day of Mourning organized by United American Indians of New England.

The observance began after Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag man, was invited to speak at an event marking the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival.

According to United American Indians of New England, organizers objected to the speech James planned to deliver and offered a replacement text. James refused.

Instead, Native people and supporters gathered in Plymouth.

That gathering became the first National Day of Mourning.

The observance continues on Thanksgiving Day at Cole's Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock. Participants honor Indigenous ancestors and Native survival while challenging romanticized versions of colonial history.

It is worth including this in a history of Thanksgiving for a simple reason:

Thanksgiving has never had only one meaning.

For millions of Americans it is a family holiday centered on gratitude, food, tradition, and reunion.

For many Indigenous people, the holiday also carries the history of colonization, land loss, violence, and cultural erasure.

Those realities can exist in the same history without us pretending they are the same experience.

Wamsutta Frank James at the National Day of Mourning, Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1974. Photo by AqWampanog, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped for layout.

When did Thanksgiving become an American national tradition?

Thanksgiving became a national tradition gradually. George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1789, Sarah Josepha Hale spent decades advocating for an annual national observance, Abraham Lincoln issued a major Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, and Congress later placed the holiday permanently on the federal calendar.

This part of the story unfolds over generations.

George Washington and the Thanksgiving proclamation of 1789

In 1789, Congress asked President George Washington to recommend a national day of thanksgiving and prayer.

Washington did so.

His proclamation designated Thursday, November 26, 1789, as a day of national thanksgiving.

The proclamation focused heavily on gratitude for the newly established system of government under the Constitution.

It was an important national observance.

It did not, however, establish the permanent annual Thanksgiving schedule Americans know today.

Presidential and state thanksgiving proclamations continued unevenly for decades.

George Washington's 1789 proclamation designated November 26 as a national day of thanksgiving and prayer following a request from Congress.

Who was Sarah Josepha Hale, and what did she have to do with Thanksgiving?

Sarah Josepha Hale was a hugely influential 19th-century editor who spent years campaigning for a nationally observed Thanksgiving.

Hale edited Godey's Lady's Book, one of the country's most influential magazines.

She used that platform to promote Thanksgiving through editorials, recipes, and descriptions of the holiday.

She also wrote to political leaders.

Her campaign was not a quick letter-writing miracle in which one note suddenly invented Thanksgiving.

It lasted for years.

One particularly important letter survives in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.

On September 28, 1863, Hale wrote to Lincoln asking him to establish Thanksgiving as what she called a “National and fixed Union Festival.”

Her timing is impossible to separate from the Civil War.

The country was violently divided, and Hale explicitly argued for a Thanksgiving celebrated on the same day throughout the nation.

For years, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for a nationally observed Thanksgiving. Her September 1863 letter urged Abraham Lincoln to establish a common Thanksgiving date.

What did Abraham Lincoln do for Thanksgiving?

On October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and praise.

The proclamation came during the Civil War.

That matters.

Lincoln's Thanksgiving proclamation was not simply about dinner or harvest.

It spoke to a country at war with itself.

Hale's September letter had specifically argued that a common Thanksgiving could function as a unifying national observance. Only days later, Lincoln issued his proclamation for the last Thursday in November.

Presidents after Lincoln continued issuing annual Thanksgiving proclamations.

Congress took another step in 1870 when federal holiday legislation formally included Thanksgiving.

Even then, the exact November date still depended on presidential proclamation.

That little loose end would eventually produce one of the strangest Thanksgiving arguments in American history.

Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation helped establish the recurring national Thanksgiving tradition during the Civil War, although Congress would not permanently fix Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November until 1941.

Why is Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November?

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November because Congress fixed the federal holiday there in 1941 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to move Thanksgiving earlier created two years of confusion.

For decades after Lincoln, presidents generally proclaimed Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November.

Then came 1939.

November had five Thursdays that year, which put the traditional last-Thursday Thanksgiving on November 30.

Retailers worried that the late date would shorten the Christmas shopping season.

At the urging of retail interests, Roosevelt proclaimed Thanksgiving for November 23 instead.

It did not go smoothly.

The presidential proclamation determined the holiday for federal employees and the District of Columbia, but states issued their own observances.

According to the Library of Congress, 23 states observed Thanksgiving on November 23, 23 states kept November 30, and Texas and Colorado recognized both dates.

Families, schools, businesses, football programs, and event organizers suddenly had to determine which Thanksgiving they were using.

Critics gave Roosevelt's relocated holiday a nickname:

Franksgiving.

The dispute continued into the following years.

Congress eventually settled the issue.

In 1941, the House initially approved legislation making the last Thursday of November Thanksgiving. The Senate changed it to the fourth Thursday, ensuring Thanksgiving would never fall as late as November 29 or 30.

Roosevelt signed the measure in December 1941.

Beginning in 1942, Thanksgiving had a permanent place on the federal calendar.

Fourth Thursday.

Argument finally over.

Mostly.

Roosevelt's decision to move Thanksgiving earlier in 1939 split the country between different celebration dates and produced the short-lived controversy nicknamed “Franksgiving.”

How did turkey become the Thanksgiving meal?

Turkey became increasingly associated with Thanksgiving over the 18th and 19th centuries, long after the 1621 harvest gathering.

Wild turkey existed around Plymouth, and William Bradford wrote of plentiful wild turkeys during the colonists' first autumn.

But the surviving account of the harvest celebration mentions “fowl,” not a Thanksgiving turkey centerpiece.

The bird's later rise had a lot to do with evolving American food traditions.

By the 19th century, magazines, cookbooks, household writing, and Thanksgiving descriptions were helping standardize the meal Americans expected to see.

Sarah Josepha Hale was part of that process.

The Library of Congress notes that Hale used Godey's Lady's Book to promote Thanksgiving with recipes and descriptions involving turkey, oysters, potatoes, cranberries, and pie.

The modern menu, in other words, wasn't simply preserved from Plymouth.

Americans built it over time.

The turkey eventually won the starring role.

Why do Americans watch football on Thanksgiving?

Football became connected to Thanksgiving during the 19th century, when the holiday provided a natural date for major college games.

One of the most important early games occurred on Thanksgiving Day in 1876, when Yale and Princeton played in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia had just established the Intercollegiate Football Association and agreed on common rules for the emerging American game.

Yale and Princeton's Thanksgiving contest was the first played under those new association rules.

Thanksgiving football spread from there.

By the late 19th century, major Thanksgiving games were already drawing crowds and newspaper attention.

The professional tradition developed later, but the marriage between football and Thanksgiving was already old by the time anyone turned on a television to watch it.

College football became closely tied to Thanksgiving in the late 19th century. Yale and Princeton played a landmark Thanksgiving Day game in Hoboken in 1876.

When did Thanksgiving parades begin?

Large Thanksgiving parades emerged in the early 20th century and became closely tied to the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

Philadelphia hosted an important early Thanksgiving parade in 1920.

New York's most famous parade followed a few years later.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1924, Macy's held what was originally called the Macy's Christmas Parade.

Employees participated, animals from the Central Park Zoo appeared, and the event helped promote both the company's expanded Herald Square store and the approaching Christmas shopping season.

The giant balloons came later.

They were introduced in 1927.

So if the 1621 feast is one layer of Thanksgiving history, marching bands, department stores, enormous balloons, and Santa Claus are another.

The holiday has been collecting traditions for a very long time.

The Macy's parade began in 1924 as the Macy's Christmas Parade, linking Thanksgiving with the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

Did people really dress in costumes on Thanksgiving?

Yes. Thanksgiving masking was once a real holiday tradition, especially in New York.

This is one of those pieces of history that sounds suspiciously invented.

It isn't.

Library of Congress collections preserve photographs and newspaper reports of Thanksgiving maskers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Children and adults dressed in costumes or deliberately ragged clothing. Some wore masks or painted their faces. Groups moved through neighborhoods and streets.

The tradition included forms of ritual begging that feel strikingly familiar to modern Halloween observers.

Children asked for pennies, food, or other handouts.

Some events became known as Ragamuffin Parades.

The Library of Congress compares aspects of the practice directly with contemporary trick-or-treating.

Thanksgiving masking eventually faded away while costumed neighborhood traditions became increasingly associated with Halloween.

So at one point in American history, Thanksgiving included masks, costumes, door-to-door begging, parades, and chaos in the streets.

Apparently turkey and football weren't enough.

Thanksgiving masking once sent costumed children into the streets of cities such as New York. The now-forgotten custom included Ragamuffin Parades and door-to-door requests for pennies or treats.

What does Thanksgiving celebrate today?

Modern Thanksgiving is the result of centuries of changing traditions rather than one unchanged custom handed down from Plymouth.

For many Americans, the holiday is primarily about family, gratitude, food, travel, football, parades, and traditions specific to individual households.

For others, especially some Indigenous Americans, the date carries a very different historical meaning.

Both realities belong in the history.

The 1621 harvest celebration happened.

So did the diplomacy surrounding it.

So did the expansion of English colonization.

So did Sarah Josepha Hale's campaign.

So did Lincoln's proclamation.

So did Franksgiving.

So did Thanksgiving football, department-store parades, and children roaming New York in masks asking for pennies.

The modern holiday accumulated layer after layer until Thanksgiving became something nobody at the 1621 gathering could possibly have recognized.

That might be the clearest way to understand Thanksgiving.

It wasn't invented once.

It evolved.

And it is still evolving.

Thanksgiving History FAQ

When was the “First Thanksgiving”?

The Plymouth harvest celebration commonly called the “First Thanksgiving” took place sometime between September 21 and November 9, 1621. It lasted three days and included English colonists, Ousamequin, and approximately 90 men accompanying him. The phrase “First Thanksgiving” was applied to the event much later.

Did the Pilgrims and Wampanoag really eat together?

Yes. Edward Winslow's surviving eyewitness account describes Ousamequin and approximately 90 men joining the Plymouth colonists during the three-day celebration.

Why did the Wampanoag attend?

We do not know for certain.

Plimoth Patuxet Museums explicitly notes that the surviving evidence does not tell us exactly why the Wampanoag joined the harvest celebration. We do know the gathering occurred within an existing political alliance between Ousamequin and Plymouth Colony.

Was turkey served at the 1621 feast?

Possibly, but it is not proven.

The eyewitness account says English hunters brought back “fowl.” William Bradford separately wrote that wild turkeys were plentiful in the area. The evidence does not identify turkey as the centerpiece of the feast.

What food do we know was served?

Wildfowl and venison are directly supported by Edward Winslow's eyewitness account. Ousamequin's party hunted five deer and brought them to Plymouth.

Other foods are often reconstructed from known Wampanoag and English foodways, local ingredients, and other period evidence, but no complete menu survives.

Did they eat pumpkin pie?

There is no evidence that the 1621 gathering included pumpkin pie resembling the modern Thanksgiving dessert.

Who made Thanksgiving a national holiday?

There is no single moment.

George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1789. Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for a common annual observance for decades. Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving in 1863. Congress formally included Thanksgiving among federal holidays in 1870, and federal law fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.

Why is Thanksgiving always on a Thursday?

Thursday had become the customary day through earlier Thanksgiving observances and presidential proclamations. Lincoln chose the last Thursday of November in 1863, and Congress ultimately fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in 1941.

Why did FDR change Thanksgiving?

Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving earlier in 1939 after retailers argued that a November 30 Thanksgiving would leave an unusually short Christmas shopping season.

The decision proved controversial because states did not all adopt the new date.

What was Franksgiving?

“Franksgiving” was a nickname critics gave Roosevelt's altered Thanksgiving date. In 1939, 23 states celebrated on November 23, 23 on November 30, and Texas and Colorado recognized both.

Is Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans?

Thanksgiving is observed as a National Day of Mourning by many Indigenous participants who gather annually in Plymouth through an event organized by United American Indians of New England.

The observance began in 1970 and focuses on remembrance, Native survival, and opposition to romanticized narratives of colonization.

A Holiday With More Than One Story

Thanksgiving doesn't become less meaningful when its history becomes more accurate.

If anything, it becomes more interesting.

There was a real harvest celebration in 1621.

There was real cooperation.

There was also political strategy, previous conflict, catastrophic disease, colonization, and uncertainty.

The familiar Thanksgiving dinner came later.

The national holiday came later.

Turkey became a symbol.

Football arrived.

Parades arrived.

For a while, apparently, masks arrived.

And generation after generation reshaped the holiday again.

That leaves us with something far richer than the tidy school-pageant version.

Thanksgiving isn't one frozen moment in 1621.

It's more than four centuries of people deciding what the holiday means, what they remember, what they celebrate, and what parts of the story deserve to be told.

That story is still being written.

Sources & Historical References

This article was researched using primary documents, museum scholarship, Native-authored educational resources, and federal archival collections. Historical reconstructions and uncertain details have been identified as such rather than presented as established fact.

• Plimoth Patuxet Museums — “Thanksgiving” educational resources and Edward Winslow's eyewitness account of the 1621 harvest celebration in Mourt's Relation.

• Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Native Knowledge 360° — The “First Thanksgiving”: How Can We Tell a Better Story?, including material on Wampanoag society, the Great Dying, Patuxet, diplomacy, and the 1621 alliance.

• Smithsonian National Museum of American History — research on foodways and the foods associated with the 1621 harvest celebration.

• Library of Congress — George Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving proclamation; Sarah Josepha Hale's September 28, 1863 letter to Abraham Lincoln; Thanksgiving history collections; Thanksgiving masking; early Thanksgiving football; and the history of the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.

• National Archives — congressional records establishing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum — archival material concerning Roosevelt's 1939 change to the Thanksgiving date.

• United American Indians of New England — history and current information concerning the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, observed annually since 1970.

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