Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [111]
But the truly fearsome time was winter, and the newcomers would survive a second one only with a robust harvest. When it exceeded their hopes, they naturally celebrated with an event in the English “harvest home” tradition, feasting after bringing in the final crops. The only eyewitness account of the occasion is blink-and-you-miss-it short:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that we might after a special manner rejoice after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. The four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst 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 on our governor, and upon the captain and others.
That’s it; that’s everything written at the time about the event that spawned a thousand pageants performed by kids in buckled hats. And, unsurprisingly, those pageants—showing a lot of prayerful English hosting a few Native American guests with a meal of turkey and pumpkin pie—have rarely gotten much right.
The 1621 harvest prompted a three-day gathering. About two of every three people there were Wampanoag; given the small size of the few houses, nearly everyone must have cooked and eaten outside, where there were various games and competitions (considering the politics of the moment, the fact that the English “exercised [their] arms,” or had target practice, seems less than casual). Along with venison, the main food was probably migrating waterfowl like ducks and geese, which were plentiful in autumn; Governor William Bradford does mention taking turkeys that year, but not in connection to the harvest celebration.
Since there were at least ninety Wampanoag and only fifty English, the gathering must have been shaped largely by the former’s ideas about what a harvest celebration should look like. Nancy Eldredge, a Nauset Wampanoag, writes that offering thanks was “woven into every aspect of Wampanoag life.” When harvesting a plant, netting a bird, or catching a fish, “acknowledgment and gratitude were given for the lives that were taken.” Winslow, on the other hand, never mentions either prayer or offering thanks. It’s a particularly striking omission, because when the English Separatists wanted to offer thanks to God, they said so: Winslow wrote in 1623 of a “solemn day . . . set apart and appointed . . . wherein we returned glory, honor and praise, with all thankfulness, to our good God” after the end of a particularly dire drought. Surely the English were grateful for the harvest, but as an expression of communal thanksgiving the feast was probably more in the Wampanoag tradition.
Whether anyone offered thanks over Wampanoag-style food depends on who exactly Massasoit brought with him; the gathering was, after all, a political event, cementing the alliance between him and the English, and the one account specifically mentions only “some ninety men.” But, as food historians Kathleen Curtin and Sandy Oliver point out, those men are said to have come “among the rest.” If “the rest” included women—something Linda thinks possible enough that she’s included Massasoit’s wives in several exhibits—then the feast is more likely to have included such