Happy Thanksgiving from the Ridge Historical Society
Part 3 of Thanksgiving week on the Ridge
November is also Native American Heritage Month.
Let’s take a moment to recognize and reflect on the Indigenous People who populated this land for 20,000 years before the European settlers came here.
The Land Acknowledgement Statement for the Blue Island Ridge is:
“We acknowledge that we are located on the ancestral homelands of the Potawatomi tribe, a member of the Council of Three Fires. Other tribes that lived in the Blue Island Ridge area in the 18th – 19th century include the Miami and the Illinois Confederation. Many additional tribes including the Fox, Sauk, Winnebago, Menominee, Meskwaki, and Kickapoo lived nearby and accessed the area for trading and portage routes.”
This week began a new series in the Beverly Review on the history of Native Americans on the Ridge. The first installment can be found at: https://www.beverlyreview.net/news/community_news/article_00f2f326-6a80-11ed-bda0-67d5ab1d8cc4.html
There would not have been a first Thanksgiving feast in 1621 for the Pilgrims from the Mayflower if the Wampanoag tribe hadn’t taught them how to secure food in their “New World.”
The Wampanoag showed the Pilgrims how to fish and hunt in the area, and how to cultivate the native food plants and gather fruit. Some items we take for granted now were not around 400 years ago. For starters, there were no sweet or white potatoes. Potatoes did not come up to North America from South America for another 100 years.
Also, the Pilgrims had not yet planted wheat fields so there were no pies and no bread. The sugar rations and almost all the food they brought with them had quickly been depleted on the journey over, so there were no jellies or sweet desserts to be made.
The Pilgrims had brought no large livestock with them on the Mayflower, only chickens, and a few pigs and goats, so there were no dairy products except maybe goats’ milk. Dairy cows would come later.
Plus, no ovens had been constructed yet for baking, so all cooking was done over open fires.
An early journal has the colonists going fowl hunting for this harvest feast. Duck, geese, swans, and turkeys were all plentiful. The Wampanoag guests brought an offering of five deer to the celebration, so venison, probably some roasted and some served in a hearty stew, was without doubt on the menu.
Historians also believe that seafood was a major component of the feast, this being New England by the coast. Mussels, lobster, bass, clams, and oysters were readily available. The first Thanksgiving was very heavy on animal protein.
The vegetables cultivated at the time included corn, pumpkins, squash, turnips, garlic, onions, beans, carrots, lettuce, spinach and cabbage. The pumpkins would have been roasted. Fruits available for gathering included blueberries, plums, grapes and gooseberries. Cranberries were there but it was another 50 years before there were reports of boiling them with sugar to make a jelly.
Flint corn, the multi-colored Indian corn, was plentiful at the first harvest. Most likely, the corn was turned into cornmeal, which was boiled and pounded into a thick corn mush or porridge that was occasionally sweetened with molasses, which was made from sugar cane, which came from the Caribbean. This was called Indian pudding, a take on the English fondness for “hasty pudding.”
Herbs, and nuts like chestnuts, walnuts and beechnuts, were plentiful from the forests. Along with onion, these would have been used for stuffing the fowl and flavoring dishes.
The celebration itself was a three-day event, with feasting, ball games, singing and dancing. Assumedly, grace was said before meals, but it was several years later that an official prayer service was added to the annual harvest celebration to give thanks for rain after a two-month drought.
Here is a vintage postcard recognizing the role of Native Americans in the first Thanksgiving.