The Truth of 1621: Winslow's Letter and the Three-Day Feast
The Paragraph That Started a Holiday
Every American schoolchild learns the story of the First Thanksgiving: the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag, the shared table, the turkey. The strange thing is how little of it is actually written down. The entire documentary basis for the event — the only eyewitness record that survives — is a single paragraph.
It was written in December 1621 by Edward Winslow, a Mayflower passenger who would later serve as governor of Plymouth Colony, in a letter to a friend in England. The letter was not a chronicle or a report; it was a piece of correspondence, signed "E.W.," meant to reassure people back home that the tiny settlement was surviving. The following year it was printed in the colony's first published pamphlet, a book now known as Mourt's Relation — full title, A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth (London, 1622). It is the source of everything else.
Read closely, the paragraph is stranger, smaller and more interesting than the holiday it fathered.
"Our Harvest Being Gotten In"
Here is what Winslow wrote:
"Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors. They 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 90 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. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."
Unpack it, as the historians at Plimoth Patuxet Museums do in their modern translation. "Our governor" was William Bradford. "Fowling" meant hunting birds — the four men came back with enough wild fowl to feed the whole company for nearly a week. "We exercised our arms" meant target practice with muskets, an entertainment as well as a necessity in a fortified settlement. "Their greatest king Massasoit" was Ousamequin, the great sachem of the Pokanoket Wampanoag; "the captain" was Myles Standish. And the five deer were not a side dish: they were a gift, delivered to the governor and the captain — the senior men of the colony — in the formal manner of a diplomatic exchange.
The celebration, if that is the word, appears to have run for three days. It fell sometime between late September and early November 1621, on ground occupied by people who had good reason to celebrate: after a winter that killed about half of the 102 Mayflower passengers, the harvest had come in.
What Was Not on the Table
Notice what Winslow does not mention. No turkey — he says "fowl," which most historians read as wild waterfowl: ducks, geese, perhaps swans. No pumpkin pie, no mashed potatoes, no cranberry sauce, no corn on the cob in the modern sense. Potatoes were still a novelty in Europe and not yet a staple in New England; forks were rare; sugar was scarce. The one meat we can count with confidence is venison, from the Wampanoag's five deer. The rest of the table, like most of that first year, was a matter of what could be grown, caught or foraged — corn, shellfish, wild game, and whatever the harvest had yielded.
Even the word "thanksgiving" would have misled a reader of the time. In the Pilgrims' vocabulary, a day of thanksgiving was a solemn religious occasion, a day of prayer, often declared after a specific blessing — the English colonists had held such days. A harvest celebration with games, shooting practice and three days of feasting was something else: an English tradition the settlers called Harvest Home. Winslow's letter describes a harvest festival, joyfully kept.
Who Was Actually There
The guest list, as far as the record goes, was two peoples.
Of the English, about half of the 102 Mayflower passengers were still alive by that autumn: twenty-four men, five women, and twenty-four children and teenagers. Their ages spanned from Peregrine White — born aboard the Mayflower in Cape Cod Bay in December 1620 — to Elder William Brewster, then in his fifties.
Of the Wampanoag, Winslow names one man: Ousamequin, known to the English as Massasoit, sachem of the Pokanoket, who arrived with some ninety men. And the record leaves room for more. As Plimoth Patuxet's teaching materials note, the "many of the Indians" who came among the settlers may have included representatives of other communities inside Ousamequin's sphere of diplomatic influence; only weeks earlier, on September 13, several sachems had come to Plymouth for treaty talks. Indigenous women and children may have been present as well: after the March alliance, Ousamequin had told the English that their women "would come and set corn on the other side of the brook, and dwell there all summer," and farming was traditionally women's work in Wampanoag culture.
A Feast of Diplomacy
This is the part the placemat version leaves out: the three days were almost certainly politics.
The Wampanoag were not bystanders who wandered in from the forest. They were a nation with more than ten thousand years of history on that coast, and they had spent the previous four years in catastrophe — an epidemic that had emptied villages and killed most of their people. In the spring of 1621, Ousamequin had opened relations with the English and concluded a treaty of mutual aid; the Wampanoag taught the settlers to fertilize corn with fish, and Tisquantum, a Patuxet man who served as interpreter, became the colony's indispensable middleman. Relationship-building with the newcomers was, for the sachem, a serious matter of state.
When Ousamequin arrived with ninety men, then, he was not dropping by for dinner. "It is probable that [his attendance at the celebration] was a political show of force," the Wampanoag and Penobscot historian and educator Nancy Eldredge has written. Wampanoag understandings of alliance, as the Mashpee historian Nanepashemet described them, were built on oral agreements sealed by the ritual exchange of gifts — and the five deer, presented to the governor and captain, fit that pattern exactly. A diplomatic visit of ninety men, with formal gifts and three days of hospitality, was how an alliance was kept alive.
The letter, read this way, is not a scene of cozy togetherness. It is a portrait of two peoples, one large and ancient, one small and lucky, maintaining an arrangement on which the smaller depended — and doing it, for three days, over food.
The Name That Came Later
The event had no name in 1621, and it was not a holiday. Thanksgiving as a national observance would not exist for another two centuries: colonial America kept occasional days of fasting and prayer, George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1789, and the holiday remained irregular and regional for decades after.
The name "First Thanksgiving" entered the language almost by accident. In the 1830s, New Englanders began looking back at the Pilgrims' feast as an origin story for their region. In 1841, the Unitarian minister and antiquarian Alexander Young published Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, a compendium of source documents about Plymouth Colony. Winslow's paragraph — by then largely forgotten — appeared in its pages, and Young annotated it with a footnote: "This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England." He also speculated, from the word "fowl," that the birds had been wild turkey.
A footnote did the rest. Within a generation, the phrase had hardened into fact; Sarah Josepha Hale's long campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday drew on exactly this image, and Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation sealed it. Winslow had wished his friend "partakers of our plenty." It was Young's gloss that told Americans what the plenty had been — and what to call it.
The Letter That Waited Two Centuries
There is something fitting about the document's own history: written as a personal letter, printed to rally support for a struggling colony, lost for two centuries, then rediscovered and renamed into a national myth. The paragraph has carried more weight than its author could possibly have imagined — a few lines about food and diplomacy now standing for a whole holiday.
What it gives us is not the story we were taught, but something better: a brief, human scene, recorded by a man who was actually there. Four hunters coming back loaded with birds. Ninety guests arriving from the surrounding country. Five deer dragged into a settlement of fifty survivors. Three days of eating, shooting practice and talk, on the thin edge of a hard winter — with the record simply stopping there, because the letter was about the harvest, not about history.
Everything else — the turkey, the pie, the placemats — was added later, by people who needed the paragraph to be more than it is. The letter itself asks only what its author asked: that his friend, three thousand miles away, be glad with them.
References
- Plimoth Patuxet Museums. "Eye-Witness Account of the 1621 Harvest Celebration." https://plimoth.org/yath/unit-4/eye-witness-account-of-the-1621-harvest-celebration
- Plimoth Patuxet Museums. "Thanksgiving." https://plimoth.org/for-students/homework-help/thanksgiving
- Winslow, E. Letter (December 1621), printed in A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth ("Mourt's Relation"). London: John Bellamie, 1622.
- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. "Full text of Edward Winslow letter." https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/Full%20text%20of%20Edward%20Winslow%20letter.pdf
- Young, A. (1841). Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth. Boston.
- Eldredge, N. (Nauset Wampanoag and Penobscot). "Who are the Wampanoag?" Plimoth Patuxet Museums. https://plimoth.org/for-students/homework-help/who-are-the-wampanoag
- Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. "History and Culture of the Mashpee Wampanoag — Contact Timeline." https://mashpee-wampanoag.squarespace.com/culture
This article continues the Thanksgiving & Black Friday series. The companion piece is The Great Dying and Patuxet: The Wampanoag World Before Plymouth. For the history behind the holiday, see Thanksgiving & Black Friday – From the First Harvest Feast to the World's Biggest Shopping Weekend and Official Thanksgiving & Black Friday 2026 Announcements — or browse the Thanksgiving & Black Friday collection.