A moderately accurate depiction of the first Thanksgiving feast in the City on the Hill. Subsequent events are a different story.
As ever, the Wall Street Journal has published the two usual editorials for Thanksgiving Day.
From 1620 comes The Desolate Wilderness, Nathaniel Morton's account of the Pilgrims' arrival in Plymouth (the one subsequently in Massachusetts.
Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild andThe other is And The Fair Land, which reminds us all what Americans have to be thankful for and, mutatis mutandis, we in the West, too.
savage hew.
If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.
They were lucky that the local Indians had recently died in large numbers from, presumably, smallpox. That left cleared ground for the new settlers to farm.
Thanks for wonderful story