Pod Insights American History Tellers The Mayflower | The Thanksgiving Myth | 5 About this episode In 1620 the Pilgrims arrived in a land already shaped by centuries of Native history. For the people who lived there, the Wampanoag, it was Patuxet—a place with its own stories, its own politics, and, as the Pilgrims soon learned, a complicated history of encounters with Europeans.
In this episode Lindsay is joined by David Silverman, professor of history at George Washington University and author of This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. He helps us imagine the arrival of the Mayflower from the Wampanoag point of view—what they saw, what they feared, and what choices lay before them.
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0:00 Lindsay Graham? Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
0:20 Lindsay Graham? From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers: Our History, Your Story.
0:43 Lindsay Graham? In our series on the Mayflower, we traveled with a group of desperate religious dissidents as they sailed from England to the Netherlands and then to Plymouth in what would eventually become known as New England. But it wasn't called that by the people who lived there at the time, the Wampanoags. They knew the place where the pilgrims settled as Pawtucket, and much to the surprise of the newly arrived English colonists, they had prior experience with Europeans. In this episode, I speak with David Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University. He's the author of This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. David will take us back to 1620 to imagine what the encounter with the pilgrims might have been like from the Wampanoag perspective. Our conversation is next.
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2:20 Lindsay Graham? David Silverman, welcome to American History Tellers.
2:22 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
2:24 Lindsay Graham? So before we head to the early 17th century, I'd like to ask you a bigger picture question about why you wanted to write about the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims. What did you think was in their story that hadn't already been told?
2:37 Speaker 03 Back in 2005, I wrote my first book about the Wampanoag people of Martha's Vineyard and how they managed to survive colonialism. And in the course of doing that research, I had numerous conversations with modern-day Wampanoag people. And what kept coming up in these conversations was how difficult Thanksgiving was for them, and particularly for the kids. What they say is, the mythical Thanksgiving of native people welcoming the English into their country so that they can form the United States makes light of the Wampanoag people's own colonization, their dispossession, right? What's more, they say that in the schools, teachers who are teaching about this mythical
3:22 Speaker 03 first Thanksgiving, say repeatedly that the native people who welcomed the Pilgrims are now all gone. And Wampanoag kids have heard these lessons while they're sitting there in the classroom. And so I wanted to write a book that put Wampanoag people at the center of this history and that connected that history to their long-term struggles with colonialism up to this very day. Second reason I wrote this book is that almost every secondary teacher in the country addresses the first Thanksgiving. It's usually the one cameo that native people make in the secondary school and even primary school history curriculum. Yet, most of the teachers who address this subject don't know much about it.
4:05 Speaker 03 And so I figured if I wrote a book that was accessible to them, I could reach millions and millions of schoolkids with a much more accurate history.
4:16 Lindsay Graham? One of the things that happens often when I've been exploring this early colonial history is we are introduced to characters who know the English through some sort of prior interaction before the colony started. This is true in Jamestown and it's true in Plymouth. In our series, we meet Squanto, who had encounters with Europeans and the English and spoke English. Can you speak a bit to the Wampanoag experience with Europeans prior to the Pilgrims arriving in 1620, including, I guess, what happened to Squanto before then?
4:46 Speaker 03 Sure. You allude to a bigger point, which is that in almost every early colonial founding, what we imagine as a first contact is nothing of the sort. You know, the Wampanoags are in contact with Europeans for a full century before the arrival of the Mayflower. The first documented contact between them and Europeans is 1524. Plymouth is founded in 1620. That's a long time. And these encounters are happening regularly, several times a year in some cases. Generally, when the two parties meet, they're interested in trade. The Wampanoags and all coastal native people are deeply interested in acquiring the goods that these Europeans carry. And, you know, here I think it's important to
5:29 Speaker 03 note, native people did not have metal. They didn't have metal tools. They're effectively a Stone Age people in that respect. And Wampanoags want metal goods, copper kettles, steel axes, scissors, knives, weaponry, cloth, glass beads, and the like. Europeans want furs, fox, marten, beaver pelts above all. They fetch a high price in Europe. Fresh food and water. So the two parties are drawn together. Problem for the Wampanoags is that the Europeans also want people. And they very often will capture native people, sometimes because they want to bring them back to Europe to train as interpreters and
6:13 Speaker 03 guides, but at other times, they're capturing them with the intent of selling them into slavery back in Europe. So in the case of Squanto, the key interpreter and mediator between Plymouth and the Wampanoags, he's taken captive in 1614 by an English captain named Thomas Hunt. And this is not the first time this has happened. It had happened multiple times before, and indeed in 1611, a Wampanoag named Ipanaugh is captured by the English, brought to England. And three years later, he manages to connive his way back by promising to lead the English to gold on the island Martha's Vineyard. There's no gold on the island Martha's Vineyard. In the case of Squanto, how exactly he came into Thomas Hunt's possession, we're not sure.
6:58 Speaker 03 What we suspect is that Hunt had lured him on board or to the shoreline under the pretense of trade and then clasped him in irons. And Squanto was just one of more than 20 native people along the coast who Hunt captures during this dragnet. Hunt then sails across the Atlantic and sells his human catch to Malaga, Spain. Squanto alone, among these two dozen plus Wampanoags, goes free. We don't exactly know how. We suspect a Spanish friar had freed him. Indian slavery was officially illegal in the Spanish Empire, but Spanish routinely broke the law. But in any case, Squanto manages to go free and somehow, we don't know how,
7:41 Speaker 03 he falls into contact with English merchants in Spain, manages to get to London and then falls into the possession of an Englishman named John Slaney, who was involved in colonization efforts in Newfoundland. Over the next several years, Squanto is thoroughly involved in Slaney's enterprises. Twice Squanto travels to Newfoundland and back. He might have even gone to Virginia during this period of time, during the early English colonization of that place. And ultimately, Squanto manages to convince a captain named Thomas Dermer, who was a close associate of Slaney's, to bring him back to New England as a means of promoting
8:25 Speaker 03 English colonization schemes in the area. And so Squanto ends up back in Wampanoag Territory in 1619, just six months before the arrival in the Mayflower, after years abroad.
8:38 Lindsay Graham? I'm curious what you think native cultures learned about the English on their travels. They were pressed into service by the English to learn about native culture. What did the native cultures learn about European culture?
8:50 Speaker 03 Well, they learn that these people are incredibly numerous, that they're organized on a scale that utterly eclipses the social organization of Native America. When the Wampanoags met as a polity or a tribe, the largest Native American polities were at most 30,000 people. Native people who return home routinely comment on the vast inequalities that they witnessed in European society. And, you know, let's keep in mind, most of these native people are traveling in pretty elite social circles. Squanto is living with John Slaney while he's in London, and he's operating in some of the highest ranks of English society.
9:33 Speaker 03 So he sees the wealth and the grandeur of the English elite. He also can see the masses of teeming poor outside the gates of the places where he's staying, and undoubtedly made an impression on him, just as it made an impression on most native people who traveled to Europe during this period of time. They comment that such inequality would be totally inexcusable in their own society, and they don't understand how the poor of these societies don't set fire to the elites' homes and slit their throats. They simply cannot grasp it. What they also grasp, and, you know, I told you this anecdote about the Wampanoag captive Ipana, who manages to make it home in advance of Squanto doing the same thing. Ipana has figured out
10:17 Speaker 03 that a lust for gold makes these people mad with ambition. So they've learned some really important things about these people, but they've also learned one other thing, which makes native people covetous. These folks have incredible military technology, which if native people can harness themselves, will make them powerful in their own intertribal affairs. And so that's a real appeal of contact with these otherwise ruthless people.
10:46 Lindsay Graham? So Squanto, after years away, finds Captain Thomas Dermer, who agrees to take him back to the Cape Cod area. And as you mentioned, this is just before the pilgrims land. What did Squanto find when he finally got home?
11:00 Speaker 03 Squanto undoubtedly was anticipating a warm homecoming, a reunion with family and friends. And instead, he wanders into an apocalypse. There's really no better way to express it. Between 1616 and 1619, an unidentified European epidemic disease starts knifing its way through native people in southern New England, from the Saco River of Maine on the north to the east side of Narragansett Bay in modern day Rhode Island in the south. And the two groups of people who suffer the most are the Wampanoags of what's now southeastern
11:42 Speaker 03 Massachusetts and the Massachusetts people of Massachusetts Bay, right around the modern day city of Boston. The identity of the disease, we don't know. I strongly suspect it was smallpox. What we do know is that this disease eviscerated numerous communities. And when I say eviscerated, I mean completely wiped them out. And any survivors scattered to neighboring communities and probably communicated the disease in the course of doing so. The entire Taunton River Valley, which was the main artery of the Wampanoag people, it stretches from just west of modern day Plymouth into Narragansett Bay where Providence, Rhode Island is located today.
12:24 Speaker 03 By all accounts, it had once been full of native villages and later English colonists can tell because the woods are all cleared for cornfields, it was empty of people. And among the communities that's wiped out is Squanto's home community of Pawtucket. Now, I'm not suggesting everyone from Pawtucket was dead. We know from the records of the Mayflower passengers that Squanto actually managed to find some of his relatives in nearby communities. But some of his relatives is not all of his relatives. Unquestionably, most of his family and friends and acquaintances were now dead. So as Squanto is approaching the shoreline for his homecoming, we have to assume he's
13:06 Speaker 03 full of hope and anxiety. Hope because he's been away for years, right? And he desperately wants to reconnect with loved ones. Anxiety because he probably would have heard that a terrible disease had struck the coast. The Englishman had already commented on that point. So when he finally lands at Patuxet, what does he see? Well, according to English eyewitness accounts, and we have multiple of them, the place was like an inverted graveyard. The bones, the skeletons, the skulls of the dead were littered all over the landscape. And that tells you something profound. That tells you that the people fled in a panic because native people treated the remains of their dead with great respect. They would
13:48 Speaker 03 never just leave them standing there. You know, in other words, Squanto knows that just a tragedy of epic proportions has struck his people. And now he's desperate to find if there are any survivors, to hear about what had happened and where his place in the world is going to be.
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16:14 Lindsay Graham? So Squanto manages to return to Pontucksec just before the pilgrims landed in 1620. Talk about how the Wampanoags approached the pilgrims initially after their landing.
16:25 Speaker 03 Well, the Wampanoags are conflicted about what to do with these Mayflower passengers. When the Mayflower first lands off of Cape Cod, one of the things that strikes the English is they can't find any native people. Now, part of that has to do with the fact that in that part of Cape Cod, Wampanoags would live out there during the warm months of summer, during planting season, but would withdraw inland to the forests during the cold weather for hunting season. But that's not the only factor here. They're wary of these newcomers. They don't know quite yet what to do with them, and so they're biding their time. There are a few furtive encounters during the first couple of weeks that the English are on the scene.
17:10 Speaker 03 The English go exploring. They find a Wampanoag summer camp, and they ransack the place. Indeed, they disinter a burial, a couple of burials, in fact, which is a really lousy way to introduce yourself to foreigners by Desecrating their graves. They steal some buried seed corn that will become the basis for the first harvest that the English enjoy. But they can't find any people. The English send out some exploring parties to probe the territory. And they do encounter a couple of Wampanoag men walking on the beach with their dogs. Um, and try to hail them down and the Wampanoags take off. They're almost certainly afraid that these Englishmen are going to clasp them in chains and ferry them away somewhere.
17:53 Speaker 03 Later on, the English are camped on a beach, the exploring party that is, and they come under attack by a small band of Wampanoag warriors. The hostility and trepidation that the English meet from the few Wampanoags that they encounter on Cape Cod is one of the reasons that they decide to find a new place to settle. Um, they choose Plymouth ultimately because the native people have been wiped out there and the land is already cleared for planting. And here it's important to set the intertribal context in the run up to the pilgrims arrival. The Wampanoags might have suffered enormously from the epidemic of sixteen sixteen to sixteen nineteen. But their Narragansett rivals to the west did not contract the disease.
18:37 Speaker 03 And so in the wake of the Wampanoags devastation, the Narragansets begin conquering the Wampanoags and subjugating them to the status of tributaries. In other words, you know, requiring them to pay an annual tribute to Narragansett leaders and contribute warriors to the Narragansett's own military campaigns. So when the Mayflower passengers arrive off of Cape Cod, the Wampanoags are facing a couple of choices. You know, on the one hand, they know that these English people have a long history of kidnapping and killing Wampanoag people. And as such, many Wampanoag people are in favor of wiping out these newcomers.
19:21 Speaker 03 They say this is not a danger worth risking. On the other hand, Wampanoag people have seen the potency of English weaponry and English soldiers. Squanto has been to England and back and can say, "Look, this is a formidable people. If we can win them to our side, that would be to our advantage." And ultimately, the debate is, should we try to ally with these people against the Narragansett's? Or should we push them back into the sea and accept subjugation to the Narragansett's? Ultimately, allying with these people wins out. That's a position that the Wampanoags' leader, Usamiquin, or Massasoit, as he's better known, makes. But it is not a decision that all Wampanoags agree with.
20:07 Lindsay Graham? I'm interested in the politics of the Wampanoags. You mentioned that some people didn't agree with the ultimate decision to ally with the English. But talk to us about how these decisions are made. And I guess this gets into an introduction to the sachem, Massasoit.
20:21 Speaker 03 Well, we don't have any eyewitnesses on the scene. But we know enough about how native polities in general worked and how the Wampanoag polity sometimes worked to make some educated guesses. So Massasoit, or Usamiquin, should be considered first among equals among other Wampanoag leaders. Every village community or sachemship had a chief or a sachem. When a series of local sachemships banded together in confederacy, usually to meet a foreign emergency, they would defer to the leader of what we might
20:59 Speaker 03 call a paramount sachem, or a great chief. That's Usamiquin or Massasoit. When Usamiquin or Massasoit is making a decision about what to do with the English, what he would do is call the sachems from other communities together in council, and the people would talk about it. They would consult their shamans known as powas. That's where the word powwow comes from and tried to divine the best way forward. Decisions weren't made by majority vote. The goal was always to achieve consensus. So as a result, there's constant fissures. So when Usamiquin or Massasoit manages to achieve a rough consensus about what to do with the English,
21:44 Speaker 03 he is always aware that there are dissidents within the ranks who might try to break away. And indeed, over the next several years, there are constant minor rebellions within the Wampanoag polity by local sachems who want to side with the Narragansetts and wipe out this young English colony.
22:02 Lindsay Graham? So one of the advantages that both the English and Massasoit had in these early relations is Squanto as translator. But was he a good translator? There was suspicion growing. Was he a good diplomat for his people?
22:16 Speaker 03 My sense is that Squanto's English is very good. The question was always whether he was faithfully translating between the two peoples or whether he was tailoring the message to his own political ends. Usamiquin or Massasoit suspects very quickly that what Squanto is trying to do is set himself up as a great sachem and a rival to Massasoit's. We just don't know. What we do know, because eventually there's more than just Squanto who can speak both languages, is that Squanto has been spreading some whoppers of lies to try to terrify
22:58 Speaker 03 the Wampanoag people and claiming that only he can handle the emergency. So in particular, what he says is, playing on Wampanoag fears of the previous epidemic, that the English have a disease buried in a box in their storehouse and that they can release this disease whenever they want and that only Squanto himself can influence them to keep it buried. What he's probably referring to is gunpowder. What the English would do is keep gunpowder buried in the event that there was a fire and they don't want it to ignite. At other points, Squanto spreads false rumors among the English that Massasoit had been taken captive by the Narragansetts and he's constantly trying to stoke crises.
23:44 Speaker 03 So that he himself can bring them to a resolution, thus raising his reputation among both the Wampanoags and the English. Eventually, Usamiquin or Massasoit is calling for Squanto's head. He demands the English to either execute him themselves or to hand him over so that Massasoit can execute him. Before this emergency comes to a head, Squanto dies of a disease, though the possibility exists that Massasoit had him poisoned.
24:12 Lindsay Graham? So Squanto is the perhaps unreliable diplomat for the Wampanoag, but the English had their own, Edward Winslow. They chose him as a representative to deal with and visit the Wampanoags. What skills did he bring to the job?
24:25 Speaker 03 Winslow was a printer back in England and had read a number of narratives by Englishmen and other Europeans about their adventures in America. So he had a knowledge base to prepare him for this kind of sensitive intercultural diplomacy. Other than that, it's just personal characteristics. He's a brave man. There's no other way to put it. He visits Wampanoag communities. These are places that are utterly foreign to him and that, within his worldview, are permeated by devil worship, which he deeply, deeply fears. He views Wampanoag powwows as minions of Satan, as witches.
25:07 Speaker 03 He's constantly afraid that these folks are going to stick a knife in his back. And yet, he develops a quick rapport with Massasoit. They seem to genuinely like and respect one another. Indeed, Massasoit contracts the same disease that eventually kills Squanto. And while he's seemingly on his deathbed, he sends a messenger to Plymouth for Winslow to visit him. For me, I think the most illustrative moment of Winslow's abilities, his diplomatic abilities, comes during that bout of disease that Massasoit suffers. So Winslow shows up in Massasoit's village, and the entire community is in a state of ritual mourning, believing that Massasoit is about to die.
25:52 Speaker 03 And so Winslow enters the Witu or the Wigwam, where Massasoit is ailing, and immediately begins doctoring him. He tends to Massasoit's bowels, empties his chamber pot.
26:07 Speaker 03 He opens up Massasoit's mouth and scrapes his tongue. He prepares food for Massasoit, a bowl of duck porridge, which Winslow highly recommends against. Massasoit insists upon it and ends up throwing it up. Eventually, though, Massasoit recovers. And when he does, he then recruits Winslow to doctor everyone else in the community who's sick. And Winslow does it. This is a nauseating exercise, as Winslow himself puts it. And yet, he follows through. And in doing this, he demonstrates an enormous amount of goodwill. He shows that he's a friend and can even be considered something of a relative. Right? This is how relatives treat one another.
26:50 Speaker 03 So he's an essential man in all this.
26:53 Lindsay Graham? So let's finally turn to, I guess, what we call the first Thanksgiving, the myth that's become of this meeting. After that terrible first winter for the pilgrims, there is some sort of harvest feast in the fall of 1621. How did this feast even begin?
27:09 Speaker 03 So it's common for the public to say, oh, you know, the first Thanksgiving involved the pilgrims of Plymouth inviting the Wampanoags to dinner. That is not what happened. What happened was this. The English bring in their harvest and they decide, for the first time since they had arrived, they're going to take a couple of days and rest and celebrate the fact that they have survived and that they now have food to eat that they raised through their own labor rather than through the Wampanoags. And among their recreation is militia practice, target practice. They start firing off guns. Well, the Wampanoags hear the gunfire and the Wampanoags have a military alliance that they've negotiated with the English.
27:54 Speaker 03 The English obligation is to come to the Wampanoags' protection if the Narragansett's attack. But the Wampanoags' obligation is to come to Plymouth's protection if the Narragansett's or, say, the French or the Spanish attack. So that, you know, they hear the gunfire and then the Wampanoags show up in force. Ninety of them show up, armed men, led by Massasoit himself. This is almost twice the number of colonists who were left in Plymouth. So many of them have died. In almost any other colonial setting, that many native people showing up at the edge of a colony where the colonists are armed would have resulted in a bloodbath. But that's not what happened here.
28:37 Speaker 03 Enough goodwill had been cultivated between the two people that nobody misfires. And moreover, the English, and they really have no choice in the matter, let's be clear, they're guests in Wampanoag country, they say to the Wampanoags, why don't you stay? And so the Wampanoags contribute to the feast and the two parties sup together for the next couple of days. That's the entirety of the event. And here, I think it's important to note, we have mythologized this event over the past few hundred years into this seminal moment in Wampanoag-English relations. None of the parties ever mention it again. It doesn't seem to have been very important to either one of them, and the English barely
29:22 Speaker 03 write about it.
29:23 Lindsay Graham? You mentioned that this was a moment in which any other settlement would have been wiped out by the arrival of an overwhelming armed native force. But can you explain a bit more on why the Wampanoags and the English were able to avoid bloodshed, at least for a while?
29:37 Speaker 03 There's a couple of factors that allow this uneasy peace between the two people to last for decades. First and foremost, as I've been emphasizing, it's the Wampanoag's own desperation. They see the English as useful in their struggle for independence from the Narragansett. And it works. That's really what's critical here. It does work. At least twice, the English send military men to assist Massasoit in fending off Narragansett attacks. What's more, Massasoit does become the point man in English trade with other native people. Archaeological excavations have been done on the site of Massasoit's home village, and the place is littered with the remains of English goods.
30:22 Speaker 03 Yet another factor is that Plymouth Colony is really small and insignificant for quite a long time. And there's no lucrative crop that's grown in Plymouth Colony. You know, in Virginia, within a handful of years of the founding of Jamestown, the English discover the profitability of tobacco. Whereupon migrants begin streaming into the colony and they begin overrunning the Powhatan Indian peoples' land, thus prompting war. That doesn't happen in Plymouth. Plymouth is a nothing place. Its population remains low. Its territorial boundaries do not expand dramatically in the first couple of decades of Plymouth's existence.
31:03 Speaker 03 And then finally, the men who cultivated this alliance, Massasoia, and in the case of Plymouth, William Bradford, Edward Winslow ends up going back to England. But, you know, William Bradford rules Plymouth Colony for decades. And so there's stability at the top, and that matters enormously to keeping the peace. Because eventually, the English do start expanding at Wampanoag expense.
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33:12 Lindsay Graham? You mentioned the stability at the top. Massasoit, Edward Winslow, Bradford as keys to keeping the uneasy peace between the Wampanoag and the English at Plymouth. But eventually, the top changes. And in fact, it's Massasoit's son and Edward Winslow's son that takes over. Tell us what happens to this alliance.
33:31 Speaker 03 Well, what happens to this alliance is the same thing that happens to colonial Native American relations, wherever colonists settle in large numbers. Once colonists no longer need Native people in order to have a viable economy, when they no longer need military alliance with Native people for protection against other Native people, they start throwing their weight around, aggressive missionizing. And when the English evangelize Native people is not just for the purpose of saving their souls, as the English understand it. The English intent, and Native people perceive this quite clearly, is to have Christian Native
34:13 Speaker 03 people switch their allegiance from their sachems to the English colonies. So they'll follow English laws, which means that sachems like Massasoit's sons, Wamsutta, his eldest son, dies in 1662, and then Pometicum, or King Philip, as the English call him, they start losing tribute payers to these evangelical campaigns. You know, what's more, the English start engaging in really underhanded expansion. They take land that was previously shared, as is the Native American understanding, right? When Native people sell land, almost always, they say, you know, okay, well, we'll continue to hunt and plant here, and you can use it too. That's not the English understanding of these transactions.
34:57 Speaker 03 They will deliberately get Native people drunk and get them to sign land deeds, so transfers of land, that Native people later say, I have no memory of signing this document. Native people say, therefore, it shouldn't stand. Well, the English say, well, you know, you shouldn't have got drunk, and that's the way it goes. The English livestock wander the landscape. These animals trespass. On native cornfields and native clam banks and drive native people out of the area, which is the exact intent. When native people kill these animals, the English bring suits. They say, you've killed my private property. And Jewish native people say, well, keep your private property on your private property. And these disputes go on and on. Eventually,
35:39 Speaker 03 we get to the point where the English are trying to arrest native people for crimes between native people in native territories. And the ultimate flashpoint is a case of murder. You know, native people will tolerate all kinds of encroachment by colonists up to the point of colonists trying to capitally execute people for murder. No native group is going to stand for that. And that's ultimately what happens in 1675. In the run up to that moment, Usamie Quinn's eldest son, Pometacom, or King Philip, had been trying to put together a multi-triple anti-colonial coalition. He negotiates with the Tarragansets and native
36:24 Speaker 03 people hither and yon. And what he says to them is, look, we all face a common enemy here. And if we don't band together, they're going to continue playing a game of divide and conquer until we're all conquered, which is precisely what happens.
36:38 Lindsay Graham? And this is what leads to in 1675, full-fledged war, what's known as King Philip's War. What was this war like?
36:45 Speaker 03 The main impetus to this war is that the English seize, try and execute three high-ranking Wampanoags for the supposed murder of a native interpreter named John Sassiman. John Sassiman was a Wampanoag. He'd gone to Harvard College. He used to translate land deeds for Pometacom. He would serve as an interpreter in diplomatic settings for him. In the winter of 1674, 75, John Sassman goes to Plymouth and warns Josiah Winslow, son of Edward Winslow, the governor, that Pometacum's getting ready for war. Winslow brushes off Sassman, and Sassman says to him, "You're probably never going to see me alive again." Turns out to be true. Sassman disappears.
37:29 Speaker 03 Later, they find his body under the ice of frozen Assawamse Pond west of Plymouth, and a couple of Christian Indians come forward and say, "We saw three of Pometacum's men kill this guy and stuff him under the ice." So the English try the accused and execute them. At that point, there's no restraining the Wampanoag's young men anymore. Pometacum's warriors start attacking neighboring towns. And the war spirals outward. And when native people would attack English towns, usually what they would do is station small numbers of warriors in hidden spots around the community during the evening.
38:09 Speaker 03 And then, as the sun was going up and English farmers began emerging from their homes, they would attack suddenly and try to kill or capture as many of the colonists as they could before those colonists fled to these fortified blockhouses where everybody would defend themselves. Once colonists made it to those fortified blockhouses, native people would put everything else to the torch or the knife. When the English attack the natives, it's an entirely different kind of scenario. They're not attacking from ambush. They have armies that are on the march. And what they're doing is attacking native civilian towns, camps, and everyone is a target.
38:49 Speaker 03 So effectively, on both sides, what they're doing is they're waging wars of terror. These are not wars just between male combatants. They're total wars that involve everybody, and they're wars of attrition. Another aspect of the way the English waged this war is often forgotten in our accounts of it. The English are enslaving their native enemies. They keep some of them to work in New England, but a disproportionate number of them, they sell to the Caribbean and other places abroad. And this is not a purely colonial Indian war. There are almost no purely colonial Indian wars in colonial America. There's almost always native people who side with the colonists against other native people. Christian Wampanoags on Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod,
39:34 Speaker 03 grudgingly, but nevertheless, they side with the English in this war against their own tribespeople. The Mohicans and Pequots of southeastern Connecticut side with the English. The eastern Niantics try to remain neutral, but then ultimately side with the English in this war. And then finally, in what might be the most decisive development in this war, the Mohawk people of what's now upstate New York, just outside of Albany, side with the English in this war. And that combination of native allies allows the English to endure terrible losses during the first six months of this war and ultimately defeat the natives in resistance.
40:18 Speaker 03 There's an exceptionally symbolic moment at the end of King Philip's War. The English managed to track down Pometicom and the last Wampanoag holdouts in this war. A Christian Indian allied with the English shoots Pometicom dead. Then the English desecrate his body. They decapitate him. They sever his four limbs. They send the head back to Plymouth to be piked outside the walls of the community to rot for the next 20 years. And then Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Colony hold a day of Thanksgiving to celebrate God's blessing that allowed them to achieve a victory over their savage enemies.
41:01 Lindsay Graham? So finally, as we think about Thanksgiving, George Washington had a proclamation in 1789 for a Thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday. And the mythology surrounding the first Thanksgiving is with us all. But what should we really take away from this first Thanksgiving and the intent behind our myth? What's something worth considering?
41:22 Speaker 03 I'm often asked the question of what we do with Thanksgiving in light of this history. And let me be clear about a couple of points in our overheated political environment. I'm not declaring war on Thanksgiving. I am not calling for a cancellation of Thanksgiving. Nor for that matter, am I calling for us to replace Thanksgiving with a day of mourning, which is a ritual that Wampanoag people have been holding, some Wampanoag people, since 1970 to call attention to the disjunction between their own historical experience and the whitewashed Thanksgiving. Here's what I am saying. The Thanksgiving myth is not true.
42:02 Speaker 03 It's a sanitized, whitewashed history that's designed, quite frankly, to make white people feel better about colonization. The history of Plymouth and the Wampanoags, the history between Native people and colonists, is incredibly violent. It is incredibly exploitative, and it resulted in Native people losing almost everything. Native people are our countrymen and countrywomen these days, and if their history is going to be invoked during a national holiday, they have the right to see that history portrayed accurately.
42:36 Lindsay Graham? David Silverman, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers.
42:40 Speaker 03 I appreciate you having me. Thanks.
42:42 Lindsay Graham? That was my conversation with David Silverman, professor of history at George Washington University and author of This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. You may also want to check out another of his books, Thunder Sticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America. In the next season of American History Tellers, we'll explore the story of Frederick Tudor, the so-called Ice King of Boston, who pioneered the business of exporting ice from New England to the hottest corners of the globe. But keeping his customers cool was one thing. Managing to stay afloat in the ice business was another thing entirely.
43:23 Lindsay Graham? American History Tellers is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com. From Wondery, this is the fifth and final episode of our series on the Mayflower for American History Tellers.
44:06 Lindsay Graham? American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Music by Thrum. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Managing producer Desi Bleylon. Senior producers are Alita Rozansky and Andy Beckerman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louie for Wondery.
44:32 Lindsay Graham? By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men, so he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife,
45:13 Lindsay Graham? he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress to the enemy and doom the revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible on the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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