Massasoit
The year is 1621, and Massasoit is the sachem of the Pokanoket people (and a larger confederation of tribes called the Wampanoag) in a region that includes what will come to be known as Rhode Island and Massachusetts. This land was not so long ago the home of a thriving population of nations and villages, but in only the last few years, diseases inadvertently transported from Europe to North America have decimated the population. 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, people of Europe and Asia have lived in increasingly dense population centers and in close proximity to livestock, and in these conditions, many diseases have emerged and have at times devastated their people centuries back, most notably when the Black Death killed 75-200 million people in a four year span of the 14th century. Those who survived the epidemics did so with stronger immune systems, and they passed that enhanced ability to fight those diseases onto their children. When Europeans sailed for the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were carrying in their bodies diseases that could have little noticeable effect against the immunity that generations before had built up and passed on to them, and although some in later generations would very intentionally try to spread disease like smallpox into American Indian populations, these travelers couldn't possibly have known it. When the bodies of the Americans encountered these unseen biological forces carried on the air, water, food and soil, through mosquitoes and fleas, the immune systems of many were entirely unprepared. These were obviously not the first diseases the Americans' bodies encountered, but they were unlike those they had and in many ways more aggressive. Some Europeans contracted American diseases, but almost none of those were as efficient as the diseases that had developed in Europe, and the Europeans' immune systems were thus more well-practiced. [One disputed possible exception was syphilis, the first positive record of which in Europe occurred in the 1490s after Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas and resulted in an epidemic in Europe.] From 1616 to 1619, an unspecified disease or multiple diseases ravaged the coastal tribes of North America in what would come to be called New England. They died faster than could be memorialized or buried, sometimes leaving full villages lying dead as if they'd been gassed. Entire tribes were wiped out, and places that had once been bustling centers of living had become mass graves. Massasoit's people, the Pokanoket, still live, but in significantly decreased numbers from what they had been. The neighboring Narragansett people have been less affected by disease and have emerged as the greatest power in the region, a position which they wield to threaten and intimidate the Pokanokets, their traditional enemy. Massasoit is not his true name, at least not our typical understanding of such things. It is more of a title. He is Massassoit, a "Great Sachem" over multiple less sachems in the Wampanoag confederation called "sagamores". He is also called Ousamequin. His leadership holds together a loose alliance of villages in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and his people's fate hangs in the balance.
European people had attempted to make permanent colonies in the Americas before, but they had often failed miserably. The first successful English colony was Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, which itself struggled greatly to survive, with 88% of its settlers dying in the winter of 1609-1610, largely from starvation, and some turning to cannibalism. At times, it was like European nations were simply throwing people at the Americas to see if anything stuck, but not a lot did. The English Puritans (best known to us today as the "Pilgrims") were playing against the odds, and it showed in that first winter of 1620-1621 when close to half of the Pilgrims died. They made landfall in Massachusetts in November 1620 after a little over two months at sea. In December, they chose a site that renowned explorer John Smith had named "New Plymouth" on his 1614 map of which they made use. In the midst of December weather, they built houses on Cole's Hill during the day and returned to the anchored Mayflower at night. They weren't ready to actually begin unloading the ship until January, and when they did, they had to prop the dying up against the trees with guns to make a legitimate show of force against investigating Americans. In one instance of desperation, they stole corn from a crib they discovered. The land they were on had been touched by mass death before. It had been the home of the Patuxet people for generations before the 1610s, when they were beset by a relentless series of plagues along with many other tribes of the region. The last surviving and most famous of the Patuxet, Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, had been abducted by an English ship in 1614, and when he finally returned home in 1619, he discovered everyone in his village were dead. For some Europeans, especially the Puritans who saw God's hand in everything, this was nothing less than divine providence opening the land up to Christian settlement.
Religious refugees from England, they were isolationists who set themselves apart from others in the world they had to share. Their ideology was simultaneously radical and conservative, seeing themselves in the world but not of it, believing that the Catholic Church was a perversion of Jesus Christ's church and that the reforms all others had made in the Reformation era were insufficient and thus perversions themselves. They believed England was God's chosen country, but finding themselves unable to impose their demanded changes on the Church of England, and with their attempts to do so resulting in persecution, the most stalwart opted to separate themselves from the Church and then from England's soil altogether. They sailed to the tolerant Netherlands, but after 11 years, they feared they were losing what made them English while their children adopted the Dutch language and customs. Unwelcome in England and intent on not being Dutch, they had cut themselves off altogether from a society they had deemed impure and arranged to build their own world as they saw fit in the Americas. They did not need anyone else. They would be independent. When they arrived in Massachusetts though, their situation was desperate, and yes, they were independent as they had intended, with all which that entails. They were dying.
In March, Massasoit makes a decision. On the 16th, a tall Abenaki sagamore walks up to the scanty Plymouth Colony, with its extremities guarded by sharpened stakes and armed guards. He had been visiting with Massasoit, and having an imperfect but adequate understanding of the language, the Great Sachem turned to him to make contact with these English. His name is, as the Pilgrims recorded it, "Samoset". He is not as fluent in English as others that Massasoit could have called upon, but he understands well enough from interactions with fishermen in his native Maine, and what's more, he is sociable, bold and trustworthy. It was not mere charity that brought Massasoit to the decision to open relations with the Pilgrims; he needed them as badly as they needed him. The significantly diminished number of Pokanokets has made them vulnerable to attacks from the Narragansetts, and even as vulnerable as the Plymouth Colony is at this moment in time, an alliance with them promises certain exotic advantages that strike fear in the hearts of their adversaries; guns, steel and plague.
The following fall, when the Plymouth Colony made their first harvest in the Americas thanks to the bond formed with Massasoit's people, and the particularly close relationship they formed with the savvy interpreter Squanto, so in recognition of this fact, that two peoples had come together to save each other, they held a harvest festival that's now often referred to as the "First Thanksgiving". The festival lasted for three days, bringing together the seemingly disparate cultures of English Separatists and Wampanoag Americans for games, socializing and feasting that included waterfowl, wild turkeys, venison, clams, oysters, cod, bass, corn, squash, berries, lobster, eels, bread and all other manner of their bounty.
The easy answer to "what Thanksgiving is about" is that it's about gratitude, and indeed, that's what the concept of a Thanksgiving is, giving thanks, but the moral of the story, I think, is in fact that people need each other. People are so isolated from one another so that they can make their own decisions, be their own person, respect their own journeys, be independent, but people do need each other. The Thanksgiving story doesn't bring with it a pretty, clean-cut moral message, and neither do people. There are nuances, complications and motivations. The Pokanoket didn't help the Plymouth Pilgrims simply because they were good noble savages who naively helped any stranger and were one with the Earth, and the Plymouth Pilgrims didn't come to North America looking for a land of freedom and progressive ideals or as greedy capitalist patriarchs looking for a land to exploit. If either the Pilgrims or the Pokanoket had been able to continue on their own, they almost certainly would have, but their situations necessitated something more. Massasoit's gambit paid off, even while the machinations of certain Plymouth settlers and native people (including Squanto) to attain more for themselves threatened to overturn his leadership and the alliance. In an especially notable instance in 1623, Massasoit fell very ill with an affliction that blinded him and made it difficult to breathe, while a coating filled his throat and tongue, making it "exceedingly furred." Edward Winslow, a leading member of the Plymouth community, personally visited Massasoit and scraped the coating from the sachem's tongue and throat, then spoon-fed him and nursed him back to health at which point he quickly regained his strength and sight. This act of kindness firmly cemented the good feelings felt by Massasoit toward the Plymouth Colony, and further cementing his position as their ally, Massasoit warned them of the intentions of some Massachusetts people to wage war on the European settlements. Massasoit managed to maintain a state of peace, mutual benefits, and even some overlap, with the European settlers for nearly 40 years, but the passage of time brought about another generation that had forgotten how important the two communities had been to one another. Fraught land deals, prejudice and ultimately the failure of diplomacy led to the deadliest war per capita in recorded history of the region after the death of Massasoit in the early 1860s. Massasoit's son and successor Wamsutta (also called Alexander) sold a parcel of land in an exchange that was disputed by Plymouth's laws, so Plymouth Governor Josiah Winslow (the son of the man who nursed Wamsutta's ailing father back to health) had him arrested, and after three days in a Plymouth jail died from unknown causes. Wamsutta's brother, Massasoit's next oldest son, Metacom (also called Phillip), suspected the colonists of poisoning him and succeeded him as sachem. The reasons that brought about the King Phillip's War, as with all wars, are multi-faceted, complex and open to debate, but the most important ingredient to producing an environment of so much pain and death, where a generation before an Englishman personally cleaned the mouth of a Pokanoket chief and nursed him back to health when he was on his deathbed, was that the lives of others had lost their value. They no longer saw that they needed one another. From 1675 to 1678, the population of New England was decimated again, not from microscopic diseases but by deliberate bloodshed, with some 30% of the English population and anywhere from 60-80% of the indigenous population killed. Where the two cultures had merged and embraced each other, they were then irreparably ruptured. According to the European fashion of warfare, the English obliterated their enemy, and Metacom, the son of Massasoit, was shot in Assowamset Swamp by a "praying Indian" (an American Indian who had converted to Christianity and lived as an Englishman). The Plymouth Colony militia cut off his head, hands and cut the body into quarters, and the head was put on display at the Plymouth town. Most of the remaining members of the Wampanoag people, mainly women and children, including Metacom's son (Massasoit's grandson), were pressed into slavery and transported to Bermuda to labor on English plantations.
About that Massasoit statue, though, well, it's there because Cyrus Dallin sculpted the original for a monument in Plymouth on Cole's Hill in 1921, and he donated the plaster original to the state of Utah. They put a bronze cast of the statue on the Capitol grounds in 1959.
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