The real first Thanksgiving in America.

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Bad ass Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrives in Florida for Thanksgiving in 1565.

One of my ancestors landed at Plymouth Rock. He signed the Mayflower Compact. When I commemorate their first thanksgiving in 1621, some Virginian says, oh, it wasn’t the first because there was one in Jamestown, Virginia, 14 years earlier.

But neither the Pilgrims nor the Virginians had the first thanksgiving in what is now the United States of America.

Floridians claim the honor should go to Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the Spaniard who conquered a tribe of Timucua Indians, took over their village (which they called Seloy) and renamed it Saint Augustine—all in one day: Wednesday September 8, 1565. He brought 800 settlers with him.

Saint Augustine became the first permanent settlement in the USA, 42 years before 104 British men and boys established Jamestown.

The day establishing Saint Augustine ended with a thanksgiving feast. The Indians were guests before being enslaved, which was the style at the time. It was a Catholic thanksgiving, not Protestant.

Spain’s interest in Florida was strictly to keep it out of French hands. The peninsula did not have gold and its inhabitants were rather primitive even by Indian standards. My gosh, they made their clothing from Spanish moss. They were big on tattooing their entire bodies. And they sacrificed their children.

While Europeans gave Indians diseases like smallpox and measles, Indians gave the Europeans syphilis. It was the original FAFO.

Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was 46 when he established Saint Augustine. Born into an aristocratic family, the sea beckoned and he ran away to become a sailor at 14. He was good. Spain’s King Charles I commissioned him at 30 to drive Muslim pirates from the coast of Spain.

Five years later, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés became a captain but eventually he wound up in prison in 1563. Two years later, the king kicked him out of prison and dispatched him to Florida to establish a colony and keep the French Huguenots out of Florida.

He did so, and 12 days after the big feast he and his ships took care of the French. He was a bad ass. Encyclopedia Britannica said:

On September 20 he took the nearby French colony of Fort Caroline and massacred the entire population, hanging the bodies on trees with the inscription “Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” Menéndez de Avilés then explored the Atlantic coast and established a string of forts as far north as the island of St. Helena (off present-day South Carolina). He was recalled to Spain in 1567 and later helped organize a squadron of ships against the English. He died while engaged in this task.

The National Park Service didn’t mention the battles the Spaniards fought. Instead, it gave the dirt on the eats and the celebration itself:

The celebrant of the Mass was St. Augustine’s first pastor, Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, and the feast day in the church calendar was that of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. What exactly the Seloy natives thought of those strange liturgical proceedings we do not know, except that, in his personal chronicle, Father Lopez wrote that “the Indians imitated all they saw done.”

What was the meal that followed? From our knowledge of what the Spaniards had on board their five ships, we can surmise that it was cocido, a stew made from salted pork and garbanzo beans, laced with garlic seasoning, and accompanied by hard sea biscuits and red wine. If the Seloy contributed to the meal from their own food stores, then the menu could have included turkey, venison, gopher tortoise, mullet, drum, sea catfish, maize (corn), beans, and squash.

Gopher tortoise? They ate Great Gobs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Tortoise Guts!

But while Saint Augustine claims it was first, was it?

Historic Coast Culture of Saint Augustine noted:

Some historians argue that while America’s first Thanksgiving indeed took place in Florida, it actually occurred 40 miles further north and one year earlier than the one in St. Augustine when French Huguenots—Calvinists like the Pilgrims —held a service of thanksgiving and feasted with the Timucuans to celebrate the June 1564 establishment of Fort Caroline along the St. Johns River in present-day Jacksonville. “We sang a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching him that it would please his Grace to continue His accustomed goodness toward us,” French explorer Rene Goulaine de Laudonnière wrote in his journal.

So, it was the Protestants, not the Catholics, who held the first Thanksgiving on June 30, 1564. Fort Caroline was in what is now Jacksonville.

Or was it?

The Texas Society of the Daughters of the American Colonists reported:

Late in 1959 a marker was placed at a crossing in Palo Duro Canyon, now in the Palo Duro State Park near Amarillo, commemorating a feast of Thanksgiving held in 1541 proclaimed as a day for prayer and feasting by Padre Fray Juan de Padilla for Coronado and his troops seventy-nine years before the arrival of the Pilgrims in America. Though a monument had been erected previously in Amarillo to Father Padilla, the DAC marker commemorated the location of the thanksgiving feast itself.

It is known where Coronado and his troops in armored regalia entered the canyon to seek safety and refuge, though the steep sides of the canyon seem to make it impossible for armored men on horseback to have made entry at any point.

So once again, the Catholics may have been first.

But was the first Thanksgiving really in Texas?

A year ago, Bill Delaney of The Jaxson wrote:

Possibly the first known words of thanksgiving said by a European in what’s now the continental United States came from Juan Ponce de León. When his expedition spotted the East Coast of Florida in 1513, Ponce de León said, “Thanks be to Thee, O Lord, who has permitted me to see something new.” Several later conquistadors are recorded as saying words of thanks and holding ceremonies of Thanksgiving in Florida and elsewhere.

So what do all these first thanksgivings mean? Plenty.

They mean that far from being barbaric and blood thirst conquerors, the Europeans were civilized and so devoted to God that they thanked Him for establishing a new life in a new world. They indeed did the Lord’s work, occasionally with guns. The diseases which devastated so many tribes were a divine intervention as was Europeans getting VD. One does not need a PhD to figure out the Lord’s message with syphilis.

May the first travelers to Mars thank the Lord first before building their colony.

As to whose thanksgiving was first, I really don’t care, Margaret, as long as we remember to thank God early and often and at least once a year as a nation.

TWO POLLS TODAY.

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