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FOOTNOTES IN TEXAS HISTORY
Thanksgiving as a Texas Thing
By Clay Coppedge
If you sit down to a Thanksgiving turkey this month, you are celebrating a holiday with origins in 17th century New England. But, had Texas been used as a model, you could have been eating bison in May.
In a Texas-centered history of the first Thanksgiving, arguments would persist over where in Texas the alleged feast took place, and when.
In one corner would be the group proclaiming May 23, 1541, as the date of the first Thanksgiving, and Palo Duro Canyon as the site. Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado would be the star of legend and lore, and we’d probably be eating leftover buffalo instead of turkey.
In the other corner would be the people proclaiming an April 30, 1598, feast along the Rio Grande as the first Thanksgiving.
Both stories center on travesty and travail and encounters with two of the most forbidding landscapes Texas has to offer—the Llano Estacado and the Chihuahuan Desert.
The Palo Duro camp tells us that in 1541, a friar traveling with the Coronado expedition proposed a service and feast thanking God for his mercy and bounty. Friar Juan de Padilla promptly performed a Thanksgiving Mass, which was witnessed by a few baffled Teyas Indians.
We know, too, that Coronado and his men suffered travails aplenty in their quest for Quivira, the richest of the Seven Cities of Cibola, and that Coronado enlisted the aid of an Indian prisoner the Spanish called La Turque (The Turk) because “he looked like one.”
La Turque took the 1,500 men, along with scores of horses, cattle and sheep, on a hellish, meandering tour of the Llano Estacado, a vast expanse of shortgrass prairie with no settlements, no trees, very little water and nowhere to fix a compass. Coronado and his men wandered in dazed circles for days on end, lost, hungry and thirsty on an endless sea of grass. In this most desperate of states, they made a final, harrowing descent into the Palo Duro.
A hailstorm hit the canyon the first night and stampeded the expedition’s horses and destroyed much of their equipment. Hunters ventured onto the plains to kill buffalo, but the hunters got lost. Most of them eventually returned.
To this story, many historians add a touch of balderdash. They point out that grapes and pecans, said to be a part of the feast, did not grow in the Palo Duro at that time. “There is now some doubt whether this was a special thanksgiving or a celebration of the Feast of the Ascension. It was held in Texas, but may have been on one of the forks of the Brazos River farther south,” wrote Mike Kingston in the 1990-91 edition of the Texas Almanac.
The story of the Rio Grande as the site of the first Thanksgiving centers on Juan de Oñate, an aristocrat-turned-explorer who set out to explore territories he had been granted north of the Rio Grande. In 1597, he bypassed a traditional route to blaze his own trail across the Chihuahuan Desert. The trek did not go well.
First, there was the endless rain, which Oñate and his companions prayed would stop. After it did, Oñate, 500 people and several hundred head of livestock nearly died of thirst. They went the final five days of the 50-day journey with no food or water. The expedition’s arrival at the Rio Grande was its salvation.
After recuperating for 10 days, Oñate ordered a day of thanksgiving. The feast consisted, we are told, of game hunted by the Spaniards and fish supplied by the natives of the region. Franciscan missionaries traveling with the expedition said a Mass. And finally, Oñate read La Toma—the taking—declaring the land drained by the Great River to be the possession of King Philip II of Spain.
Some historians call this one of the truly important dates in the history of the continent, marking the beginning of Spanish colonization in the American Southwest.
Others call it America’s first Thanksgiving.
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Clay Coppedge frequently writes history pieces for Texas Co-op Power.
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