The Pilgrim Thanksgiving Puzzle

Written by William Shepard, Published on 11/23/2009

It was Mr. Torrington, our seventh grade American history teacher at Weaver Middle School, who came up with the idea. Instead of the usual, tired, same old history pageant, our class would put on one to remember. We would run the pageant, but it wouldn’t be exactly correct. I mean, for three of the students playing historical characters, it would be, but the fourth would enact something that didn’t happen, or not in the way it was presented. Then after the pageant, we’d see just how many of the parents were really paying attention!

The word spread throughout the Middle School, but everyone absolutely promised not to tell anyone from another class, much less a parent, what was really going to happen. The fact that our class of seventh graders would give our pageant first made it even funnier. We’d see the parents wondering throughout the show if what they had heard was really right, or not. They would wonder while the eighth grade was giving its choral salute, and the ninth grade was reenacting part of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible about the Salem witchcraft trials”.

Johnny Coleman, of course, was first. He is the brightest boy in the class and the fattest, so his Pilgrim costume made him look like a pumpkin. I’m sure that Miles Standish never had a more fervent re-enactor than Johnny. As military leader of Plimoth Plantation, he wore a sleeveless armored vest and carried a blunderbuss. “It was not the same as an AK47, but it made lots of noise, and,” he said, “helped keep the peace between our little settlement and the nearest Indians, the Wampanoags.” Standish, Johnny told us, was “a grim old widower, whose wife Rose had died in January, 1621, just a few months after the Mayflower had landed.”

Johnny pranced up and down the stage, warming to his audience and to the character he portrayed. Everyone knew how brave Miles Standish was, all the more so for being one of the shortest men in the colony. Indeed, he once led a raid against fierce Indians at what is now Weymouth, killing their leader in hand-to-hand combat. That sealed his military reputation, and everyone was overjoyed that he had joined the pilgrim group at Leyden, in The Netherlands, to share the Plymouth adventure. After his exploit the Wampanoags, led by their great chief Massasoit, then became even friendlier to our Plymouth colony.

Johnny as Standish said “he had never seen anyone so pretty as young Priscilla Mullins.” Now, it was clear that most settlers thought Miles Standish, just twice her age, was far too old for her, and the students playing them expressed their disapproval with thumbs down gestures behind his back.

“Well, we’ve made it through the first year,” he said. “At least, half of us did. And now we offer praise for our deliverance through illness and privation.” He was a pious man with a gun, and a pretty good shot too, as he told us.

Alan Klingke, who played his rival, John Alden, was next. He said he had been a farmer in England, who joined the Pilgrims in their New World adventure. Alden said he was glad to have left Holland to come to the New World, because the group was losing its English nature and beginning to adopt Dutch ways.

He was even happier that the New World harbored Priscilla Mullins. “I may or may not have asked her to marry Miles Standish, as he requested. It doesn’t make me look very good, so I’m not telling,” he said. “But I’m surely glad that in the end, she decided to marry me instead!”

“Actually,” he said in an aside, “although there are no records from those days in Plymouth on the subject, a family legend says it really was true that I was asked by Miles Standish to propose marriage to Priscilla on his own behalf. That first came out when our great-great-grandson, Reverend Timothy Alden, wrote the story, publishing it in 1814. It was not too long after that when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also our descendent, in 1858 wrote ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish,’ which tells the tale.”

Priscilla Mullins came next, played by Betsy Simpson. “Yes, times were very hard, particularly when all of my family that crossed the great ocean with me died that terrible first winter,” she said. “That includes both of my parents, and my brother, Joseph. So I was left alone, at seventeen. People were dying right and left, and for the sake of the survival of the colony, the survivors didn’t wait very long to remarry. That’s why I wasn’t terribly surprised when the proposal of marriage came.

“There is nobody quite as obvious as a man who doesn’t know how to speak, and gets red in the face every time he sees me. So I knew that Miles Standish had me in mind, and I had time to make my mind up long before the proposal came. The only thing was that it was John Alden who actually made the proposal. What a silly thing to do! He really didn’t have a clue. I even wondered if he knew himself that he was the one who should have done the proposing on his own behalf. Well, it all worked out well, and they say that our many descendants now live throughout this great land.”

She walked around the stage a bit. Then she and Alan Klingle, as John Alden, lapsed into the earlier time and told of their hopes for a future family. “We’ll have a large family and celebrate a joyous Christmas every year, with lots of presents, just as we used to do in England,” he said. “And we’ll have a birthday party every year on each child’s birthday,” he added “as merry as Christmas itself, with birthday presents too!” Alden was a steady provider and the family eventually prospered.

Jack Mason played our Governor, William Bradford. He said that most people thought he was the first Governor of Plimoth Plantation, but that wasn’t so. He was the second person to hold that office, for Governor Carver had died of a heat stroke that terribly hot 1621 summer. His own wife had died as the Mayflower lay in the harbor not long after the 1620 landing. He married Alice Carpenter in 1624. He was reelected Governor over thirty times, and his account of the colony, “Of Plimoth Plantation,” contains much of our information about those early days.

“I don’t know why so much is made of it, but everyone wants to know about that first Thanksgiving. We had, finally, plenty to eat, and we gave thanks for our deliverance, of the 53 of us in the colony who had survived. I invited the Wampanoag Indians, and ninety of them showed up, under Chief Massasoit! But they were fine guests, and provided five deer for the feast, which lasted several days. We had many different fish, too.”

Someone yelled from the audience, “What about turkeys?”

“Everyone always asks that. What I wrote was that we shot fowl for dinner, and wild turkeys there were. So you won’t be far wrong if you celebrate many years into the future with turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner!”

The class pageant ended, and Mr. Torrington stepped forward. “We’ll see how good you are at history. One of our characters told several things that were not true. Which character was it, and what were the mistakes? I’ll give you five minutes to think it over, and then by a show of hands, vote for the one with the phony knowledge!”