As children, we were taught that the first Thanksgiving took place in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. But some historians theorize that the first Thanksgiving meal may have happened elsewhere...including the Lone Star state. On the day after Turkey Day, Lonn fills us in on some of the other "first Thanksgivings."
One such story, comes from Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México. Villagrá’s account of the Mass of Thanksgiving takes place on April 30, 1598, when the colonizer of New Mexico, Juan de Oñate, and his five hundred colonists held a meal on the north bank of the Rio Grande. Villagrá, who was an eyewitness, described how the Te Deum was sung, fanfares sounded on trumpets, muskets fired, and a formal act of possession read, followed by a feast on fish, ducks, geese, and cranes.
