Giving Thanks Throughout the Centuries: "There are at least seven claimants for the status of first Thanksgiving--in Texas, Virginia, Florida, and Maine.".

• Author: Kirkpatrick, Melanie
• Position: LIFE IN AMERICA

A FEW WEEKS before Thanksgiving Day 1991, anyone who happened to be strolling along Court Street in downtown Plymouth, Mass., would have witnessed a peculiar sight: men dressed in doublets, wearing odd-shaped metal helmets festooned with feathers, and brandishing swords. What brought a company of 16th-century Spanish conquistadores to the heart of this classic New England town, home of the Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers?

All became clear when one of the conquistadores opened his mouth and, in a smooth Texas drawl, started speaking heresy: Plymouth did not deserve to be called the home of the first Thanksgiving, he announced. The true first Thanksgiving in what became the U.S., he said, was celebrated in 1598 in San Elizario, Texas, a town just south of El Paso along the Rio Grande. In April of that year, Spanish settlers and Native Americans broke bread together in a feast that deserves to be acknowledged as America's first Thanksgiving.

This little drama on the streets of Plymouth was, of course, a show--a good-natured publicity stunt orchestrated by Texan history buffs eager to draw attention to their hometown of San Elizario and the role it played in the history of America.

As a matter of historical record, though, the Texans had a point. History shows that the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to hold religious services of Thanksgiving in the New World, nor were they the first European settlers to sit together with Native Americans at a Thanksgiving table in the land that became the U.S.

Earlier Thanksgivings were celebrated by European newcomers in parts of the country far from New England. These Thanksgivings sometimes were ceremonies called for the purpose of giving thanks for the Europeans' safe arrival in North America. The Age of Exploration also was an age of prayer, and the safe conclusion of a dangerous journey was just one of many reasons for a Christian to kneel and give thanks.

The pre-Plymouth Thanksgivings mostly were religious observances--Protestant prayer services or Catholic masses. A couple contained a festive component in the form of a meal and perhaps some entertainment. At least one Thanksgiving--in Popham, Maine--might have been in part a harvest festival.

There are at least seven claimants for the status of first Thanksgiving--in Texas, Virginia, Florida, and Maine. The Big Three are St. Augustine, Fla. (1565); San Elizario (1598); and Berkeley Plantation, Va. (1619).

The San Elizario Thanksgiving took place on April 30,1598,10 days after an expedition led by Spanish explorer Don Juan de Onate y Salazar reached the Rio Grande and set up camp along its banks. Today, that is the location of the dusty town of San Elizario, 20 miles south of El Paso. Onate's expedition included a scribe, Capt. Gaspar de Perez Villagra, whose epic poem provides a vivid description of the San Elizario Thanksgiving and the circumstances leading up to it.

Onate had led his group across the...