While Thanksgiving celebrations today maintain some aspects of the First Thanksgiving, the environment in which we celebrate has changed significantly. The Pilgrims held the First Thanksgiving feast in 1621 to celebrate their first successful corn harvest since their arrival in the New World, where they came seeking land ownership and the freedom to practice their religion without persecution. Crossing the ocean on a small ship called the Mayflower, the Pilgrims landed the previous September and then endured a brutal winter that took the lives of half the passengers. Survival that spring depended upon the help and guidance of the local Indian tribe, The Wampanoag, who taught the Pilgrims how to cultivate corn, extract maple syrup, and recognize poisonous plants.
The Governor of the new colony invited the local tribe to that first harvest festival to give thanks for their help and for the bounty of the earth that would keep them alive until the next harvest. After that, it became common practice for communities and states to declare an annual or occasional day of thanksgiving. President Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War in 1863, declared Thanksgiving to be a national holiday to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November.
A notable event occurred on the first Thanksgiving celebrated in Aurora County. George and Rachel Gibbs, living in a lean-to shanty built adjacent to the George Saville home (occupied today by John Saville), welcomed their newborn son, George, into the world on November 27, 1880. That Thanksgiving baby holds the title of the first baby born to the Euro-American settlers in Aurora County.
Some of the earliest settlers practiced the custom of hosting pioneer Thanksgiving dinners for those families who arrived before 1883. In later years, many of the churches hosted pubic Thanksgiving dinners with the Ladies Aid organizations using that opportunity to sell handmade items to raise funds for church projects.
Whether preparing the Thanksgiving meal to be served at home or at church, the pioneer women used only basic cooking tools and methods. Just finding water for cooking posed difficulties. Until wells were dug, water had to be hauled, sometimes for miles. Well water was often too hard to even boil beans. Instead of thawing a frozen turkey, the pioneer women raised and then killed the turkeys, removed the feathers and prepared the bird for roasting. Rather than opening cans of pumpkin, they harvested the pumpkin from their gardens, cooked it, scooped the pumpkin from the shell, and then mashed the pulp before adding it to a homemade piecrust. With no such thing as instant mashed potatoes, the women peeled, cooked, and then mashed pounds of potatoes by hand, not with an electric mixer. On the treeless plains, the women cooked those foods using stoves fueled by coal, twisted straw, or even buffalo chips!
The pioneer women preparing those meals faced many challenges making homes on the windswept prairie. Some of their families were quite large, with births occurring every two years for twenty to twenty-five years. They kept house, fed and clothed their families, birthed and cared for the children, nursed the sick, and raised chickens and milked cows for cash income to support their families. Meals were often cooked in homes that were small, had little insulation, and probably no floor other than dirt. While a few women enjoyed nicer frame homes, with papered walls, wood floors, windows, and doors, some women lived in dual-purpose homes and others lived for years in dugouts or houses built from sod.
When Blanche Brady married Peter McGovern (first marriage in the county), their bedroom also served as a grain bin, with the marriage bed placed atop the pile of grain. A pregnant Elizabeth Stahl Teesdale started housekeeping in a dugout when she and her husband brought their three children to Aurora Township in 1882. Following a miserable winter in inadequate housing, the family moved to another homestead, again living in a dugout, until they built a claim shanty. Teesdale gave birth to nine more children in that shanty before her husband built them a retirement home in Stickney.
In her memoirs, Ella Todd Wilson described the interior of many of the early homes. “Because they had to bring their own building materials besides livestock and seed, the new homes were generally small, the furnishings scant, just the necessities of living—bed, stove, table and a few chairs, a “milk safe,” which was a small cupboard to set milk pans in. The doors were tin, perforated in patterns to let air in to the milk. There was always a shelf or two for food and groceries. There might be a dresser too. Quite often a small pantry was built in one corner, where were stored the iron kettles, iron frying pans—often called “spiders”—and bread pans, dishpan, and groceries.”
Today, many people celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with extended family members, gathering at someone’s home with men and women working together to prepare a traditional meal of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, cranberry relish, pumpkin pie, and other customary dishes. Modern conveniences, such as gas or electric stoves, microwave ovens, crockpots, refrigerators, deep fryers and gas grills, make preparation easier than in years past. Advances in transportation allow people to travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to share the holiday meal with loved ones. Developments in food distribution and storage now permit people to purchase complete meals, already prepared, needing only microwave ovens to heat the meals at dinnertime. Families partake of the dinners in well-heated and insulated homes equipped with the latest technology, followed by the families gathering around large-screen televisions broadcasting a national football game, while electric dishwashers automatically clean the dirty dishes.
Americans collectively give thanks for the blessings in their lives on Thanksgiving. Close to 400 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God and their neighbors for learning how to produce a bountiful harvest in the New World. More than 250 years after that, the pioneers of Aurora County expressed gratitude for the opportunity to produce bountiful harvests on their new lands on the Dakota prairie. Now, after almost another 140 years, while the land is no longer new and the harvest not always bountiful, the people of Aurora County are still grateful for the blessings in their lives. And, because they are not cooking Thanksgiving meals under pioneer conditions, women feel the most thankful!
It Happened Right Here: Giving Thanks, by Ruth Page Jones, Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, November 24, 2016
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 