Some years ago Thomas DiBacco, a historian at the American University in Washington, DC, wrote an article decrying the “fowling” of Thanksgiving by commercial interests.

First he noted that Thanksgiving as we know it today, owes little to the Pilgrims in New England. Govenor William Bradford did, indeed, proclaim a holiday in 1621, but it was a one-shot affair for the Plymouth colony. Furthermore, the “kill joy” DiBacco wrote, there was “no turkey, no bread and no pumpkin pie in Plymouth in 1621.”

According to tradition, a motley collection sat down to that first Thanksgiving dinner. Forty Pilgrims and 89 Indians in animal skins and gaily-colored feathers gathered together in friendship. Most honored was the legendary Squanto, who had met the Pilgrims a year earlier and taught them how to make use of the corn they had found, also how to find wild greens in the spring and how to fish for eels and other seafoods.

Corn saved the day, as well as their lives. The Pilgrims happened on corn by accident. After disembarking from the Mayflower they trekked inland for several miles ... “a heap of sand, newly done, which we digged up and found a fine great basket of fair Indian corn. Digged further and found a fine great basket full of very fair corn of this year and with some six and thirty goodly ears of corn ...”

As Governor Bradford described it, “It was a great mercy to this poor people that here they got seed to plant them corn the next year or else they might have starved for they had none nor any likelihood to get any until the planting season had been past.”

Until the mid-19th century, Thanksgiving was celebrated mostly by New Englanders. The very earliest celebrations apparently featured fish and venison as main dishes. Duck, turkey, goose and partridge eventually made it onto the main platter, but no one cuisine predominated.

As the holiday was mainly a New England affair, in the middle 1800s Americans from all over the Eastern region traveled to the Northeastern states to experience the celebration, with over 10,000 New York City residents making the trek in 1858 alone. Such mass activity caused some eyebrow-raising and chin-scratching among the entrepreneurial class, and purveyors of produce in mid-Atlantic states began to urge their state governors to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday.

The movement was slow in developing until the ‘War between the States.’ America was truly in its darkest hour, its survival as a nation in doubt. President Lincoln seized upon the Thanksgiving holiday to try to instill some unifying spark, even if only symbolic, so in 1863, in the midst of the war, he proclaimed a national day of prayer and thanksgiving.

After the Civil War, fowl suppliers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania began talking turkey when Thanksgiving came around. This promotion was so successful that by 1883 Americans were hooked on turkey for Thanksgiving, with other birds, including chicken, way behind in consumer preference.

One observer noted that the day before the big feast, New York City markets were overwhelmed: “People appeared to be determined to get a turkey or die,” reported the New York Times, even though the price, 10 cents a pound, was not low for that era.

By the late 1800s, historians, writers and artists had begun diddling with history, taking considerable license with their renditions of early American settlements. Thanksgiving feasts were depicted with Pilgrims gathered around tables laden with... you guessed it... turkeys and pumpkins and other familiar fixin’s.

With the turkey image thus successfully implanted, businessmen turned next to promoting Thanksgiving as a means to blend American values with sales of goods that made the November home fires burn brighter. Here’s a typical ad, from 1883, replete with rhyming and unintended blank verse:

Harvest Feasts now cheer the land;

Peace and Plenty smiling stand;

Home Sweet Home more precious seems;

When Thanksgiving Pleasure teems.

Old and Young in pastimes meet;

See the Golden Moments fleet;

Social Love now warmer grows;

People all don warmer clothes.

Largest dealers in the land

Are M. STERN & SON, New York.

Then came the successful movement to identify Thanksgiving as the benchmark for the beginning of the Christmas selling season, with parades and that famous countdown, “26 shopping days until...”

In 1939, business interests were successful in getting President Franklin D. Roosevelt to change the date of Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the next-to-last Thursday in order to extend the Christmas buying season a week.

So many citizens were upset, including my mother, by what they called “the President’s tinkering,” that in 1941, Congress officially changed the holiday’s date back to the fourth Thursday in November.

But the 1939 ploy accomplished all that business wanted and more. Many Americans decided to celebrate two Thanksgivings that year, the traditional one on Nov. 30 and the revised one a week earlier. That meant a whole lot more turkeys on the butchers’ scales.

And for the American who could not afford to celebrate both Thanksgivings, the National Sausage Casings Dealers Association came up with a new product that could be readily purchased and eaten, especially at late-November football games. Bunned and smothered in cranberry sauce, it was appropriately called a “turkeyfurter.”

The sound of that didn’t go over so well, so now they are called turkey frankfurters.

In the Northwest, when the white man came, the Indians ate mainly berries and seafoods, although the small white potato-like camas, was cultivated and eaten. Trading was brisk between the Eastern Washington and Western Washington Indians.

The early settlers at Oak Harbor raised potatoes in the fertile ground of Crescent Harbor and employed the Indians to dig them. A flour mill was installed at Kennedy’s Lagoon (San de Fuca) and the tidal flow turned the wheel to grind the grain.

Those 1850s settlers ate to live, instead of living to eat, and food was not wasted. Many a cook became innovative in preparing meals for her family from the basic foodstuffs, such as flour, molasses and meat dishes from salmon and wildlife. It must have been a happy time when berry season came around, and Island berries of all kinds were ripe for the eating and preserving.

There are no accounts of an early formal Thanksgiving Day on Whidbey Island, but each day was a special thanksgiving time just to survive. There were no wild turkeys, and the Chinese pheasant was not introduced until the 1880s. Ducks and geese were plentiful, along with deer and the ubiquitous seafood. The open fireplace did the cooking.

We’ve come a long way...

Lee Brainard moved to Whidbey as a Navy wife in 1961 and worked for the local paper. She moved onto the base in 1970 where she spent the next 15 years as editor and reporter for the Navy Crosswind. During that time she started working for Dorothy Neil, editing and publishing nine of Dorothy books and editing Spindrift Magazine. In 1990 she and her husband published the Town Crier, an Oak Harbor community newspaper. She is also an active member of the Oak Harbor Soroptimist club.