People of all creeds, races and locations around the earth have given thanks for many millennia, following their own traditions of gratitude for life, safety, food, shelter, family and companions. In America, the earliest native settlers celebrated and gave thanks for bountiful hunts and harvests, as did the early Spanish settlers in New Mexico, the English at Jamestown, the French in Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, and later the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in the 1620s.
During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered special thanksgiving services for his troops after successful battles and in recognition of military alliances. Washington wrote of this time, “To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without shoes, by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and almost as often without provisions as with; marching through frost and snow … is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce by parallel’d.”
The Oneida tribe, one of the original Hou-Du-No-Shaun-EE or People of the Long House, later known as the Iroquois Confederacy, decided to help. A delegation set off to walk more than 200 miles from Fort Stanwix to Valley Forge carrying 600 baskets of corn. One of the group, a woman named Polly Cooper, taught the Continentals how to cook the white corn, and she stayed the winter, cooking and nursing sick soldiers. Grateful soldiers thanked her, and Martha Washington, who brought buggies of clothing and shoes for the troops, gave Cooper a black shawl. To this day, the Oneidas keep the shawl as a treasured thank-you gift.
