Holiday Rerun: The Other First Thanksgiving

Unless you live in the American Southwest, the grade school version of American history* typically leaps from Columbus and 1492 straight to 1620, when the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. There is a vague awareness that the Spanish and the French were "out there" doing something, but the story focuses on the development of the thirteen British colonies.

In fact, El Paso, Texas, makes a good claim to being the site of the first American thanksgiving feast. **

In March, 1598, an expedition under the leadership of Juan de Oñate set out from Santa Barbara in the modern Mexican state of Chihuahua toward the northern Rio Grande Valley, where Oñate had been granted land by the viceroy of New Spain. Instead of taking the normal route along first the Rio Conchos and then the Rio Grande, the group of 500 people and 7000 head of livestock set out across the Chihuahua desert.

map of New Spain, 1768

The trip took fifty days. For the first seven days, the expedition traveled through heavy rain. For the rest of the trip, they suffered from heat and dryness. Five days before they reached what is now El Paso, they ran out of both food and water. They scavenged what they could in the desert, but it was the Rio Grande that saved them. After resting for ten days on the banks of the river, Oñate declared a day of thanksgiving, including a feast of game and fish. One member of the expedition described the event in his diary:

We built a great bonfire and roasted the meat and fish, and then all sat down to a repast the like of which we had never enjoyed before. . .We were happy that our trials were over; as happy as were the passengers in the Ark when they saw the dove returning with the olive branch in his beak, bringing tidings that the deluge had subsided.

In fact, the feast wasn't the main event of the day. Festivities also included claiming the land of the Rio Grande Valley in the name of Philip II of Spain***--an event known as La Toma, literally The Taking. Many historians consider this event the beginning of Spanish colonization of the American Southwest. (Oñate's party continued up the Rio Grande and settled in what is now Santa Fe.)

Since 1989, the El Paso Mission Trail Association has celebrated a day of thanksgiving on April 30 in commemoration of Oñate's feast. I don’t know about you, but that's a holiday I could buy into. Thanksgiving tamales, anyone?

 

* Which tends to be the default version in our heads.

**Or more accurately, the first European-American Thanksgiving.

*** Just to help you connect the dots: Philip II was married to Queen Mary of England, the older sister of Queen Elizabeth. In 1588, he ordered the ill-fated attempt on England known as the Spanish Armada.

On War, Part 2

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After last Friday's post about the Pritzker Military Library's symposium, On War, I got a challenging e-mail from a reader, asking me for the titles of definitive histories for World War I, World War II and Vietnam.*

My first response was "danged if I know." My second response was doubt that there is a definitive history for either world war because of their sheer scope. I finally decided that if I couldn't give him definitive histories, I could at least give him important ones.

Members of my favorite on-line military history group made several useful suggestions:

• Phillip Davidson's Vietnam at War
• John Keegan's The First World War
• Barbara Tuchman's wonderful The Guns of August***
• Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

From my reading in the last two years, I'd add Antony Beevor's The Second World War and Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War.

I ask you, dear readers: What books would you add to the list? Are there any here that you disagree with violently?

*Another reader who regularly asks me hard questions took a totally different angle and suggested I read James Juhnke's The Missing Peace: The Search for Nonviolent Alternatives in United States History.**
**I have the smartest, toughest readers anywhere!
***I want to be Barbara Tuchman when I grow up.

On War: An Opinionated Report

Last week My Own True Love and I attended On War: Exploring 20th Century Conflict, a military history seminar at Chicago's Pritzker Military Library. I promised to report back.

The short version? Wow! Four wars, four sessions. (1) I came away with pages of notes and two major takeaways:

• I know nothing about the Korean War except what I learned watching M*A*S*H reruns.
• If I ever plan an all day seminar, I'm serving coffee at the mid-afternoon break instead of waiting until the 5:00 break. We descended on those urns like vultures.

But I suspect you were looking for something more substantive than that. Here goes:

World War I

Sir Max Hastings, spoke about his latest book, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. (2) He took the old -fashioned position that Germany was to blame for the war and that England had to fight to protect Europe from the horrors of domination by the Kaiserreich. He took a swipe at the French for employing colonial troops in Europe. (3) He was snotty about the role of women in the war. He dismissed the modern commonplace that the war was "a mistake made worse by the incompetence of British commanders," calling it the "poet's view" of the war. He expressed sympathy for officers who ordered the execution of soldiers who ran from battle as an example to their fellows. He argued that the Versailles Treaty was reasonable. I had a lovely time disagreeing with him in the margins of my notebook. (4)

World War II

The session on World War II was billed as Big Men of World War II. Gerhard Weinberg, author of A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II, gave lively and opinionated analyses of the character and accomplishments of leaders from both sides of the war. Here are a few of the comments that caught my attention:

• We forget how close the memory of World War I was at the time.
• We tend to forget how long the distances were in the Pacific Theater. The distance between islands in New Guinea was as long as the Eastern Front. (5)
• What do you think would have happened to David if he missed Goliath with the first sling shot?

Korea

I'm afraid I can't do justice to Allan Millet, whose three volume The War For Korea is the definitive work on the Korean War from the American perspective. I am simply too ignorant. What caught my attention most clearly was the challenge to historians with which he opens his first volume:

The besetting sins of Korean War history are the inability of academic historians to deal with military matters, the inability of official historians to deal with political and institutional failures, the inability of secular humanists to deal with the power of faith systems and the inability of military historians to deal with anything but the combat performance of their favorite armed forces.

From my perspective, these are the besetting sins not simply of Korean War historians, but of historians in general. Recognizing, and attempting to transcend, our biases should be part of every historian's work even though we will necessarily fail.

Vietnam

Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, and Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried, in conversation about Vietnam, writing, and writing about Vietnam--does it get any better than that? I took as many notes from this session as I did from the other three sessions put together. Here are a few snippets:

• O'Brien: "My war wasn't with the North Vietnamese. We fought the 48th Viet Cong Battalion. They were great soldiers…The word "insurgent" is demeaning. It suggests they weren't professional soldiers. If they weren't professional soldiers I don't want to meet professional soldiers."
• O'Brien: "Even if you support a war, you don't like being shot at. You don't like watching people die."
• Marlantes: "When you're on the edge of the DMZ, you're scared. Once you're in it, you're too busy to be scared."
• O'Brien: "I start all my writing with a scrap of language."
• O'Brien: "A great deal of my war was daily brutality. Like being dipped in crankcase oil--evil on a daily basis.
• Marlantes: "The military is run by ordinary human beings, Put that power in the hands of ordinary people and it will get abused."
• O'Brien: "Vietnam is a real place and not just a war."

'Nuff said?

(1) At least two of the sessions will appear on Chicago's WTTW at some point in the future. Keep your eye on the Pritzker website for details.
(2) The hundred year anniversary of WWI is coming soon. Brace yourself for a flood of Big Fat History Books attempting to say something new about the war. Some of them will be brilliant. Others will be doorstops. One is already sitting in my to-be-read pile waiting for review.
(3) Conveniently not mentioning the Gurkha and Sikh regiments who fought for Britain.
(4) I'm a big fan of summary paper, which is divided into two columns of un-equal width. The narrower column is a great place to record questions, reference notes, disagreements with the text and doodled marginalia. If anyone comes up with database software for a Mac that reproduces it I'll be first in line to buy it.
(5) What can I say? Some of my favorite historical stuff begins with what we usually forget.