American Thanksgiving - let me get this straight...

[d_r]

8. you missed a couple of parts

the pilgrims landed in 1620. The Spaniards had introduced European diseases such as small pox and other diseases more than a century earlier. There had also been English fishermen off the coast of what is now the NE US who had traded with the Native Americans living there. Squanto hitched a ride with them to England, then tried to come back but was captured and taken to Spain to be sold as a slave, but he made it back to England. Squanto returned to the new world, and went back to where his old village was. The village was empty because everyone had been wiped out by diseases brought by the Europeans. So when the pilgrims landed, they had the help of English-speaking Squanto and a whole empty village of buildings and cleared fields for planting corn. They also had lots of graves to rob for further equipment.

The pilgrims and Wampanoag signed a peace treaty in 1620 that worked pretty well for the next 50 years or so. The Wampanoags were killed or sold in to slavery in the late 1670s during King Philip's war. The colonists got a chuck taken out of their hide also.