Originally, the Pilgrims celebrated thanksgiving as days of prayer. But in 1621, in celebration of surviving the winter, they first celebrated thanksgiving as a time of feasting. The national holiday stems from that feast held in the autumn of that year by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians. The feast lasted almost a week and sometimes the Pilgrims ate with the Wampanoag, sometimes separately. Since the Wampanoag lived two days walk from the colony and the Pilgrims ha

Autumn, 1621, the chief sachem of the Wampanoag tribe, the Massosoit, was interrupted by several of his village’s hunters with news that they had heard gunshots coming from the new colony of foreigners. Massosoit, whose birth name was Ousemequin, immediately assumes that the new colony is being attacked by an enemy tribe. He threw together supplies and ordered ninety of his warriors to accompany him and his wife to make the two day journey to go to their rescue. When they

While driving down the road recently, I heard a news flash that purebred buffalo have been genetically cleansed by Colorado State University and the calves will be released at Soapstone Preserve in northern Colorado. It piqued my interest because I recently wrote a seven-part series on white buffalo and how rare [once in every ten million births] they are among the purebred buffalo [click to reference articles on white buffalo]. Recently, buffalo have come under attack fear

This summer my wife and I vacationed in Wyoming and passed a cemetery claiming to have the grave of Sacagawea (pronounced like “Chicago Wee-uh) near Fort Washakie, Wyoming. This Shoshone woman buried on the Wind River Reservation died April 9, 1884. However, if you look up Sacagawea’s death, it is officially recorded as December 20, 1812, near Mobridge, South Dakota. So, who is buried in Wyoming? Although the story of Sacagawea has enjoyed a resurgence over the past few d