It is turkey time. Thanksgiving is next week and turkeys will be the focus on tables all around Tooele Valley. Somewhere between the TV bowl games, the tag football on the front lawn (weather permitting) and stuffing ourselves with turkey and stuffing, we will likely recall the black-clad, serious and diligent men and women who began this holiday. It is almost certain the Pilgrims didn’t have any idea they were starting a practice that would be celebrated yearly nearly 400 years later.

Their story is familiar. The group left England for Holland due to religious persecution and then left Holland because they didn’t want their children to lose their English heritage. They sailed to America where they hoped to establish a society that allowed their heritage and religion to mesh. The voyage was hard and survival after they arrived in Massachusetts mid-December even harder. They paid a high price for the freedoms they espoused. Nearly half died of starvation and cold that first winter.

The survivors determined to stay and see their dream through. Massassoit, chief of the Wampanoag tribe of American Indians in the area, befriended them and taught them how to use native crops. That knowledge saved their lives.

The pilgrims frequently observed Feasts of Thanksgiving as they saw the hand of the Lord blessing their lives so after the harvest of 1620, they invited their new American Indian friends to share the feasting and the feast lasted for three days.

It fit well with the tribal customs. Knowing that leaner times would arrive with the winter, they customarily gorged themselves in the harvest season, sometimes feasting for several days at a time.

The American Indians knew about growing crops, but hunting was a mainstay for them. Primarily the men arrived at the meal bearing venison and possibly some birds, fish, rabbits, elk, antelope and other wild game.

The vegetables the Pilgrims learned to use were not typical only to the area where they had landed. Beans, corn and squash were staples for the American Indians. The early tribes who discovered these in Central America carried seed with them as they migrated and other tribes learned about them. Most tribes were nomadic so soon these easy-to-store plants that adapt to a wide range of climates were common throughout the Americas. Potatoes, sweet potatoes and cranberries are also native to the Americas, but may not have been part of the first Thanksgiving Feast. Pumpkins were probably not made into pies. Instead, they were probably hollowed out and a sort of custard poured into the center to make a type of pumpkin pudding. The cooking that first fall was done outdoors over an open fire.

The tribes’ women dried and preserved foods against the lean months and the Wampanoag tribe had taught the Pilgrims the necessary skills.

American Indian men brought meat from the hunt and the tribe preserved it by cutting it into thin slices and hanging it to dry. After the meat became jerky, some tribes pulverized it with a stone maul and mixed it with ground and dried berries. The high-protein result was called pemmican, which could be stored in rawhide cases and kept for months. The European settlers also dried meat but they also preserved it by salting and smoking it.

Some tribes stored meat, fruit, dried corn and other vegetables in large jug-shaped caches dug into the ground. The food stayed good for months and could be retrieved when food was scarce to hold them until spring.

Although the European settlers made use of iron cookware, the natives roasted some of their foods. To make stews and moist dishes, tribes that hunted buffalo might create a cooking pot by making a four-legged tripod and fastening the lining of a buffalo stomach to the four legs. They filled it with water, roots, meats and other vegetables and herbs, and then heated it by dropping hot, fist-sized rocks into it to bring it to a boil. The stomach paunch would last for three or four days, before it would finally become soggy and soft from the heat. By this time, it too could be eaten.

When food was plentiful, the tribes ate three meals a day, but did not waste anything edible from the animal. They even broke the bones to boil the marrow. They made sausages using the cleaned and shaped entrails, filling them with meat, seasoned wild onions and herbs.

If they had turkey at the first Thanksgiving — and the records do not say whether or not they did — they would have been quite different from the birds we will eat next week. While the domestic farm-fed turkeys we purchase at the grocery store are tender with very meaty breasts, wild turkeys would have been leaner and stringier. To survive, the wild turkeys had to be lean, with strong wing muscles for escape that were also excellent at foraging for food. Today’s hybrid turkeys do not fly for any great distance and could not escape predators or fend for themselves in the wild. Food is delivered to them daily.

The Pilgrims and other European settlers did not adopt all of the American Indian customs. However, adapting local foods to their diets meant survival and they have become a welcome part of the heritage we will celebrate next week.