One of the things I like to do as a teacher is really dig into the facts. I’m hoping I pass such a desire on to my students, sparking interest and causing them to read more. This is, I suppose, the desire of most teachers.

I often warn my fifth graders that they are going to start hearing some unpleasant things at their age. Many of their chapter book stories now deal with death and endings that aren’t happy. It’s part of growing up.

We started our unit on colonies in the New World, beginning with the lost colony of Roanoke. If you don’t know much about that story, I’d encourage you to Google it. Fans of the show “American Horror Story” tell me the show has devoted a season to the folks at Roanoke. Maybe I should watch.

After Roanoke, we learned as much as we could about the settlers at Jamestown. Sure, we’ve heard about Pocahontas (a lot of myth, by the way) and maybe even about how tobacco saved the colony. But did you know the settlers were so hungry at one point that they started eating leather? Did you know that one man murdered his pregnant wife and planned to eat her? There are things left out of the history books. I can’t imagine my eighth grade history teacher, Mrs. Lang, saying a thing about cannibalism while she taught us about Jamestown.

I try to get the Pilgrims of Plymouth introduced and talked about before my kiddos join their families for the Thanksgiving holiday. Usually, though, we end up talking about the Pilgrims well into December. I don’t like to rush history.

Much of the time, I think back to the days of my own schooling when we’d hear stories from the past. In the early days, we’d color pictures of the Pilgrims and that first Thanksgiving feast. There are friendly pictures of smiling Pilgrims and smiling Native Americans (we called them Indians back in the 1970s). We learned about the natives showing the Pilgrims how to plant in sandy soil, using small fish as fertilizer. We made construction paper pilgrim hats and collars, and hat bands with feathers. We stretched an old pantyhose over a bent coat hanger and made a tribe of brown-skinned natives by gluing on construction paper accessories to resemble face paint and headdresses.

But we never heard some of the other details. The Pilgrims were visited by leaders of the Pokanoket tribe in 1621 and formed an alliance with them.  There was even a battle with another tribe later in the summer in which the Pilgrims helped the Pokanoket tribe with their muskets. There was also plenty of death and hardship, as there always seems to be in the stories of our beginnings.
We see plenty of Currier and Ives type paintings around this time of the year. I’m sure you’ve seen one. It’s a picture of the brightly dressed Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock, being met immediately by the neighboring natives. The natives, in the painting, are bowing down to the newcomers.

There were no women or natives present when the pilgrims landed, and even thought folks still buy a ticket to see Plymouth Rock, there is no evidence they landed there at all.

In 1741, a man named Elder John Faunce (aged 95) called Plymouth Rock a place were the forefathers landed. Most historians believe that he was just referring to a place where many of the early settlers “often landed.” Still, the story was changed to “first landed” and Plymouth Rock remains a tourist attraction to this day. Oh, and about the bowing. Well, I doubt very much that the natives bowed in submission to the strange white folks.

I’m not out to debunk every myth that comes along, but I do like to know as many details as I can.

History isn’t always as sugary as our Kindergarten color pages portrayed.