As those of us who enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving feast yesterday groggily recover today, this might be a good time to take another look at the first Thanksgiving in 1621.

Three years ago, I wrote in a Bourne Musings column of a presentation made by historian Kevin Doyle at the Bourne Historical Society’s annual harvest dinner. Kevin dug into the meager records and later accounts of that first Thanksgiving celebration. His research led him to believe that both the pilgrims and the Wampanoag came together warily out of common need, and that it would have taken only a nod from the warrior Sachem for the Plymouth colony to be wiped out, as apparently happened in the Roanoke Colony a generation earlier.

While there are abundant legends and fanciful lore of that first harvest dinner, the

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