First Thanksgiving reenacted at Socorro Mission
Petting farm animals and shooting arrows, modern El Pasoans Sunday remembered a story that began more than four hundred years ago.
Spanish Conquistador Don Juan de Oñate’s expedition reached what would be El Paso in 1598, after months of travel. Running low on supplies, they met the Manso natives.
“They took what was at that point what was a very bedraggled and hungry and thirsty group of people and they helped them to fish, catch wild duck, wild birds,” said Daniel Fresquez, with the El Paso Mission Trail Association.
After days of recovery, on April 30, the Catholic day of Ascension, the Spaniards and had the first European-Amerindian Thanksgiving.
“They had a feast, a Mass, and they had a formal reading of the taking,” Fresquez said.
That’s when Oñate claimed the lands of the Rio Grande as property of the Spanish Empire, but the Manso reaction to the conquest isn’t recorded.
“Being an actually very primitive tribe, they were probably overawed by the arrival of people on horseback,” Fresquez explained.
The Spanish would go on to conquer the lands of West Texas and New Mexico, moving on from that first thanksgiving day held right on the banks of the Rio Grande. The borderland natives being used to build these same missions, where now the story of the first Thanksgiving is retold every year.
