Nearly a century ago, Henry Ford told the Chicago Tribune : "History is more or less bunk." He could have been talking about Thanksgiving.

Most of what we know about the holiday, we don't really know.

It began with the folks we call Pilgrims. They were indeed pilgrims, but they called themselves Separatists (from the English church), Saints and, later, Forefathers. A couple of centuries after that, they were handed the moniker Pilgrim Fathers, and they weren't around to refute it.

They weren't somber fuddy-duddies in black clothes, big hats and belt buckles. The Victorians gave them that image.

Neither were they Puritans, who wanted to purify the church, not break away from it. The Puritans settled in Boston years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in late 1620.

Actually, the Mayflower first landed at Provincetown, later reaching Plymouth, where the passengers went ashore in a smaller boat called a shallop. They didn't land on Plymouth Rock, either; that public relations gem arose 120 years later.

The Mayflower apparently was headed for the northern edge of the Virginia Colony, which included today's New York state. But after a four-month voyage, and facing winter, they had to go ashore in Massachusetts -- "our victuals being much spent, especially our beer ..."

They survived winter aboard ship and in an Indian village wiped out by plague brought by earlier Europeans (log cabins didn't exist in America yet). They scavenged graves and stores of grain. Despite all that, they got the natives' help that winter and at spring planting.

The next fall, the surviving settlers (46 had died) held a party. Coming in the fall, it was more agricultural -- "harvest home" -- than religious (else they might have excluded the Indians).

Thanksgiving had been observed before in America: by Spanish, French, Dutch, other English and maybe Vikings centuries before. Oh, and by Indians.

The one we commemorate, Thanksgiving Day 1621, actually lasted three days, with lots of food. The men, both white and red, played games of skill. Four Separatist women and two teenage girls cooked and served. (Sound familiar?) There probably was no turkey or pumpkin pie.

And that was that. It did not become an annual event. For centuries, attempts were made to create a holiday to give thanks. Finally, in 1863, after much lobbying from a magazine editor, President Lincoln declared the last Thursday of each November to be Thanksgiving Day; for the most part, there it has stayed.

Only later did the Friday after Thanksgiving become the biggest shopping day of the year.

Do you know what, though? None of that matters. Today, Thanksgiving is what we have made it, not tales from the bloody pages of history, misunderstandings, and whole-cloth creations and re-creations. It's a tasty sausage made from dubious parts.

This week, we pause to thank God for our bounty. We gather our families and invite outsiders. We eat, watch football and eat. Sometimes, history really is more or less bunk.

MOORE WORDS: The word "thank" comes down to us from Old English and older German, from a word that led to both "thank" and "think." Through the years, it became a favorable thought, good will, gratitude.

By the 1500s, we had "thanks." In the following century, "thank you" became short for "I thank you," says John Ayto, in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

"Thanksgiving" has been around since at least 1533; its use as a festival came in 1632; and in the term "Thanksgiving Day" in 1674. By the way, "bunk," meaning nonsense, wasn't coined until about a century ago.

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.