National History: A Turkey's Tale - The Roosevelt Review

November 26, 2019 | By Jaymi Firestone

As Americans, we expect a delicious, juicy turkey to adorn our tables on Thanksgiving Day. It’s customary for each table to have a version of the big bird among dozens of side dishes and desserts. We are following tradition, after all. What most Americans don’t know however, is that the turkey we all devour every Thanksgiving is not actually native to the United States, nor was it from Turkey or any other European country.

That’s right. The turkey you eat wasn’t even American when the Pilgrims roasted one on that cold day at Plymouth so many years ago.

The domestic turkey we all know and love is actually a breed of Mexican fowl.

Yes, we said Mexican. The chunky, flight-less birds originated in southern Mexico.

The Spanish conquistadors who embarked upon Native American colonies found the odd birds roaming the lands of the southern part of North America, then exported them back to Europe a century before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth in search of religious freedom!

The Olmec people began domesticating turkeys, known as “huexolotl,” around 800 B.C. for meat, eggs, and feathers to adorn their heads and clothing. Other Native tribes, like the Aztec and Mayans, then copied the Olmec people, and began domesticating the birds themselves and raising them on their lands.

Some 400 years later, the birds had migrated to present day Arizona and New Mexico, where the Pueblo Natives living there were breeding and eating the large fowl as well. Natives all over the southern portion of North America were using the birds as a source of food.

By 1100 A.D. the land-dwelling birds had reproduced and migrated north from Mexico into much of the United States. Natives all over were relying on the bird as one of their most important sources of meat and eggs.

Then around 1500 A.D. the first Spanish invaders encountered the Aztec empire in Mexico and the Pueblo villages in Arizona and New Mexico. When they found the turkeys in those colonies, and realized the excellent meat source these animals provided, they began to export the huexolotl birds from their native land to Europe.

According to a professor from Rutgers University, “Europeans confused this bird with the guinea hen (an African fowl) that had been imported via Ottoman Turkey. Apparently the taste—and the agricultural economics—of the Mexican bird were superior, and so it displaced its African kin on European farms and tables, taking over the name “turkey.” (quartz.com).

Thanks to the Spanish who brought this delicious new meat source, by 1530, the Mexican-originated fowl was abundant among many European and British farms.

The colonists who originally founded the United States had all grown up eating “turkey” in Europe.

Much to their surprise, when they landed on what would become American soil, they found similar birds, the North American wild version, native to their new environments. The “new” birds didn’t take well to being domesticated however, since they had migrated from Mexico and were wild. So, Europeans began to export the Mexican “turkeys” from Europe back to North America, where they originated from to begin with.

And while the first Thanksgiving probably involved a variety of local birds, the ones we consume by the mouthful every Thanksgiving are most likely descendants of the original Mexican fowl that made a round trip from Mexico to Plymouth via Europe on English and Spanish ships!

Of course this is where the Thanksgiving story of struggle and triumph comes in where Native Americans and the new American colonists joined together to overcome disease and despair in the early 1600s.

We know how the Pilgrims survived, and how Squanto’s role helped them to overcome harsh winters and disease that was running rampant. What most don’t know is that the turkey that they had in celebration of their survival probably originates to Mexico and the Spanish invaders who found it centuries before.