Thanksgiving for Smallpox

3 Nephi 10: 10 … and the mourning, and the weeping, and the wailing of the people who were spared alive did cease; and their mourning was turned into joy, and their lamentations into the praise and thanksgiving unto the Lord Jesus Christ, their Redeemer.

This scripture from the Book of Mormon is a great description of how joyful it is to be saved from the hand of destruction, the terrible devastation that preceded the Savior’s visit to the New World. However, this description equally reminds me of the joy the European pilgrims must have felt in their delivery from the forces of destruction and their thanksgiving. The only problem is that they thought of the Indians as a potential source of their destruction.

Here's a Thanksgiving holiday editorial from the Anchorage Press that gives a rather untraditional bent on our traditional telling of the camaraderie and thanks of Thanksgiving.

"Historians who dig beneath the revisionist veneer of Thanksgiving legend report that the original three-day feast of 1621 featured as much guarded suspicion as camaraderie, and any crying and hugging that might have gone on seems to have spread more smallpox than love into the native population. In a sermon at Plymouth two years after the original Thanksgiving, a Pilgrim preacher named Mather the Elder thanked God for smallpox, which had by that point wiped out many of the Wampanoag. A few years later, the Pilgrims and what was left of the Wampanoag were fighting each other in King Philip's War, which by today's standards would be considered more a massacre than a war."

This is a fascinating take on events but it's a rather dark and depressing thought for this day of appreciation and thanksgiving. I mean thanksgiving that our potential enemies were wiped out by an unseen disease of God by some 95%. Wow!! I can see why we might shy away from looking at that aspect. Unfortunately, that temporary friendship probably sped up the spread of smallpox to Native Americans who had no resistance or immunity to it that the Europeans did. The sad thing is that the Wampanoag were doomed, whether they were friends or foe.

I now need to lighten the mood by eating a little more pumpkin pie and watching a football game to get back into the spirit of things, and thinking of more pleasant things like how at one point at least we were humbled enough by the wild forces of a hostile New World to get along with people who were so different.
Photo by Ariel Camilo via stock.xchng