A cure for loneliness?
Pioneer Oklahomans enjoyed turkey for Thanksgiving, but it was wild and brought to the table by a hunter.
Most of the turkeys that will be the centerpiece of Thursday’s Thanksgiving dinner were grown on a farm and bought from a store.
Pioneer Oklahomans enjoyed turkey for Thanksgiving, but it was wild and brought to the table by a hunter. This article from The Oklahoman on Nov. 21, 1920, provides a different perspective of the Thanksgiving bird.
Most of the wild turkey tends to encourage the spirit of the wild that is in the frontiersman. It satisfies the desire for food without despoiling the atmosphere. It fits into the surroundings. It is the choice diet where the woods meet the prairies. Its juices are not of conventional civilization, and it does not depress one with homesickness.
Therefore it was far and away the meat for the once trackless west. Perhaps on the rockbound shore the Pilgrims discovered its chief virtue. An oldtime Oklahoma ranchman holds that the turkey became the Thanksgiving bird because it made the Pilgrims forget their sorrows and spurred them to adventure in the new land. Fried chicken or beefsteak would have made them lonesome, he said, in spite of the oppression from which they had fled.
You may have felt some Thanksgiving night, far out in the west, that indescribable sensation of loneliness. It usually creeps in and upon the person spending the first Thanksgiving away from the fireside of home.
One morning, after ‘thirty’ not many years ago, a young reporter just out from North Carolina opened a box his mother had sent him for Thanksgiving. It contained fried chicken, biscuits, tea cakes, layer cakes, boiled eggs, jams and jellies. He divided with the other fellows, all of whom were away from home, many, many miles and a majority of whom were spending their first Thanksgiving away from home. They ate and wept in silence.
They needed wild turkey. Having become identified with the west they needed the meat of the west. They needed to be transported into the high winds of the plains, into the tall grass of the wide spaces where once the buffalo slept, into the vast valleys of the undulating prairies where the music of the stars melts into the shrill midnight cries of the lonely wolf.
Turkey hunting was the chief sport of Oklahoma pioneers. Nearly every written or published experience of a man who ‘made the run’ or drew a ‘claim’ or lived in the vanguard of the ‘sooners’ somewhere says in his tale that he never before saw as many wild turkeys. He killed them for breakfast, for dinner and for supper. They roosted in the high trees of the virgin forests, they fed along the rims of ragged hills cover with waist-high sage grass, or they drank in the dense shades of the blue and silent brooks.
The wild turkey was among the first inhabitants of the territories and about the last of the untamed things to pass with the human habitation of the soil. Once there were millions of them in the Kiamichi, Arbuckle and Wichita mountains and in the hills of the Creek and Cherokee nations. Osage Indians virtually lived off deer and turkey for many years in the rough spots of their Oklahoma reservation...
As we celebrate Thanksgiving, pause for a moment and be thankful for the turkey on our tables but also for the wild turkeys that fed the Pilgrims on that first Thanksgiving and sustained our Oklahoma pioneers.