Pilgrim leadership insisted on returning to Provincetown and eventually New
Plymouth. Conspiracy theorists take this to be a charade to dissuade the
majority from insisting on Virginia. See Willison, Saints and Strangers, 145,
466; Kinnicutt, “The Settlement at Plymouth Contemplated Before 1620”; and
Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 109, 270.
51 Willison, Saints and Strangers, 421- 22.
52 Speech in Sioux Falls, 9/8/1919, in Addresses of President Wilson,
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 86.
53 T. H. Breen, “Right Man, Wrong Place,” New York Review of Books, 11/20/
1986, 50.
54 Written by Robert Beverley in 1705 and quoted in Wesley Frank Craven,
The Legend of the Founding Fathers (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983
[1956]), 5-8.
55 Axtell, The European and the Indian, 292-95.
56 J. Leitch Wright Jr., The Only Land They Knew (New York: Free Press,
1981), 78.
57 Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 173; James Truslow Adams, The
March of Democracy (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), 1:12.
58 I encountered most of these students in New England, but many of them
came from suburbs of Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. I
suspect that replies from the rest of the United States would be similar, except
perhaps the Far West.
59 Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1974), 139, describes the same process in Pennsylvania.
60 Emmanuel Altham letter quoted in Sydney V. James, ed., Three Visitors to
Early Plymouth (Plymouth: Plimoth Plantation, 1963), 29.
61 Could there be a fairy tale parallel to this Pilgrim incident? Like
Goldilocks, the Pilgrims broke-and-entered, trespassed, vandalized, and stole,
and like Goldilocks, educators forgive them because they are Aryan. The
Goldilocks tale makes her victims less than human, and the shadowy way our
histories represent Indians makes the Pilgrims’ victims also less than human.
My thanks to Toni Cade Bambara for this analysis of Goldilocks.
62 Kupperman, Settling with the Indians, 125.