Synopsis
Describes how the Indian Squanto, an English-speaking Christian and former slave, whose village had been wiped out by smallpox, taught the Pilgrims the skills they needed to survive the harsh Massachusetts winter.
Children's Literature
Between the time the earliest English settlers and the ones we call Pilgrims arrived in what is now Plymouth, a Patuxet Indian named Squanto had twice been enslaved, taken to Europe, freed, and returned to his homeland. On his second return, however, he found land but no home. All of his people were dead from smallpox, brought to them unwittingly by the English. In her simply written, yet highly informative Squanto and the First Thanksgiving, Joyce K. Kessel tells how, ironically, the misfortune of the last of the Patuxets became the Pilgrims' blessing.