Howdy and welcome to Wies about Texas, the podcast about Texas history.

Now the normal production schedule is every other Monday, but this is a bonus episode for you.

It's Thanksgiving Week 2015 and I wanted to give you a little Thanksgiving history with a Texas

twist of course.

Now the traditional first Thanksgiving story

involves the pilgrims celebrating their first harvest in the new world in

1621. Numerous other of the Eastern states claim Thanksgiving celebrations at various times in the

1600s, and several of the original colonies celebrated Thanksgiving before the 1800s.

Several presidents also called for Thanksgiving celebrations.

George Washington called for the first National Day of Thanksgiving in 1789.

But if you've learned one thing from this podcast, it's that Texas is different,

and Thanksgiving is no exception.

So today we're going to go all the way back to 1541. That's right, 1541, way before the

Pilgrims and Plymouth and get wise about Texas.

In 1540, the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado

led an expedition of about 1500,500 men north from Mexico City looking for gold.

In the spring of 1541, the expedition was camped near Paladura Canyon up in the panhandle of Texas and they celebrated a

eucharistic Thanksgiving. Now whether this was a special service or just the

celebration of the Feast of the Ascension is not known but this event was

commemorated as the first Thanksgiving by the Texas Society of the Daughters of American Colonists.

In 1959, they placed a marker in Paladur Canyon at a river crossing.

Incidentally, that service was celebrated by Frey Wanda Padilla,

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