lucky find gazette c c
 
 
The Wampanoag tribes of the New England coast lived the good life for over 5,000 years. English sailors in the 1500s told tales of a tall, muscular, and well-painted bunch, who lolled on dunes around bonfires at night, and gorged on a cornucopia of clams, oysters, berries, grapes, turkeys, corn, maple sugar, and pumpkins every day, to the soothing swell of the eternal surf. But all things must pass.
 
      
 
The clean and healthy People of the Dawn tried to keep the European invaders out of the New World. After they had inhaled a few whiffs of those unwashed Old World traders, they refused to let them land, no matter how pretty their beads were. Whenever they spied the explorers, they would moon their crafts from the shore. But to no avail: the good life ended in 1618, when some short, smelly, disease-ridden Frenchmen wrecked their rat-infested ship on the sands of Cape Cod and infected the native peoples with a virulent disease which had killed off 95% of their population by the time the Mayflower arrived in 1620.
 
It’s doubtful the Pilgrims would have ever set foot on Plymouth Rock if there had been anyone left alive in the village of Patuxet to push them off of it!
 
 
What a contrast between the lifestyle of those “savages” and the miserable early Puritans! One group roamed around the beaches and forests and fields all day, reveling in the glories of Creation, while the other fidgeted on hard benches as some pious jerk droned on and on about fire and brimstone.
 
Burn me at the stake, but I’d rather be a heathen.
 
Puritan men did wear wicked cool hats, though.
 
 
 
Happy Thanksgiving!
 
 
      
 
A nice public dunking will soon cure this wench of ingratitude.
Page Six, Issue Two
Pilgrims and Puritans