Wild at Heart

Settle an argument: Were turkeys wild or domesticated before Columbus showed up?

I don't think my answer will settle your argument because the answer is yes.

When we think of turkeys and Thanksgiving, our minds travel to New England with the pilgrims and the little piece of revisionist history that is our Thanksgiving pageant – Colonist and Natives sitting down for a big happy meal where the indigenous people brought corn, venison, turkey and succotash and the Pilgrims brought funny hats with buckles on them -cause they were so uptight, even their hats had to be locked down.

I don't want to be that person, but it wasn't quite like that. For openers, that more closely resembles the interaction of the early Virginia settlements where native populations, divided in their own territorial ambitions, weren't above trading food for metal and light weaponry. Up north, the pilgrims were predisposed to days of thanks, but they weren't really about enjoying a good meal. And although the new world was abundant with food, all early settlers preferred English foodstuffs to the point of privation and starvation.

But back to the Plymouth Rock story, in the NE, turkeys were not domesticated, they were wild. Or wildish, turkeys according to bird authority John James Audubon described the fowl as fearless/reckless in the winter months raiding human food stores and later cavorting with other farmed fowl.

However, in the SE and Mexico the bird had been domesticated for 1000ish years before Columbus showed up in this hemisphere. With Spanish the Spanish incursion into Mexico, the turkey was transported first to the Caribbean then to Spain. From Spain, the bird quickly conquered Europe, displacing the goose as holiday fare.

Turkey and turkish were the general terms given to all things exotic and non-Euro, despite the nation's toehold on the Continent. The Spanish word for the bird, guajolote, comes directly from huexoloti or what the fowl was called by members of the Triple Alliance aka Aztecs.

So take your pick the turkey had been domesticated long before Columbus showed up. Just not on the eastern seaboard where pilgrims, colonists and refugees began establishing settlements in the 16^th century.