Actually , that ' s bullshit . What the hell are they even teaching you in american schools ? To condense the actual story , essentially the colonists attempted to set up New Plymouth as a commune , which led to a lot of mistakes being made , since communism as a system tends to not work very well without a great deal of oversightand even then , it can be argued . Essentially , they planted everything incorrectly and their crops died , leading to them turning to the local tribes for help , and after a great deal of hunting alongside them , a three day feast was held . This was NOT thanksgiving . The decision was later made after yet another year of poor harvests that the colony would switch to a system closer to individual enterprise , in which land was reallocated on the basis of family size and need , and this led to a significantly larger crop as the farmers were more motivated to get out into the fields , secure in the knowledge that their hard work would feed their family and not be taken by the state to be redistributed to everyone else . It was at this point shaping up to be a very good harvest indeed , but then there was a very hot summer and for a worrying period of time , the rains stopped coming , so the colonists were worried they wouldn ' t have any harvest at all . The pilgrims held what they called A day of humiliation in which they got together as a community and prayed heavily , and within a few days the rains came again and the harvest was saved . They interpreted this as a sign from God , and the governor , one William Bradford , declared November 29 th a Day of Thanksgiving in which the families would get together and feast on their harvest from the month prior . That ' s the actual story of thanksgiving . As for the native americans , the reason for the fighting is a lot more complex and has to do with the way the tribes themselves interacted and took land from each other . Some of it was certainly unjustified on the part of colonists , and some of it was a matter of going far overboard in retaliation for raids , but a great deal of it has to do with intertribe warfare that was going on since long before europeans came to the Americas .