In 2017, The New Yorker magazine published an article by Maya Salam titled, “Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong.”

“Thanksgiving facts and Thanksgiving myths have blended together for years like so much gravy and mashed potatoes, and separating them is just as complicated,” Salam wrote. She blames school textbooks.

The Pilgrims sometimes wore bright colors, for example, not limiting themselves to the monochromatic gray, black and white apparel of modern day New York City residents.

We were led astray as children. We could have used the colored construction paper! The Pilgrims had nothing against donning their gay apparel now and again. Records show that ruling elder William Brewtser boasted a red cap, a white cap, a quilted cap and a lace cap, as well as a violet coat and a pair of green drawers.

Nor did those colonists call themselves Pilgrims, as we do today; they were Separatists.

Furthermore, the Separatists came to America, not in search of religious freedom — they already had religious freedom in Holland — but to found their own theocracy. Some of the Mayflower passengers boarded for entrepreneurial reasons, or as indentured servants.

Since, as I mentioned, I have always been fascinated by Squanto, imagine my delight upon learning that, although much of what we were taught in school about the Pilgrims is American mythology, having little or no correlation with actual fact, there really was a Squanto. Edward Winslow, a Separatist leader, always referred to Squanto as Tisquantum, which historians believe was close to his proper name, while Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford nicknamed him Squanto.

Truth, as we are often reminded, is stranger than fiction. Imagine the surprise of the Mayflower passengers upon landing at Plymouth Rock when Squanto, an English-speaking Native American of the Patuxet tribe, emerged from the great primeval forest to greet them.

His story is not what you might think.

No simple backwoods fellow, Squanto was a man of the world. By the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Squanto had been around. In his day, there was considerable activity along the New England coast, with English explorers and merchants gathering lucrative cargoes, including saleable furs, timber and human beings.

According to Coll Thrush in his book, “Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire,” in 1614 Squanto and 26 other Pawtuxet and Wausset Natives were kidnapped by Captain Thomas Hunt and sold in the slave market at Malaga, a coastal city in southern Spain.

Freed by kindly friars, Squanto reached London, where he lived with John Slaney, an English merchant and ship builder. Slaney helped him find passage back to North America in 1619.

Squanto was returned to Plymouth Harbor by the exploring party of the English sea captain Thomas Dermer, only to learn that the rest of the Pawtuxet had been wiped out by disease. He was the last of his tribe. When the Pilgrims showed up six months later, Squanto latched right onto them and never left them.

He helped the colonists deal with local tribes, acting as translator and go-between, and yes, he really did teach them to plant corn as well as beans and squash using fish for fertilizer, where to hunt deer and catch fish and, most important, how to form alliances and make peace.

Brought in by Algonquian sachem Massasoit as interpreter, Squanto mediated between the colonists and the Wampanoag people, and he became involved in the very complicated and fractious relations between the English and Massasoit’s people.

Squanto had acted as translator for twenty months when he fell ill and died in November 1622, two years after the Mayflower landed on American shores and one year after the fabled First Thanksgiving.

I just heard a Thanksgiving joke:

Q: How do you know if people have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower?

A: They’ll tell you. So, in this particular column, mum’s the word. You won’t hear it from me.

We Americans, even Native Americans, are all immigrants and pioneers, or their descendants. I’ll bet that crossing the land bridge during the Ice Age, a step or two ahead of the glaciers, wasn’t always that much fun. But that’s pioneer spirit for you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)