Thanksgiving is the first great multicultural holiday for Americans, thanks to Native Americans who taught the Puritans how to adapt to a strange new world, says a UC Davis historian.

"This was a new environment for the English because of the differing nature of American wilderness," says Clarence Walker, an authority on the history of American race relations.

"England had been farmed for centuries, and the land was not heavily forested," Walker adds. "In the New World, because of the Indian slash-and-burn agriculture, land had reforested itself, and it would have to be cleared."

In a spirit of cooperation, Native Americans taught their English neighbors in the Plymouth settlement -- mostly artisans and not farmers -- to raise crops in the unfamiliar soils and how to trap animals for food and build nets and baskets to catch fish.

The Indians also helped the English survive by helping them construct homes and by serving as cultural mediators. Squanto, for instance, forestalled initial hostility between the English and native tribes that could have driven the Puritans away, Walker says.

Although the Puritans faced being starved out as other early English settlements would be in the 1600s along the American coast, Walker says Thanksgiving became a story of American success. It was celebrated as a New England holiday long before President Lincoln declared it a national holiday in 1863.