We’ve all heard the story about how settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts were saved from starvation by local Native Americans who shared their bountiful harvest of corn and stuffed turkey with pumpkin pie desserts, learning that this was the genesis of the modern Thanksgiving feast.

But as with most American history–even that taught outside Florida–it seems the story is wrong.  Historians widely agree that a gathering fourteen years before near Phippsburg, Maine, the Popham Colony was the spot of the original “Thanksgiving dinner” after more than 40 Wabanaki natives paddled up in canoes to a European settlement, whose residents entertained the guests with “meat and drink” and presented them with gifts of copper beads and knives when they departed.  It marked the first recorded gathering of native and European peoples in North America.

One of the reasons Maine doesn’t want that initial Popham visit memorialized:  those colonists were dicks.  Two of the Natives who attended the meeting were already victims of European colonialism:  they had been kidnapped by settlers and taken back to Europe as oddities.  The Europeans hoped the kidnapped individuals would serve as emissaries and trade negotiators with their home tribes.

The Europeans brought them back to the “New World” hoping they would serve as guides, but they escaped and returned to their homes, later serving as interpreters during that first meal.  According to reports of the gathering, one of the women who attended the gathering told settlers she thought her husband had been dead for two years before he returned unexpectedly.

Other members of the Algonquian alliance in the region had also been abducted by settlers, leading to local peoples increasingly isolating the Europeans, who eventually abandoned the colony after a little more than a year when the group’s leader died.

“The Popham Colony failed in large part because of these kidnappings and the Wabanaki realizing they couldn’t trust these people,” said Colin Woodard, a Maine journalist and historian and the author of nationally bestselling books like “American Nations.” “To go back and celebrate that Thanksgiving moment during this moment is tricky.”