Farther ahead is a national myth that will remember only part of the man.

Once those layers are visible, the old image can never look quite the same.

Tisquantum was not a magical guide sent into history to save Plymouth.

He was a Patuxet man whose life had already been broken apart before the Pilgrims knew his name.

He survived long enough to become indispensable to them.

Then he tried to use that position for himself.

He died before the new colonial world he helped stabilize had fully taken shape.

And four centuries later, people are still trying to separate the person from the role America wrote for him.

The most truthful way to remember him is not as the man who taught the Pilgrims one trick about corn.

It is as the man who crossed an ocean against his will, crossed it again trying to get home, found his community gone, and then stood between two worlds that would never again be separate.