Tisquantum did help Plymouth.

And all of those facts existed alongside kidnapping, epidemic loss, competing political interests, and colonization.

History becomes stronger when both sides of the sentence are allowed to remain.

The Fish Fertilizer Legend

Few details are more closely associated with Squanto than the image of a fish buried beneath a corn seed.

The lesson appears in countless children’s books: Squanto showed the starving Pilgrims to place fish in the soil, fertilizing the corn that saved them.

The story contains a kernel of plausible agricultural practice but has been repeated with more confidence than the early sources support.

Bradford wrote broadly that Tisquantum instructed the colonists in planting corn and finding fish.

Later retellings fused these ideas into a single memorable technique.

Some coastal Native communities did use fish or fish remains as fertilizer under appropriate conditions.