Thanksgiving Greetings from the Pole

Young polar explorers wear warm clothes to celebrate Thanksgiving at "the Pole" in this postcard illustration from 1910. But which pole--North or South?

Frederick Cook claimed that he reached the North Pole in 1908, and Robert Peary said that he arrived there in 1909. Around the same time, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott were attempting to be the first to reach the South Pole.

In the 1900s and 1910s, polar expeditions received widespread attention in newspapers and magazines in the same way that the later news media covered the race to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. The publisher's generic caption about "the Pole" gave the postcard a longer shelf life since it applied equally to whichever direction--North or South--a polar expedition was going.

Printed on the other side of the postcard: "Thanksgiving Series No. 10"