January 30, 2019 • 12 mins
Johnny Appleseed was real! And he was about as amazing as the legend paints him. He really did plant apple trees all over America and if the feds hadn’t chopped them down during Prohibition, they’d still be around. Learn what we mean in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry. Let's get to it. I thought this is
an interesting pick from you, and I salute you because, um, well,
I mean I'm I'm literally saluting you. I see my hand.
I'm pretty good at it too. You really are, like
how high and tight that is you? And you did
(00:25):
like the little snap where you're hand kind of reverberates,
you know. Oh I hate a lazy salute, so uh yeah,
I salute you because this is um people think of
they hear the words Johnny Appleseed, they hear that name
and immediately they think of the Disney version, or they
think of folk tale. But Johnny Appleseed was a real
dude named John Chapman who planted apple trees. Yeah. It's
(00:49):
one of those amazing, awesome myths that turns out to
be virtually accurate. Yeah, so it's not a myth at all. No,
not really. I mean, there's only like some stuff about
about that legend that are that is somewhat mythical, but
really most of it's pretty accurate. It's not like he
had like a giant ox or anything that followed him
around that was blue. He was basically I think the
(01:12):
thing right, the thing that um that that people usually
get wrong in the retelling with with Johnny Appleseed is
that he was basically like the world's first flower child,
and that he was just basically like kind of trapesing
along the frontier at the turn of the from the
eighteenth of the nineteenth century, planting trees just because he
(01:33):
loved nature. That is not correct. Necessarily, this guy did
love nature. He's a businessman, he was. He was. He
did this four like out of a business a sense
of business, for sure, but he was not like any
kind of um, hard nosed, hard hitting, like I'll come
(01:54):
to your house and break your legs kind of businessman.
He would never double cross anybody or do something in
business that would make someone else suffer. He apparently was
well known for never ever reminding someone that they owed
a debt. He believed that the he believed the good
Lord would tell that person you need to go Paige,
Johnny apples He because you owe him some money, and
(02:15):
it really didn't matter anyway if you bothered him, because
they knew that they owed the debt. And who was
he to go bug somebody and make him feel down
you never knew someone was going through. So he was
that kind of business man. And yet even with that mentality,
even with that attitude, he had everything he needed in
life and more which was not necessarily substantial, because he
(02:36):
used to sleep on a bed of leaves and little
twig huts that he made of his own construction on
the frontier. Well, let's talk about apples for a second. Um. Apples,
as far as we know, started out in what we
would call Kazakhstan today. They gained a lot of popularity
in Rome because they grafted apples and a lot of
(02:57):
fruit trees. If you want them to grow and fruit
like you are accustomed to, or like you want them to,
you don't plan from seed. You you graph them, which
is when you take a stem with a bud on
it and through magic, not technique as a gardener, but
through magic you uh graph that onto another tree instead
(03:19):
of planting from seed, uh and you would get a
more reliable outcome, especially in the case of apples, because
apparently growing apples from seed. If you have a wonderful, red,
delicious apple and you go spit a seed out into
the ground, your it might grow into something and maybe
I mean, obviously an apple tree, but it probably will
not be a red delicious apple that you can eat. No,
(03:42):
there were called spitters. Apples grown from seed were called
spitters at least scoring. According to this um the Smithsonian
article that we found um because they are way, way
sour like. Apples did not used to be like what
we think of apples today. They were very, very sour,
at least the one's grown from seeds. There were sour um,
(04:03):
and Henry David Thoraux said, did I mention they were sour?
Henry David thoros said that they would put a squirrels
teeth on edge. It's pretty sour. That's super sour. And
I love the way you put it so folksy. And
now he was a proto hippie, I'll tell you that.
But this these were the trees that Johnny apple Seed
was planning. He was planning them from seed um, not
(04:25):
from grafting. And apparently one reason why he planted them
from from seed and not grafting was because he was
a member of the sweden Borgian church Work Work Work,
which UM which kind of held that plants could feel uh,
and therefore grafting was inherently cruel because it could conceivably
(04:46):
create suffering in the plants. So he grew from seed. Alright,
let's take a break. Oh wow, and we'll we'll come
back and we'll talk about why John Chapman wanted to
plant all these apples to begin with from seed right
after this. All right, So Mr Chapman was from Ohio,
(05:21):
and uh, it's it's funny. We don't know a lot
about his early years. He was born in actually born
in Massachusetts, but kind of lived his life in Ohio,
I think, uh for the most part, and which was
the west at the time, which is funny. And said,
all right, here's the deal. The Ohio company associate said,
(05:41):
all right, you want to go out west and settle.
If you want to form a permanent homestead beyond Ohio,
then you can get it. You can get a hundred acres.
But what you have to do, though, is you have
to plant fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees in
three years. Um. I guess it's an incentive to make
the land rich with with plants. Well, also to show
(06:03):
that you planned to be there in a few years
when these things started bearing fruit. It was it was
a way to show that you meant to settle there permanently.
I guess, well, yeah, but it was it's not like
build a house. I mean it it had an agricultural benefit.
I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess that would
have been part of it then too. Yeah. So he says,
all right, he sees a business opportunity, and he's like,
(06:26):
if I can start heading west from Pennsylvania and I
can get just ahead of these settlers and plant these things,
like claim this land and plant these trees and these orchards,
then I can turn around and sell them at a
much higher value. Yeah, because he improved the land. He
was the first squatter kind of in a way, I guess.
But the other thing that I saw he did too
(06:48):
was he would establish nurseries in the area as well.
So if if you didn't buy attractive land that he
had already developed, you could also still just come and
buy his trees from him. Um. And he did this
for decades, going up and down the frontier, because the
frontier kept kept growing further and further west. And at first,
(07:10):
I mean when he when he first embarked out, and
I mean we're talking Ohio. Ohio was the frontier there
was there was no United States beyond that. I don't
think Ohio was even a state quite yet. So he's
walking up and down these unsettled lands, um like growing
these orchids, planning apple trees, and then also creating nurseries.
(07:32):
But at the same time too, he was also serving
as a liaison between these incoming settlers and the Native
Americans who know now suddenly had neighbors, whether they wanted
them or not. UM And he apparently uh spent a
lot of time learning the languages of the different tribes
that he encountered, and they grew to trust him, and
(07:55):
so he became an advocate for the settlers, but also
was able to advocate for the Native Americans too. He
was just that kind of a guy. He was that
he was that that's kind of the cut the cloth
he was cut from. I bet he put his mouth
around a piece piper too, speaking of one of the
first hippies. Uh, all right, So he's going around, he's
(08:16):
planting all these apple orchards and I guess presumably peach
because he was required to. But he's not known as
Johnny Peachtree. No, just apple seed or peach seed, I guess. Uh.
And he Here's the thing though, with these apples, like
we said, because he's planning them from seed only and
not grafting them. It's pretty wild, like it's like the
(08:38):
wild West. Apple wise, you don't know what's gonna come up.
Um many times, like you said, they're much too sour
to eat, But what they weren't too sour for is
to make booze out of them in the form of cider.
And cider was a big, big part of frontier life.
Like they drank it. It's apparently, um New Englanders that
transplanted out on the western edges of Ohio would drink
(09:01):
close to eleven ounces of hard cider per day. And
it was a time when water quality was suspect, and
you knew you could count on that cider, right because
I mean it's alcoholic, so it's fermented, which means that
any harmful bacteria has been killed. It can't really survive
in an alcoholic drink, right, It's wonderful, So they would
drink cider instead of water, which, by the way, eleven
(09:21):
ounces is it's like a bottle of cider today. No
it's not not too much, No it's not. But everyone
drank it every day. Instead of water. So there was
you know, a certain amount of buds going on, I'm sure,
and who knows what the alcoholic content of the cider, right,
but that was I mean, that was what apples were
used for. Um. I think Michael Pollan said that up
(09:44):
until prohibition, an apple in the United States had a
much greater chance of being turned into hard cider than
it did it just being eaten. And again it was
because most apples in the US were grown from seed,
meaning they were sour, meaning they were much better or
for cider than they were for eating, right, And that's
how it was again up until prohibition. And one of
(10:07):
the reasons why cider just kind of went away is
because prohibition. Apparently the Feds used to chop down apple
trees where they saw him to kind of say, no,
you're not gonna make any cider out of this, you
hay seed hick. You got it. I'm gonna cut down
this tree right in front of your face, right exactly. Uh.
You like cider, Yeah, I love it? Yeah, Yeah, it's
(10:28):
great stuff. Um. My initial introduction to cider was you know,
really sweet, like I guess the first wave of the resurgence,
like back in college in those days, what was the
one that everyone drank would chuck? Yeah, that was it. Yeah,
it was basically the zema of cider, at least back then.
I haven't had it in a while, so maybe they
kind of I don't know, so that's what I'm saying.
(10:50):
They may have toned it down just regular hard cider.
Oh yes, And it's not supposed to be it's it
was never supposed to be sweet. That was just a
weird anomally. So I think the cider now is much
closer to the traditional citer, which is it's it's got
like a deadbit of sweetness to it, but it's it's
definitely a lot more um beery than than apple juicy.
(11:12):
I'm gonna have to dip my toe in the cider
pond once again. Do not do that, Just drink it.
Uh what else we have? Do we have anything else?
In this guy? Johnny Appleseed? Um No, I think I
mentioned he was a sweet businessman. He was a friend
to the Native American and the European settler check and
check he uh oh. There's supposedly a tree in Nova,
(11:36):
Ohio on a farm. It's a hundred and seventy five
year old tree, and some people believe that it is
the last remaining tree that can be found that Johnny
Chapman a k a. Johnny Appleseed actually planted, because again
the prohibition federalis chopped all his other stuff down. So
that's Johnny Appleseed. Everybody, Drink it up. If you want
(11:59):
to get in touch with us, send us an email.
You can do worse than that. Just send it off
to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry. Let's get to it. I thought this is
an interesting pick from you, and I salute you because, um, well,
I mean I'm I'm literally saluting you. I see my hand.
I'm pretty good at it too. You really are, like
how high and tight that is you? And you did
(00:25):
like the little snap where you're hand kind of reverberates,
you know. Oh I hate a lazy salute, so uh yeah,
I salute you because this is um people think of
they hear the words Johnny Appleseed, they hear that name
and immediately they think of the Disney version, or they
think of folk tale. But Johnny Appleseed was a real
dude named John Chapman who planted apple trees. Yeah. It's
(00:49):
one of those amazing, awesome myths that turns out to
be virtually accurate. Yeah, so it's not a myth at all. No,
not really. I mean, there's only like some stuff about
about that legend that are that is somewhat mythical, but
really most of it's pretty accurate. It's not like he
had like a giant ox or anything that followed him
around that was blue. He was basically I think the
(01:12):
thing right, the thing that um that that people usually
get wrong in the retelling with with Johnny Appleseed is
that he was basically like the world's first flower child,
and that he was just basically like kind of trapesing
along the frontier at the turn of the from the
eighteenth of the nineteenth century, planting trees just because he
(01:33):
loved nature. That is not correct. Necessarily, this guy did
love nature. He's a businessman, he was. He was. He
did this four like out of a business a sense
of business, for sure, but he was not like any
kind of um, hard nosed, hard hitting, like I'll come
(01:54):
to your house and break your legs kind of businessman.
He would never double cross anybody or do something in
business that would make someone else suffer. He apparently was
well known for never ever reminding someone that they owed
a debt. He believed that the he believed the good
Lord would tell that person you need to go Paige,
Johnny apples He because you owe him some money, and
(02:15):
it really didn't matter anyway if you bothered him, because
they knew that they owed the debt. And who was
he to go bug somebody and make him feel down
you never knew someone was going through. So he was
that kind of business man. And yet even with that mentality,
even with that attitude, he had everything he needed in
life and more which was not necessarily substantial, because he
(02:36):
used to sleep on a bed of leaves and little
twig huts that he made of his own construction on
the frontier. Well, let's talk about apples for a second. Um. Apples,
as far as we know, started out in what we
would call Kazakhstan today. They gained a lot of popularity
in Rome because they grafted apples and a lot of
(02:57):
fruit trees. If you want them to grow and fruit
like you are accustomed to, or like you want them to,
you don't plan from seed. You you graph them, which
is when you take a stem with a bud on
it and through magic, not technique as a gardener, but
through magic you uh graph that onto another tree instead
(03:19):
of planting from seed, uh and you would get a
more reliable outcome, especially in the case of apples, because
apparently growing apples from seed. If you have a wonderful, red,
delicious apple and you go spit a seed out into
the ground, your it might grow into something and maybe
I mean, obviously an apple tree, but it probably will
not be a red delicious apple that you can eat. No,
(03:42):
there were called spitters. Apples grown from seed were called
spitters at least scoring. According to this um the Smithsonian
article that we found um because they are way, way
sour like. Apples did not used to be like what
we think of apples today. They were very, very sour,
at least the one's grown from seeds. There were sour um,
(04:03):
and Henry David Thoraux said, did I mention they were sour?
Henry David thoros said that they would put a squirrels
teeth on edge. It's pretty sour. That's super sour. And
I love the way you put it so folksy. And
now he was a proto hippie, I'll tell you that.
But this these were the trees that Johnny apple Seed
was planning. He was planning them from seed um, not
(04:25):
from grafting. And apparently one reason why he planted them
from from seed and not grafting was because he was
a member of the sweden Borgian church Work Work Work,
which UM which kind of held that plants could feel uh,
and therefore grafting was inherently cruel because it could conceivably
(04:46):
create suffering in the plants. So he grew from seed. Alright,
let's take a break. Oh wow, and we'll we'll come
back and we'll talk about why John Chapman wanted to
plant all these apples to begin with from seed right
after this. All right, So Mr Chapman was from Ohio,
(05:21):
and uh, it's it's funny. We don't know a lot
about his early years. He was born in actually born
in Massachusetts, but kind of lived his life in Ohio,
I think, uh for the most part, and which was
the west at the time, which is funny. And said,
all right, here's the deal. The Ohio company associate said,
(05:41):
all right, you want to go out west and settle.
If you want to form a permanent homestead beyond Ohio,
then you can get it. You can get a hundred acres.
But what you have to do, though, is you have
to plant fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees in
three years. Um. I guess it's an incentive to make
the land rich with with plants. Well, also to show
(06:03):
that you planned to be there in a few years
when these things started bearing fruit. It was it was
a way to show that you meant to settle there permanently.
I guess, well, yeah, but it was it's not like
build a house. I mean it it had an agricultural benefit.
I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess that would
have been part of it then too. Yeah. So he says,
all right, he sees a business opportunity, and he's like,
(06:26):
if I can start heading west from Pennsylvania and I
can get just ahead of these settlers and plant these things,
like claim this land and plant these trees and these orchards,
then I can turn around and sell them at a
much higher value. Yeah, because he improved the land. He
was the first squatter kind of in a way, I guess.
But the other thing that I saw he did too
(06:48):
was he would establish nurseries in the area as well.
So if if you didn't buy attractive land that he
had already developed, you could also still just come and
buy his trees from him. Um. And he did this
for decades, going up and down the frontier, because the
frontier kept kept growing further and further west. And at first,
(07:10):
I mean when he when he first embarked out, and
I mean we're talking Ohio. Ohio was the frontier there
was there was no United States beyond that. I don't
think Ohio was even a state quite yet. So he's
walking up and down these unsettled lands, um like growing
these orchids, planning apple trees, and then also creating nurseries.
(07:32):
But at the same time too, he was also serving
as a liaison between these incoming settlers and the Native
Americans who know now suddenly had neighbors, whether they wanted
them or not. UM And he apparently uh spent a
lot of time learning the languages of the different tribes
that he encountered, and they grew to trust him, and
(07:55):
so he became an advocate for the settlers, but also
was able to advocate for the Native Americans too. He
was just that kind of a guy. He was that
he was that that's kind of the cut the cloth
he was cut from. I bet he put his mouth
around a piece piper too, speaking of one of the
first hippies. Uh, all right, So he's going around, he's
(08:16):
planting all these apple orchards and I guess presumably peach
because he was required to. But he's not known as
Johnny Peachtree. No, just apple seed or peach seed, I guess. Uh.
And he Here's the thing though, with these apples, like
we said, because he's planning them from seed only and
not grafting them. It's pretty wild, like it's like the
(08:38):
wild West. Apple wise, you don't know what's gonna come up.
Um many times, like you said, they're much too sour
to eat, But what they weren't too sour for is
to make booze out of them in the form of cider.
And cider was a big, big part of frontier life.
Like they drank it. It's apparently, um New Englanders that
transplanted out on the western edges of Ohio would drink
(09:01):
close to eleven ounces of hard cider per day. And
it was a time when water quality was suspect, and
you knew you could count on that cider, right because
I mean it's alcoholic, so it's fermented, which means that
any harmful bacteria has been killed. It can't really survive
in an alcoholic drink, right, It's wonderful, So they would
drink cider instead of water, which, by the way, eleven
(09:21):
ounces is it's like a bottle of cider today. No
it's not not too much, No it's not. But everyone
drank it every day. Instead of water. So there was
you know, a certain amount of buds going on, I'm sure,
and who knows what the alcoholic content of the cider, right,
but that was I mean, that was what apples were
used for. Um. I think Michael Pollan said that up
(09:44):
until prohibition, an apple in the United States had a
much greater chance of being turned into hard cider than
it did it just being eaten. And again it was
because most apples in the US were grown from seed,
meaning they were sour, meaning they were much better or
for cider than they were for eating, right, And that's
how it was again up until prohibition. And one of
(10:07):
the reasons why cider just kind of went away is
because prohibition. Apparently the Feds used to chop down apple
trees where they saw him to kind of say, no,
you're not gonna make any cider out of this, you
hay seed hick. You got it. I'm gonna cut down
this tree right in front of your face, right exactly. Uh.
You like cider, Yeah, I love it? Yeah, Yeah, it's
(10:28):
great stuff. Um. My initial introduction to cider was you know,
really sweet, like I guess the first wave of the resurgence,
like back in college in those days, what was the
one that everyone drank would chuck? Yeah, that was it. Yeah,
it was basically the zema of cider, at least back then.
I haven't had it in a while, so maybe they
kind of I don't know, so that's what I'm saying.
(10:50):
They may have toned it down just regular hard cider.
Oh yes, And it's not supposed to be it's it
was never supposed to be sweet. That was just a
weird anomally. So I think the cider now is much
closer to the traditional citer, which is it's it's got
like a deadbit of sweetness to it, but it's it's
definitely a lot more um beery than than apple juicy.
(11:12):
I'm gonna have to dip my toe in the cider
pond once again. Do not do that, Just drink it.
Uh what else we have? Do we have anything else?
In this guy? Johnny Appleseed? Um No, I think I
mentioned he was a sweet businessman. He was a friend
to the Native American and the European settler check and
check he uh oh. There's supposedly a tree in Nova,
(11:36):
Ohio on a farm. It's a hundred and seventy five
year old tree, and some people believe that it is
the last remaining tree that can be found that Johnny
Chapman a k a. Johnny Appleseed actually planted, because again
the prohibition federalis chopped all his other stuff down. So
that's Johnny Appleseed. Everybody, Drink it up. If you want
(11:59):
to get in touch with us, send us an email.
You can do worse than that. Just send it off
to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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