Ep. 886: Who Was the Real Johnny Appleseed?

Steven Rinella talks with author Isaac Fitzgerald.

Topics discussed: Isaac's new book, American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed; the true story of Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) versus the mythologized version; land speculation, westward expansion, and environmental impact; Appleseed's religious influence; the role of storytelling in shaping national legends; the role of apples and cider in American history; John's role in the War of 1812; and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 2 (00:15):
Listening past, you can't predict.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
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dot com. That's f I R S T L I
T E dot com. All right, everybody, Today we're joined

(00:44):
by writer Isaac Fitzgerald, who has a brand new book
i'll called American Rambler. Walk in the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.
Johnny Appleseed being one of those dudes that I that
I I feel like I know about, but I don't
know about. Now.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
You probably know the disneyfied version, you know the version
that they teach you in elementary school. But he is
an American legend, but he's he was a real guy.
His name was John Chapman. That's one of the things
I love about him. When I first brought it up
to the woman that's now my wife, I was thinking
about writing a book about him. I said, Johnny Appleseed,
he was this great Walker. He was kind of into faith.
I'm kind of coming back into faith a little bit
in my life. And she was like, he's not a

(01:22):
real dude. And she's like Paul Bunyan Peko spill and
I was.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Like, you're a real guy.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
I was like, those are not real dudes. You're right,
you're right.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
But Johnny Appleseed was a real guy named John Chapman,
born around the Revolutionary War. So I wanted to kind
of walk where he walked and explore the country.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
I want to start out by telling you might not
realize who you're in the presence of this is Johnny
Johnny Spencer, you could call him Spencer apple Seed, tell
him he's tell him he's an aspiring you know.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I want to start an orchard. I set aside my
whole spring. I didn't do any hunting this year. WHOA
just so I can focus on planting. I plant did
sixty fruit trees, dwarf fruit trees and fruit shrubs in
my yard.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
That's amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
I want I want to just say I love that
we have like a fact checker here on the podcast.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
That's helpful.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
You don't even know that, but were you were you
planning seeds or were you grafting?

Speaker 2 (02:16):
I have not done any grafting. It's a mixture of things.
So there's stuff that was done by like bear root,
you know, which just like comes out of a cellar
at the nursery. Uh, and up to the biggest thing
being like an eight foot tall pear tree.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
That a variety of stuff. Why don't you know he
was doing this? When I heard he was doing it,
I was like, hey, we got a dude coming out
and talk all about that. He said, you should, you
should be in there. Very exciting.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Can I ask, like, what what gave you the level?
Like obviously like your hunter, but that to take off
a full season is a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Well, I like foraging and now I don't have to
leave to do it. I can just do it in
my backyard. I also like the idea of perennials rather
than annuals. I feel like the gardeners in the office here,
which there are many of u, they talk about it
with more frustration than love. You disagree, Oh no, okay.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
The garden from the place to anger.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
That's what I have witnessed, And so I'm like, I
don't want to be the one who's mad that my
tomatoes froze on June fourth. I would rather just like
put a perennial on the ground, and and then it's
like gonna keep doing its thing, and I don't have
to be the one who gets mad every year.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
It doesn't. You'll find plenty of reasons. I will.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
But you're trying to start from a place of joy.
You're trying to start from place. But what you said
earlier too is like you like gathering, but now you
want to do it from your backyard. That's why most
people start a little more farming, a little more harvesting,
a little more seasonal, which is what Chapman did himself.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Spencer's too young to call him oldiecentric, but when he's older,
he will absolutely be regarded as an old ecentric. Chapman asks,
aspiring old you're on your way? I love all right, Man,
tell people before we get into the book and everything,

(04:04):
tell everybody where you're from in your other book.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
So listen, I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, but then
I lived out in north central Massachusetts. You know, if
you know you go far enough western Massachusetts, it gets
real pretty yeah. Before there.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Before where people go on color tours.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Exactly exactly, kind of like the rust belt of Massachusetts.
And that's what my first books about. It's called Dirtbag Massachusetts,
and it's really I really love to write about juxtapositions.
I love about like kind of wrestling with the ways
in which things are contradictory. And Massachusetts is a very
rich state, but it still has very very low income areas,
one of which I grew up in.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
Ye, you guys grew up poor. You grew up poor.
I grew up.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
I grew up on the house, which on paper you
would think those are like kind of the worst years
of my childhood. But I actually loved those years because
I was surrounded by other adults. I was part of
this community in inner city Boston, was Catholic worker. It
was very much everyone kind of taking care of one another.
Is really community driven. Loved it. And then when I
moved out to this farming kind of north central Massachusetts,
that's when things got lonely. But a few towns over

(05:07):
is where John Chapman was born. Like I said, during
the Revolutionary.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Well, I don't want to talk about him yet, not yet,
so I was, but I I want to ask you
thing about growing up though. Oh yeah, no, ask me
your dad. You're like, you're your dad would take you
guys out on Okay, in your book American Rambler, Yeah
you're roaming around. Yeah, but your your dad was a roamer,
was and he would drag you on his roams.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Absolutely a wanderer and a rambler. Because again, we didn't
have any money for any kind of vacation, and so
my father would take me out on these long camping trips,
these long hikes. We would sleep outside, we'd go up
into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I love the
White Mountains and we were part of this thing. It
was it was you know, it wasn't anything official, but
it's called the four thousand Footers Club, and you were

(05:50):
just trying to climb all the four thousand foot mountains,
which I know out here probably sounds a little small
to y'all, but for us, those are the big mountains
out out here.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Well, I mean, want one of the deadliest mountains in
the entries in the White Mountains.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Right, that's right? Is that George Washington?

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Right? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, And so absolutely just growing up with him and
what he would do. You know, when you're walking and
I think about this a lot in all sorts of
different ways. But when you're walking with an adult and
you're a child, it's actually pretty tough. They got these
long strides and you're just trying to keep up. And
so my dad looking at exactly, and my dad would

(06:24):
tell me these long, meandering stories to try and get
me to keep up with him, trying to make sure.
He'd be like, oh, if we just hit this peak,
or if we just hit this kind of turn in
the trail, I'll tell you what happens next in the story.
So he'd almost give me these like cliff Cliffhanger cereals
to keep me going. Now, when I started consuming culture
as I got older, all of a sudden it'd be like, Luke,

(06:44):
I am your father, And I was like, this sounds familiar,
like he was just he was just ripping off all
these things and telling them. But I loved I adored
those times with my dad.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
I ajorined like, wait, they stole that from my dad exactly.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Just start reading Lord of the Rings and be like,
how did this guy talk to my dad? That's nuts?
But genuinely, I just I love them so much, And
I loved those times spent with my father because it
was one. It was bonding, you know how it is
when you get out there, it's just it's beautiful. It's gorgeous.
We'd sleep under the stars or in a tent. Every

(07:20):
once in a while the weather would be pretty rough.
He had this beat up old Toyota, like blue, rusted
out truck that had like that plastic covering on the bed,
and so if things got real bad, we'd try to
get back to that and we'd sleep in there. And
I just remember kind of like curled up in my
dad's chest. Those walks were the most spectacular times, like
some of my best memories with him as a father.

(07:41):
And he does come down to this kind of storytelling
that he used to do, and he would also be
ripping off American legends as well.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, okay, intro. What's the first you ever heard of
Johnny Appleseed? I thought about this. When I was thinking
about I was like, I think the only thing I
can think about Johnny apple Seed is he had he
wore around a pot on his head.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
That's all right, which, by the way, sadly I hate
to dispel that rumor, but probably it's not factually accurate.
I'm so sorry, man, I I apologize he did probably
wear a bucket. He usually had a bucket, but that
the tin pot with a handle off of it really
hadn't been thought up yet at that point. That's kind
of almost a few decades later.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
But yes, Pump, they gave that idea to him decades later.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Oh yeah, no, his whole his whole deal is he
gets lionized a few decades after his death, and we'll
get to that.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
But no, So the first time, are you are are
you aware that Boone didn't wear a coonskin cap?

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Don't break my heart.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
Crocket wore a coonskin cap, but he wore it almost
like like a provocation, like it was a goof as
a troll.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Basically, he was like, Oh you think I'm such an
outdoor being.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Oh my god, here he comes in his coonskin hat.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
He was he was, He was like being audacious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no,
yeah again. These things get put back on these legends
right as we learn about them and as we try
to basically flatten them and make them less complex so
that they can be consumed by young children. But the
first time I heard about Johnny Appleseed was very much
my dad, because he would tell these kind of giant,

(09:11):
elaborate stories, and my Johnny Appleseed of my father. He
walked all the way to California. He brought apples here
over the Atlantic Ocean on his shoulders. My dad was
such a storyteller. He went so big, and so my
mother's job was kind of to bring me back to earth.
She'd be the one that would take the encyclopedia out
and be like, hey, he was actually a real guy.
His name was John Chapman, who was born right down

(09:33):
the road in Lemonstar, Massachusetts. Maybe not the tinpot hat,
definitely not the getting to California. But he was a proselytizer.
He was a wanderer. He planted orchards. He did not
throw seeds willy nilly. He actually was pretty committed to
an almost haphazard style of land speculation. And so my

(09:54):
mom kind of taught me all about that. But it
wasn't until later in my life when walking came into
my life again in a really big way, the same
way my father loved walking, and faith came back in
my into my life the same way. My mom has
always been interested in prayer. I was I was approaching
forty and I was realizing these things were returning into
my life. After a lifetime of kind of trying to

(10:15):
be different than my parents, I all of a sudden
realized I was coming to their traditions again. And that's
when I started thinking about who's one of the walkers
in history that I would love to explore? And that's
like I said. I was like to my wife, I said,
Johnny Applese. She said, not a real guy, And I
said no, well, actually I got to push up my
little nerd glasses and go well actually, And that's that's

(10:37):
how this book was born.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Tell me what you were telling me the other day
about that wasn't like eating out.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
He didn't make tasty apples. Oh no, made spitters spitters.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yeah, Walt Whitman would describe it as tart enough to
make a blue jay scream spitters. That's tart, and that's
and it's coming from seeds, right, Yeah, that's what happens
if you grafted an apple tree. If you graft an
apple tree, you let's say you have a honeycrisp. You
graft that apple tree, you're gonna get that same apple
you're cloning at that point exactly. But what happens if

(11:11):
you hit it with seeds.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Well, if you do a seed, it's sort of you
don't know what product you're going to get. And I
feel like what Johnny Appleseed was doing was sort of
a survival of the fittest almost he was allowing the
seeds to become their own apples that then like evolved
and diversified what the apple crop was on the continent.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
That's exactly right, And it was this version of basically,
because of cross pollination, you had no idea whatever seed
you put in the ground, you had no idea what
kind of apple you'd get. But they were usually small,
and they were usually tart. And despite what Disney teaches
you in Melody Time, which I won't sing the song
because we don't have the rights to it, but if
you were a kid that grew up, especially around Churchill,

(11:54):
remember the Lord's been good to me. And so I
think the Lord forgiving me the things I need, the
birds and the bee in the apple seeds, the Lord's
been good to me. It is very much all about
apple tarts for the settlers, It's all about apple pies.
It's all about this wholesome American story of westward expansion,
which again, after his death he kind of becomes the

(12:15):
Mickey Mouse of westward expansion, so we can kind of
ignore the brutality and the bloodshed that went into that.
But it's not true. Every single apple, the seeds that
he got even came from sighteries, and the apples he
was making were all for alcohol. And that's really when
I was like, Oh, this is my guy. Now, this

(12:37):
is my guy. He was moving westward ahead of settlers.
He was very smart thinking about the fur trade business
is something you guys talk on here all the time.
He was doing a kind of land speculation business but
also an orchard business where he was getting ahead of
settlers and as they were arriving, he would be like, oh, look,
do you want to just pay me a little bit
of money all these apple trees are here, or we

(12:58):
could partner because he's going to keep moving on. He
never had a home address. He's going to keep wandering,
but he would partner with these people to kind of
basically lay claim to the land. And at the same
time they would be so excited because there was putable
water was kind of hard to get their hands on.
There was something that they consumed so much of which
was alcoholic sider and apple jack.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Huh yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
At the time, like a hard sider was more reliable
than water. Exact, you were drinking it, like I'm not
going to get sick from this hardsider, but water there's
a decent chance, so.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
We'll give it to the kids too. Yeah, yeah, you know,
I read this book long ago. It was called a
I think the book was a boy an author named
Andrew Barr, and it was just called Drink, and it
was like a history of alcohol consumption in the country,
and he pointed out a thing that hadn't encountered this elsewhere,
but he pointed out a thing I believe it was

(13:50):
going back to the Plymouth Rock the Plymouth colonies. They
had an idea that the water was good to drink,
like water wasn't good to consume, and they would consume
as a thirst quencher, mildly alcoholic beverages as a sort

(14:10):
of that it was just more peer than water. And
you're right about the mildly.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
I will say that, sorry to the IPA drinkers of
the world, nobody was doing like a heavy nine percent.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
It was.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
It was often something that you could just like consume
to kind of get you through the day, keep yourself
somewhat hydrated. But yeah, it kind of meant that the alcohol,
the alcohol consumption of that time period was so much more.
I don't have the stats on hand, but they are
in the book. It was so much more high than
it is now. And and it was just part of

(14:40):
the culture.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
So to explain that a little bit better when you
say the land speculating aspect of it.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
So land was land, wash, land was money, land was power,
Land was everything back then, right, And so I can
talk about it real quick, and and and bringing it
into his into what John Chapman was trying to achieve.
But it's interesting because he also had this religious aspect

(15:06):
to him. And I would argue that in the eighteen
hundreds coming up with a new version of Christianity was
the same as starting a website today, like genuinely like
you were like, this is my new startup. And at
the time, the Shakers were around, which shout out to
the Shakers. I don't know if you're familiar with them.
They basically dance as a form of praise. They were

(15:27):
not really into sex though, so their numbers have dwindled
over the years to the point where there are now
two practicing Shakers.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Wow, and books they were appropriating.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Because they were not. That's a tough Catholics figured it out.
A lot of other dimssions figured it out. Shakers didn't
really didn't go with the procreation. So they only have
two practicing Shakers. They are in their seventies maybe eighties.
They live in Maine. But I'm happy to report that's
in the book. But since the book has been published,
you could make the argument that Shakers of fastest growth

(16:00):
in religion in America, because they call it the doubled,
they have at increase member has recently joined. Isn't that fantastic?

Speaker 2 (16:09):
I was just gonna say, in the Animal Kingdom, that's
called functionally extinct. There, like if there's like one of
this kind of rhino left and it can't reproduce, that's
labeled as functionally extinct. So I thought you were going
to tell us that they were functioningly.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Now they're fighting back the other they're klawn on h Swedenborganism. Swedenborganism.
It's a tough one, but it's it's the teachings of
Emmanuel Swedenborg. And around the time that Chapman was like
in his teens early twenties. It comes over from Europe,
it comes from Sweden. Swedenborg himself was a philosopher who

(16:42):
in his fifties kind of got into like i can
see ghosts, I'm talking to God. I'm figuring out this
right way to live. It's all in the book. We
don't have to really get like into the weeds on
that right now. But what you need to know is
that Chapman was a strong believer in Swedenborg.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
But is it is it of the Judeo Christian.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
One hundred percent? It's Christian one hundred percent. It's Christian.
And they have they have actually somewhat progressive views for
the time. They really didn't believe in slavery.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
They were early abolitionists. One might say.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
They almost pedestaled what you might say, like Native Americans
and other kind of like around the world, people that
were not living in the European style and almost maybe
to a way.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
Where that feels weird too.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
But they they had really eccentric viewpoints on a lot
of different issues of the day. But one thing was
the harder your life was in this realm, the easier
your life would be in the next, which is a
very classic religious thing. Right now, there are still practicing
Swedenborgians here in the United States. I go, really yes,

(17:50):
Yet they have a giant, beautiful cathedral in Brynathen, Pennsylvania,
outside of Philadelphia. I celebrated Easter with them in this book.
It's a fascinating religion, it's a fascinating culture. In all
these different ways, they've actually amassed a lot of wealth.
But at the time Chapman was accumulating land. To get

(18:11):
back to your question, which is a way of accumulating wealth.
But he also didn't want to partake in it because
he felt like it would actually mess with his chances
in the afterlife. Got it, and so he would walk
around again, no house, no address, partnering with these folks,
with these settlers to have the orchard running, but never

(18:33):
sticking around to kind of reap their bounty. There's a
joke that at one point he lost some paperwork and
he lost like half of Ohio. But when he dies
at the ripe old age of his seventies, not to
get ahead of ourselves, but when he dies, he has
one thousand and two hundred acres to his name, and
he had no progeny he had no family, but he

(18:53):
had it got dispersed to like brothers, siblings, half siblings,
so the Chapman family did keep it. But he actually
had a mask quite a bit of wealth, despite the
fact that you would often either sleep on strangers floors
or proselytize in a town and hope somebody befriended him
and took him in, or sleep in the woods. So
he lived this kind of Popper's life. So the timpot

(19:14):
on the hat not so much, but he often dressed
in like a coffee sack like kind of almost a
scratchy Yeah. So there is this like interesting and there's
all these different theories about him. Was he this way
because he got kicked in the head by a horse?
Was he this way because he got broken hearted? There's
all these different stories about him. But what really threads
through is here's a man that accumulated land, love to

(19:36):
move west, love to do business. There's a real capitalist
theme through Chapman, yet at the same time he never
enjoyed the benefits of it.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Can we back up? I feel like the Johnny Appleseed
story kind of starts when he's an adults, But what
do we know about.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
His childhood fantastic, absolutely, Okay, So he's born in Lemonsterear, Massachusetts.
And shout out to Florence E. Wheeler, who is a
woman in the sixties. You know those historical societies you
find in every round. They're maybe not focused on the
big hits, but they are focused on what happens in
their community. So she is the one. There was so
many rumors about Chapman. Nobody knew where he was born.

(20:14):
Some people said that his mother was Native American. Some
people say that his father was a Harvard preacher. None
of that was true. Florence E. Wheeler, one of these
historical society women, really dug into the ledgers basically, because
that's how we find so much of history is who
owed who money? Right, You guys talk about this on
the pod, like this is how people were keeping track

(20:37):
of things. And so what we found was he's born
of a minuteman. Oh, so his dad was partook in
the Revolutionary War. His father eventually became a guard of
an armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Not long after Cha is born,
his mother dies, his father remarries, and they relocate to
Long Meadow.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Message do his mom die from complications a child. Yeah,
I believe it was a sibling. I believe that's correct.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
Again, as always with history, somebody else says it might
have been a disease. I can't remember which one, but
I do. I think the overwhelming idea is that it
was a complications a child because he has a lot
of siblings, a lot of half siblings his father. After
the war, like so many people that worked in the
Revolutionary War, and this is the story of my area,

(21:23):
which is again this low income part of Massachusetts, a
lot of those soldiers were not paid the money that
they were supposed to be paid.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
They were paid in scripts.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
Then people from Boston came and bought the scripts for
pennies on the dollar's. Basically, if you were a Revolutionary War,
if you were a soldier, they would the government that
was very new wrote you and I owe you. And
then you needed seeds, as you know, you needed seeds
for your farm for the coming harvest. So you just
needed anything that would get you seeds. So a bunch
of people from Boston came out, bought all the scripts

(21:53):
for very very cheap, gave them enough money to buy
seeds so they could survive, and then passed the law
in Boston, you have to make good on the scripts,
and so they became It's just another way of the
wealthy elite. Basically a massed more wealth and ripped off
all of these guys that had fought in the Revolutionary War.

(22:14):
And so Chapman's father is dealing with that kind of stuff.
He falls into debt, he falls into drinking. So at
a very young age, Chapman and his half brother Nathaniel,
I think kind of sensing that things are rough around
the house, set out and they go west. More and
more people are moving onto the East coast. It's becoming
what would feel like, especially to somebody like Chapman. I
think had a little bit of itchy feet and liked

(22:36):
to spend people alone. Again, remember I said I love juxtaposition.
You said he had a little bit of a what
itchy feet? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a wonder. He's
a rambler. But you know how I like juxtaposition. Like, again,
he liked to be alone, but he clearly also enjoyed
the company of others. But I do think he wanted
to set out, and so he set off. We don't
know much about him and how he gets to Western Pennsylvania.

(22:58):
But he and his half brother get to west sometimes
they get over the Alleghenies. They get to western Pennsylvania
where Broken Straw Creek meets the Allegheny around the area
of what is now Worn Pennsylvania. There's a story again eleg.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
But that's a bloody ground at that time.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
Right, Well, this is why there's this is this is
a story that is kind of impressive. He don't get
me wrong. He runs into a lot of trouble the
further west he gets, especially in Ohio.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
But there's a story.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Again, can't really fact check these, right, we're talking about
stories that kind of get passed down. This is not
a written down. That's one thing that's difficult about Chapman.
Think about other stories from the time, right, we're talking
about like early eighteen hundreds, Lows and Clark kept journals, right,
you have there's many people from that time in history
that write, and they write so so much, so we

(23:46):
have so much to draw from. Chapman could read, and
Chapman could talk. He was a proselytizer. He could really preach.
There's all these this documentation of people being interviewed after
his passing talking about what a great preacher and speaker
he was. But he did not write anything down. He
did not write anything down. He didn't So we have

(24:07):
no letters, we have no journals. We all have sources
from around him. But this one story is that Nathaniel
fell Ill Chapman went looking for help, and supposedly Native
Americans in the area, probably the Seneca, taught his little
brother how to hunt, how to fish, and how to

(24:29):
sustain himself while his brother was off looking for help.
And there's a story of a theory that that begins
part of Chapman's legend, which is that he was a
friend to Native Americans because he always kind of felt
a debt to the way that they helped out his brother.
I'm sorry you asked, and I'm really running with it.

(24:49):
I'm monologue and let me know if you want to
get a word in here sideways. No, we're coming up
on a favorite part of mine.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
It was the only thing I just want to set
what when he embarks out to the frontier of the time, which.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
Again we think of the wild West as the West,
but we are talking before the Ohio state border.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, I mean there are still in the post American
Revolutionary War and even post War of eighteen twelve, there
are often there are open hostilities up and down the
Ohio and full fledged Indian wars happening up and down
the Ohio. So when you go to those places, it
is at that time, to go into those areas, it

(25:34):
would it was reasonable that you would wind up tomahawked
one hundred percent in the head in your sleep one hundred.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Percent, and it was violence like That's That's one of
the parts of this book that I want to make
so clear is not to jump quick to the philosophies
behind it. But I understand that this country, we have
our issues, and that we have our arguments, and we
have our political differences, but we must acknowledge how brutal
things used to be. And that's something that I love.

(26:01):
A lot of this book is about the history of Chapman.
A lot of it is also me just looking at
the country at a n eye level and the hospitality
I meet along the way, the wonderful people that open
up their homes to me along the way. Because I
traveled where he traveled, and I kind of did what
he did. I had a rule, which is I either
sleep outside or I get invited to somebody's home and

(26:23):
how much of this country works. When you think about
how much of this country functions, this is a vast land.
This is a huge place, and when you look at
it in the modern day versus Yeah, there was a
time when this was a hugely dangerous situation that he
was putting himself and Nathaniel in. But to get back
to it real quick, he gets out to Warren Pennsylvania,

(26:45):
Tim and his brother and they meet one guy, Daniel McQuay.
Daniel McQuay, I think should almost have his own book
written about him.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
You've written books before.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
You know what it is to hit a character, and
all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, and
my barking up the wrong job. Maybe I should be
writing about this. Oh, Daniel McQuay was hired by the
Holland Land Company to do land speculation. And we've all
been young men before, right, you know when you meet
another guy and he kind of look up to him.
I swear I don't have any facts to back this up,
but I just just the philosophy of it. The theory

(27:18):
behind it is that John Chapman met Daniel McQuay and
really looked up to him. He was described by a
historian from the eighteen hundreds a true son of Aaron.
He drank, he fought, he was a bit of a maniac.
He lived in a log like y remind me that
it's like the houses, it's like wider on the top.

(27:40):
And then it's this I'm not gonna remember anyways, he
basically lives in a log cabin.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
What's the son of Aaron? Son of it? Like?

Speaker 3 (27:47):
He's just from Scotland, Ireland. He's just he's just like
a big, massive, boozy adventurer. And Holland is paying him
just to try and claim as much land as they can.
He's also in trade, so he'll cut all these trees down,
put them on rafts, takes them down the Alleghany feeds

(28:08):
into the Ohio, feeds into the Mississippi, all the way
down to New Orleans.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
What sells it?

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Rivers only run one way, walks a thousand, two hundred
miles up? Does it all over again? Kid on paper?

Speaker 1 (28:24):
What kind of trees is he cutting?

Speaker 3 (28:26):
I mean, he's kind of all he's cut everything that's
down there. He's and he's going out and genuinely another
peat that I quote like eighteen hundreds historian basically says,
on the walk back Wild Animals Thicket, there's small, small
settlements are starting to appear, like small European settlements are
starting to appear along these rivers, but not many. And

(28:47):
also there's Native Americans, of course, and highwaymen, and he
braved all of that. And it's hard not to think
that John Chapman wasn't a little bit influenced by this
guy in that same way, you know, when you're younger
and you're looking and you're like, oh, maybe I could
do some version of that, which gets back to that
this land speculation where I'm gonna if you put fruit

(29:08):
trees in the ground under the expanding colonial and eventually
US American government meant that you were laying claim to
that ground. Yet at the same time he had no
interest in actually settling. And so that begins his story
of he gets past western Pennsylvania, his half brother says,
love you come out he and the rest of the point.

(29:32):
The dad comes from Long Meadow. They settle somewhere around Dexter, Ohio.
They suted like southern Ohio, close to West Virginia. But
Chapman then starts this life of wandering rambling planning apple
seeds and running into very much what you just talked about,
a huge hute, multiple multiple conflicts, and he becomes the

(29:54):
Paul Revere of the War of eighteen twelve.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
He did, I don't know that part of them. Nobody does.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
They kind of later on. I feel like it was
as signed to Chairman that he was sort of a
walking newspaper, right because he was going around to so
many different places, and like he'd get information from Pennsylvania
that he would deliver to West Virginia. Correct, to hear
some in West Virginia that then travels to Ohio with him.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Correct.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
That's that's sort of what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Yes, And there's there's a little bit of debate whether
he made it to West Virginia or not. I kind
of like to think that he did. No, there weren't
borders that they and they touch up, and I did
drive through West Virginia at one point in the book,
so it helps me if I think Katy did. But genuinely,
that's exactly right. He would carry the good news, which
were the teachings of Swedenborgianism, which again which is this

(30:38):
very interesting view of looking at Christianity. But it's still
I mean Swedenborgianism influences.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
I mean we're talking numbers. You say that word real slow.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Sorry, sweden Borgianism, I've read it. Gusalem Church or yes,
New Jerusalem Church is what it's called now or sweden
borgian isn't like that's you would call it practitioner, But yes,
they now refer to themselves as the New Jerusalem Church.
They have ten thousand practitioners around the world. I believe

(31:11):
it's five thousand in and around bren Atham. They have
their own town, they have their own fire department, they
have their own police. It's a really interesting area. But
if we're talking numbers, they're doing better than the Shakers,
but not as good as somebody that was influenced by

(31:31):
watching that religion take off, which was John Smith and Mormonism.
So Mormonism was heavily influenced by watching how sweden Work's
teachings took off.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
God did when Chapman took off. Like let's say you'd
caught Chapman out and you would have said, real quick,
what are you doing? What are you doing? Would he
have said, I'm carrying my religion forth one hundred poor?
Would you have said I am carrying my apple seeds forth.

(32:06):
I listen again.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
You don't know the answer every but I would argue
he one hundred percent believed that the teachings of Swedenborg
were his Emmanuel Swedenborg, those were his passion, those were
his reasons. But I mean, this is this is why
I love this story. It's such an American story. You
can have your passions, but you gotta be able to
pay the bills. Granted his were very, very low, but

(32:32):
you have to have a little bit of a business.
You have to have a little bit of an underpinning
of capitalism to get you out there, to make sure
you've got it. You can grab some food when you
need it or whatever's happening. And so for him that
those were the orchards, those that the preachings I believe
were the ideals. And then the land speculation, the laying

(32:54):
claim to this land was the aspect of it that
he knew meant he had something to fall back, even
if again he never really even tapped into it, I
think he sensed some type of security from it. If
I mean, real quick, do you have a favorite like
American legend? Yeah, who's your favorite American legend Boone, it's

(33:16):
a Boone all the way.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
And on that point, you just said a thing that
reminded me. You know the guy who said that that
you could picture Chapman talking to that Scottish wild man,
Daniel McQuay.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
Yeah, guy, there's like a there's a similar tell me,
tell me, tell me when when Boone wasn't when Boone
was wrapped up in Lord Dunmore's warm.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
Okay, there's a similar story where he was. He was
a wagon driver, a mule like a mule driver. He
runs into a real wander who and some people kind
of have it pinned down to the campfire they were
sitting around where he said, you know this might interest you.
There's this path I found through the mountains, the Cumberland Gap,

(34:01):
young fellow, like you might write. And that's and some
people attribute that that was the beginning of that was
the beginning of Daniel Booms And isn't that wanderer right?
A guy through a tip?

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Yeah, threw him a tip and that's such a great
way to put it through him a tip that then
he took such advantage of and it actually led to
a person who became larger than life and That's what
I love about Chapman too, and it does I mean,
we have this today we talk about a writer's writer. Right,
everybody knows Stephen King, but who's the Who's the guy

(34:36):
Stephen King? Admires is maybe not as well known or
a comedians comedian and we all know the big names,
but who are those littler guys who maybe never got
out of the honky tonks, but they influenced. You know,
our great outlaw country singers are our great comedians. And
that's I love finding those moments of history. Do you
know who the guys?

Speaker 1 (34:56):
I do? And I've written and said it a thousand times.
Randall's here, he'd remember, it's all yeah, it's all right, No,
not John Finley? Was John Finley? John Finley?

Speaker 3 (35:07):
Well, I listen while I was working on almost certainly
johns John Finley. All right, well shut John Finley.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
We can go back.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
But there I found a bunch of these guys. And
I'm I'm going to blank on the name, but uh,
I think we should talk about him becoming the Paul
Revere of the War of eighteen twelve.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
I got a more detail oriented question. It was John Finley,
all right, Hey, yeah, John Finley was like he and
his grave. It's like, oh ma, dude, I told him
about like why is he and all like why is
he in all the paintings going to comfor the gad
It's like I was there way before that. I told

(35:48):
him about it. He goes through there and it's like,
good lord.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
But again, I'm sorry. There's something so American about that.
It's what I love. It is oftentimes the loudest or
the person who maybe and Chapman is I don't think
he really even sought out fame. It really happened to
him after his death. And that's a whole other part
of this. He I genuinely believe, was trying to be

(36:13):
a humble person. But you have no control over what
parts of history get kind of scooped up and then
lionized and then put on a pedestal. And then you
do you have the person who's right your character, Johnny,
He's right. He's like, I should be more famous than
the Boon. But for some reason, whether they pushed it
themselves or it's just the way history worked out, Boon's

(36:35):
the one that gets put in the paintings.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
In that why him? I'm not gonna get into it
cause I got Johnny was in his story. Why him?
It also comes down to why him because of a
guy he met, A guy he met and it started
the thing. I mean, the guy he met wrote like
a oh, I met this crazy, you know guy, and
he like built him up and made him crazy and changed,

(36:59):
you know, took aspects of his biography and birthed a legend. Exactly.
He just happened to run into a guy that put
him into a book and birthed the legend. And it
probably and it winds up being similar. But this story,
I'm sitting here, he had a pot on his head.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
Yeah, but it is so often a writer who comes
across the story is maybe getting paid at the time
by some magazine or and and they're the ones that
absolutely I'm also drawn thinking of writers. Mark Twain a
great example of somebody chat Chapman is this way too.
Every state he enters, and some that he didn't, they
like to lay claim to. They like to build a

(37:36):
statue to him, often carved out of wood. Lemonster has
a wooden statue, they usually carve it out of a tree.
Mark Twain the same way. Right, here's this man who
gets so many statues built about him. They all across
the country, all these different states lay claim to oh
home of Mark Twain. Well he lived here once. I
mean George Washington too, right, like we have this like

(37:57):
George Washington slept here, or like tales that have more
of a sense of humor, like George Washington took a
shit here, like all these different ways of doing it right.
But what I love about that kind of that aspect
of it is that it makes the person first and
foremost larger than life. But when you actually look at

(38:19):
Mark Twain, what he used to do was just go
to bars listen to stories, usually for the price of
a couple of drinks. Sometimes he would give them a
little extra cash. He would then just say to the person,
can I use your story? And he would pay them
just a little bit of money and next thing, you know,

(38:39):
that's how so much of his work got built. And
again that is that it just feels so American to me,
the way that these stories kind of start to outgrow
I mean, I want to say outgrow history, but the
fact of the matter is sometimes the stories become history
even though they aren't factually accurate.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Like the TIMPI had in return of a more detailed
the kind of like practical matter. Yeah, can you explain
real quick You've touched on it, But can you explain
real quick that the land the land speculator orchard. Yes, connection, Yes.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
Saying you've asked me this twice, I apparently have not
done a good enough job.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
How does that work? Like, walk me through that?

Speaker 3 (39:22):
Okay, I mean I am probably not fully educated in
the history of how this country was taken over to
speak about it super accurate.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
No, just me from his perspective, but yes, from.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Our from our perspective, I can easily say you basically
have European settlers coming over and wanting to lay claim
to land. You have Native American countries, you have Native
American peoples, you have Native American tribes that already exist here.
So there is as we know, right, and again how
historically accurate is this? But there's a lot of trading.

(39:56):
There's Manhattan sold for beads, which again maybe not exactly.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Accurate, but you get the idea.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
Europeans start coming in and basically making trades for different
parts of the country as they continue to move westward,
all the while of course signing treaties where they say
we swear we're not going west of the Alleganies. We swear,
we're not going west to the Ohio. We swear, And
of course those then become violent confrontations, as makes sense,

(40:24):
as has been true of all history. Like that's the
other part that I think is so important. We can
look at these moments in American history and be like, oh,
this is brutal, and oh this is difficult, which don't
get me wrong, it is, but this is how land
has been taken and fought over in the Old World
and everywhere else. But part of what happened with land speculations.

(40:46):
You had giant European corporations like the Dutch halland Land Company.
They would pay somebody like Dan McQuay to just go west,
build a log cabin, lay claim, put down marker basically
to the rights for that forest so that he could
log it if there were native peoples there. See, if

(41:09):
you can figure out a way to say, hey, can
we cut down some of these trees?

Speaker 1 (41:14):
Is that cool?

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Sometimes that works out, Sometimes it turns into a confrontation.
So the that's like the massive scale. That's like I'm
sorry to use like modern terms, but like that's like
the Facebook that's like the Google. That's like the big
scale stuff was you literally had European governments, East Indian
training companies something like. That's like the big On the
much smaller scale, you had this desire right for westward

(41:36):
expansion and settlers. And so the idea was if you
were to plant the land and I can't remember the
exact number, but there was like X number of trees,
you know.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
It was called the donation tract, and I think it
was like one hundred apple and fifty peach, yep or
something like that.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
It was.

Speaker 4 (41:53):
It was those.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
It was those two specifically, and then I think you
had to have a structure on the property. And those
were like your requirements and their thought when they were
making those requirements, like if you are dedicated enough to
put a fruit tree in the ground, then you're married
to that property kind of you're gonna see it through
to where you can harvest that fruit. If you're putting

(42:15):
one hundred and fifty fruit trees in the ground, that's
gonna make you want to stay there and just like
keep improving that zone.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Okay, First off, I'm so glad you're here. So that
was perfect because that's correct. Second, that's what makes Chapman
such an interesting person. So he wanted to do that.
He wanted his name down as somebody who owned that land,
but he did not want to stick around to see
it through. So that was his type of lands back.

(42:43):
Like Dan McQuay builds the hut, stays there, is getting
paid by the Holland company. It's taking the wood down
the rivers, coming back. That's his place.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
You know.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Chapman just starts bouncing around. Now he'll he'll walk back.
Seasonally he comes back. That's It's something that's very beautif
in his movements that I found that I actually try
and do a little bit of in the book too.
There's almost the seasonal, circular nature to it that I
absolutely love. But he basically will partner with somebody say hey,

(43:12):
will you stick around, will you look over this land?
It's now our land, which again he lost so much
of it, especially when he passes away like a bunch
of I'm sure not everyone went looking for his siblings
to be like by the way I was in.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
A fifty to fifty splace. I think they were like,
look at that, now this is mine.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
But that was the way that you got to lay
claim and I mean, to think about it in modern terms,
imagine if we could just I mean, this country is
so vast. Don't get me wrong, it is so big,
it's so beautiful. But the idea that you could just
go and plant a few trees and be like this
now is mine. Of course, especially to young people, that

(43:50):
was such a drawer. And so it's such a draw
and so that kept people moving westward.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
And one of the goals of the Donation tract was
to like put buffer zone between the east and the
native tribes that were further west. And so Johnny is
sort of encountering some of these tribes along the way.
Can you talk about his relationship with them?

Speaker 3 (44:11):
Yes, absolutely, so again I mentioned I mean, this is
part of the book that fascinates me. I grew up
in this area where the wappanog led by this guy
who the Europeans called King Philip. His name was Metacom
and his father and basically a colonialist's father, were the

(44:34):
ones that made peace around Thanksgiving. And then a generation later,
you can just see the way the younger generation was like,
neither of us like how this is working out in
a very interesting fact, just real quick, this is not
so much linked to Chapman. But one of the issues
was gun control because settlers brought guns and very quickly
through trade, Native Americans then had guns, and then all

(44:58):
of a sudden, the colonists started to make rules around guns,
and the Native Americans are like, what are you talking about.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
The tendency to want to be the guy with the
gun and the other guys don't have the guns is
not gone away. It never, never, never will. It's a joke.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
I'm sorry, but it is a joke I could not
make in the book. Was like, and then the Second
Amendment was ratified and there's never been any gun issues since,
which of course has not been the case. But so
that started what was called King Philip's War of Medicom's Rebellion.
As with everything back then, there's a bunch of different names.

(45:37):
Three thousand Native Americans perish, a thousand colonists perish. In
a very interesting again, Oftentimes, especially in elementary school and
earlier histories, this is seen as like civilization versus the wild,
which of course it's not. It's so much more complex
than that. The colonists do eventually kill Medicom. They then
get his head and they put it on a pike

(46:00):
outside of Plymouth for decades, which is amazing because that's
such a European like that's you know, that's William Wallace
type stuffing, right that there is this like history of that,
and there's a play somebody made kind of making fun
of bureaucracy much more modern that was Metacom's head is

(46:20):
still rotting on a pike down the road, like basically
they basically make it to play about what the town
hall meetium was to be, Like where what point should we,
like the ninety year old guys still really like it,
but at what point should we actually take this head down? Maybe?
But yeah, so there was this brutality. Chapman himself runs
into the Seneca. He runs into the Shawnee in Ohio

(46:41):
one hundred percent. You have to remember a lot of
the tribes that we think of as westward and Plains
Indians actually were pushed out that way, so they kind
of started around here. The one that that I in
my head really link him to, though, is the sense
like they you don't know for sure, but you really

(47:02):
think the Seneca are probably the ones in the area
of Warren, Pennsylvania that helped him with the with his brother.
But the War of eighteen twelve is, oh, you might
have to fact check me on this, because the War
of eighteen again like like with all these right, like
like with the French Indian War and the which was

(47:25):
part of the Seven Year War.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
You have natives on.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
Both sides, oh right, So like the Mohawk and the
Mohegan actually side with the settlers in King Philip's war.
It's the Narragansett and the Wampaogue and many other smaller
tribes that are kind of at that are fighting. And
Metacom's father made peace with the earliest colonists because he
was in a fight with the Narraganset and so right,

(47:50):
so there's all this, there's this ever shifting generational divides.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Yeah, the War of eighteen twelve is kind of like
the American Revolution part two exactly. And the English still
had certain holdings, they had certain tribal affiliations they and
there was a lot of there were some issues that
had been sort of punted around borders and things at
the end of the American Revolution, and the War of

(48:14):
eighteen twelve brought all those hostilities forward and led to
a further diminishment of English influence. I want defeated a
lot of tribes because there was a lot of tribes
in the Ohio Valley that threw in with the English
during the War of eighteen twelve and it led to
their defeat well.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
And also because they were basically saying, we will make
sure the colonists stop extending. Was that was part of
the way the British I want to say that Delaware.
The Delaware is what's popping into my mind. But again
probably a fact check, but basically, during that time, Chapman
has made it far enough west to Mansfield. And if
you'll allow me just real quick, Ohio is an incredible

(48:53):
thing to look at. It is the heart of the country.
It's shaped that way. There's nobody thinks of it as
the West. At one point, especially for land speculators, Ohio
was like the land of milk and honey. That's where
they really We had all these kind of deals that
we'd made that were holding us back from it, and
basically settlers just said screw those deals and they started

(49:14):
moving inland. Then the War of eighteen twelve breaks out.
Chapman is in and around Mansfield, Ohio. Again, he never
has a home address, but it's probably as close to
a home base as he has because he's walking in
these seasonal circles. He's coming back to Mansfield a lot.
And there is rumor a shopkeeper gets murdered. To this day,

(49:37):
we're not actually sure what happened, but a shopkeeper is murdered.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Very quickly.

Speaker 3 (49:43):
News travels Native Americans killed the shopkeeper, and they're coming,
and they're backed by the British, which was, just to
be clear, a very understandable fear at the time that
was not delusional to think that that might be happening.
Town gathers, a call goes out, there are soldiers in
Mount Vernon, Ohio, which is about thirty five miles west. Again,

(50:07):
can't remember the tribe. I believe it might be Delaware,
but Native Americans might be coming to attack. We need
those reinforcements. Sun is setting. Who will go? Who will go?
Thirty five miles basically the length of a marathon. Then
some to go. Get some soldiers down in Mount Vernon,
alert them to our plight and bring them back. And

(50:28):
the way this story is told is that a shiny eyed,
long haired, uncaptned, skinny probably mid to late thirties at
this point in his life has already gotten a reputation,
as you said, as like almost a news carrier, as
a man who was a little bit of an eccentric
in the area seasonally would come around preaching about Swedenborg

(50:50):
raises his hand and says, I'll go no gun, depending
on the legend, no shoes, but no horse. No horse
for real's legit, and he on foot goes on a
newly cut, newly cut road.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Down to Mount Vernon.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
A lot of the facts that we have about Chapman
come from children of the time because he gets lionized
after his death, like I mentioned, so those children eventually
grow into adults, and then they're the ones that are.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Recorded, which again, of course there's a legend, but recording,
oral history, version of firsthand experience from an eight year old.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
So take it all with a great assault.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Of course, he's like the way I remember it right.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
But they he apparently was running by basically saying, the
Native Americans are attacking Mansfield. The Native Americans are attacking Mansfield.
I run to Mount Vernon to get to get help.
And again this is one of those interesting things which
I love. This is what I love about this project
that I got to do. I think this country is
more interesting when you look at it in its three

(51:56):
dimensional complexities. I think my family, which is also a
tie through this story, starting with my father and those
lovely walks that I had back in the day, is
more complex when you look at it through this three
dimensional complexity. My first book was very much like the
worst moments of my family story. This is more about
what about the camping, what about the canoeing trips? Yes,

(52:16):
we grew up really broke, but what were those nice
moments that happened as well? And then John Chapman's story
is so much more interesting when you think about it
with this complexity. So was he a friend of Native Americans?
There's a lot of proof that he was. But again,
when war showed up right in front of him, he
chose a sign and he went and he got those soldiers,

(52:38):
brought the soldiers back, came back with them. Mind you,
So he went the thirty miles down and did the
thirty miles back. Which that's the last walk that I
do in this book is I also walked from Mansfield
to Mount Vernon, Ohio, and then turned around the next
day and did it back. Wasn't fun wasn't fun, but
he did it. Turned out the attack doesn't come, but

(52:59):
that gives him notoriety and fame in his lifetime. That
is what almost gets him, That's what levels him up,
and he becomes known as the Paul Revere of the
War of eighteen twelve, which again is a story they
Disney never tells us. They never tell you're in their
elementary school, because it makes him more complex, and therefore
it's easier to just brush it to the side.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
What is the Disney version? You've mentioned it a couple times,
but I don't even That's probably the one I have
in my head.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
But what is the Disney the Disney version, there's this
it's nineteen forty seven, maybe forty eight, nineteen forty seven,
late forties. Ah, there is a melody time. They make
all these different kinds of musicals. I mean, basically, what
what Disney's looking for if we can get into the
capitalism aspect of that real quick is what's the story
we can tell without having to pay anybody money?

Speaker 1 (53:45):
American legends.

Speaker 3 (53:46):
Nobody's gonna come knocking on our door looking for the
life rights some cartoons. What Pocahontas exactly exactly yeah, exactly. Yeah,
beauty and the beat, all the things like that.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
The producers where he says next time, no writers, No.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
That's exactly right, that's exactly right. And so one of
the they came out with a bunch of these different
melody times. One of them was the story of John Chapman,
and it starts with him. He looks super skinny and
he's meek because it's true. He is the gentlest of
our American legends. He is this country at its most

(54:23):
peaceful ideals. It's one of the things that I really
love about him. It's one of the things I really
respect about him. They give him a Bible. Did they
get into Swedenborgianism? No, little just got a straight up Bible. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
Yeah, he just gets the Bible.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
He gets the right down the middle of the lane
and the whole the whole video opens up. And they
showed this in elementary schools across the country. They showed
this after churches. If this isn't ringing any bells for you,
that means you might have had an interest in upbringing No.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
And I also picture the character played by him. He's
got like a like a canvas sad with.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
His seat exactly. He's got a man purse full of
seeds and back and it opens with like all these
very hardy men walking west, and he's kind of like, oh,
I can't go west, Like an angel comes to him
and is like, yeah, you can. They need apples. And
then he walks west and he throws his apple seeds

(55:21):
willy nilly, no orchards, no capitalism, just out of the
goodness of his heart. And then they grow, and then
people have apple pies and they have apple tarts, and
even I will say it gives it gives Swedenborg like
a little bit of a nod, because they do believe
in angels and they do believe in ghosts. And so
then he gets older and everyone loves him. The animals
love him, the Native Americans love him, the settlers love him.

(55:45):
He's got no shoes on. And we can get into
those facts real quick, like this is this is the
same John Chapman that like befriended a wolf and had
a pet wolf for many years. Yes, this is the
same John Chapman who like once came across some bears
living his stomach, but that he called his home and
he decided, oh, I should let the bears have the
stump because he's a good man. No, because it's bears.

(56:07):
Because it's bears. You don't go mess with bears, I
think is the easier part of that start.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
He purchased a horse that was about to be slaughtered
because he didn't want to see it killed and suppose.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
That one might be real.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Okay, they do, And then he wouldn't even ride, right
because that that was wrong to him, was to like
put the horse, you know, make it do his labor.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
Yeah, he really there was some part of Sweeten organism
that really made him respect to animals. So he didn't
hunt supposedly, which is that's what we also have ledgers
where he got jerky like you know, like but like
maybe but he wasn't armed. He might have been eccentric later, right,
he wasn't armed. The horse thing was that there is
paperwork that he bought a horse. That's great, and then

(56:45):
partnered with one of his ordered guys and was like,
will you just make sure this horse takes out the
rest of its days?

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Huh?

Speaker 3 (56:50):
So like he had he was apparently really good with children.
He would often because he did have big, thick, callous
feet from how much walking he did, so he would
like walk on embers or stick his feet with needles
too much, to like the horrification of children.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
To like wow little kids.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Yeah, to like wow little kids exactly.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
So if you wind up being an eccentric old man, yeah, yeah,
don't do the wow and little kids. Yeah, that's that.
You got to stay away from that one a little bit.
We had one of those in our town. Yeah, we
had them. Right, that's a bad joke. That's a bad joke.
Wait a lot, but no, Jenny, Like.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
Another one is he didn't use a campfire because he
thought it would kill mosquitos because they were drawn to
the light. Another one was he thought he stepped on
a warm ones and that's why he didn't wear shoes.
So there's all these eccentric eccentricities.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
And it's it's why he wouldn't graf trees, because you're
like causing some pain by cutting into a tree, right,
and so that's why he goes straight to.

Speaker 3 (57:51):
See Well, so this this is a two This is
a two parter. I think it's both. Some people argue
it's one or the other. He either didn't graft trees because,
like you just said, he did not believe in hurting
other living creatures and a tree in his like, this
is like the prototype hippie. In a way, he is
the American legend for our first Jesus driven hippie.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
Because by grafting, you're cutting into live trees.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
Exactly, you're cutting a hunk of the live tree. You're
replanting it. That's how you can ensure that you are
getting the clone. As you so beautifully put it earlier.
Other people say he just loved God so much that
to do that would be to mess with God's plan God,
which is I'm just gonna put the seed in. If

(58:36):
the best apple happens to grow from it, it'll be great.
Of course that never happened, but I would argue it's
probably both.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
My cynical wife has a third theory. When I told
her about Johnny Appleseed, the real version a few years ago,
she's like, well, no, he was clearly a business man,
and so he was saving money by just like using seed.
He wasn't following his real religion he was. He didn't
have all their motives because.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
You know, you know what I get these seeds for? Yeah,
zero dollars. No, that's to be honest.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Your wife is probably, if not one hundred percent, right,
A big part of the pie. But anyways to get
back to that is the Disney The Disney version of
him was the sweet Person, and the Disney film ends
with Angel Michael coming down from heaven, taking his old
hobo looking soul up and putting him in like the wall,
like he's our first American saint.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
This has some very Mormon like tones. It's I'm glad
to hear you say that some of that was influenced.

Speaker 1 (59:39):
I need to. I think it's importin here that I
betray that I admit to a level of ignorance about apples.
Oh's this is what you're going to you're going to
come in here. I thought that I thought for some
reason that when you do buy seed, like in America,
when you do buy seed, it doesn't work out. And

(59:59):
the you they always grafted onto American crab apple.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
No, that that the root.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
I bet someone's going to write in maybe that the
root that all if you go to any apple or
yeah in America, yep, that it is that it is
grafted onto the American crab apple rootstock.

Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
I well, I think our apples have become so corrupted.
At one point I think they say there were seventeen
thousand species of apple on the continent. Now we're down
to only a few thousand. And there's like these dudes
and women who their whole life goal after they retire,
they like, you know, have a have a job that

(01:00:42):
allows them to retire at fifty two. They become lost
apple hunters and they're going out looking for these varieties.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
So I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
I'm sure we have many species that I know, the
nastiest apple tree in the world, but somebody would like
to know about that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
But the version you're saying that they're all grafted onto
crab apples, Some certainly are, but not all.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
And I thought somehow when you planted a seed it
just like it's not like an idiot. No, I thought
it somehow just didn't work.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
No, it works.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
You just get a bad You.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
Just get a really bad apple, unless you want to
make alcohol, in which case it's a great apple because
you just need to be able to grind grind them up.
What I will say, real quick shout out to Michael
Pollan who wrote a great book Botany of Desire, one
of those which gets into some of the different aspects
and very much was informative for this book as well,
because apple. The other thing is everyone thinks American as

(01:01:35):
apple pie, So we think of apples as American, not
they they're patriotic, they're from the Kazakhstan, they were brought
over here. And I have, like, I have a few
different apple theories which are just like more barroom talk
than science what you're talking, which is I think delicious
apples have the best pr on the planet. They look delicious, yeah,
but they're not delicious. They're terrible and doing great.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
And the gland a real ship apple is the Macintosh. Oh,
here we go, Macintosh. It's a junk apple. What do
you think of gold chrisp has taken over the apple world?

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
What do you think of Golden Delicious?

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
Man? The Macintosh? That's a mealy, thick skinned, bullshit apple Macintosh.

Speaker 3 (01:02:25):
No, no, I'm I'm with you one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Johnny apple Seed get some credit for the Golden Delicious,
which is a modern apple that's you know, survived to
make it the grocery store shelves. He didn't make that,
but he made its like parents in the Apple lineage,
which was like a West Virginia Delicious or a West
Virginia golden something like that. So uh, like of all
this Johnny apple seed talk, you'd still see a little

(01:02:50):
bit of them in the grocery store.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Listen, when you when you take that many at bats,
actually you gotta you gotta have a couple of good ones,
is what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
Does that check out?

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
I really said I I will say, I think this
man knows apple's better than me. And when it comes
to that, when it comes to the botany aspect of this,
this is where I get that. This is where I
get the loosest in my research. The one thing you
bring up McIntosh. One thing that's fun is that in
the book, I go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is
where his story ends. It's where he dies. But they

(01:03:19):
now have this incredibly, huge, beautiful, wonderful Johnny Appleseed Festival.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
It happens every year.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
If you have a chance that you get it was
so much bigger and more spectacular than I thought it
could be. I had some of the best food I've
ever had. Granted, some of it was like chicken dumplings
by Amish people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
And when you have.

Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
That much workforce for free, of course you're going to
make some really really good stuff. But one of the
other aspects of it is that Fort Wayne has a
farm league team that their players go to San Diego,
which is interesting, it's very far away, but they are
called the Fort Wayne TinCaps. Oh, and it is a
gorgeous stadium to this day to this day. But the

(01:03:58):
reason you say McIntosh brought it up for me was
I was like, so, how did you come up with
the name? And they had all these different aspects, and
they had some voting and there are other parts that
were linked to Fort Wayne. And one of their aspects
was well, we know we want to do something with Apple.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
And immediately they.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
Were like, oh, there's a little company in Coopertino, California
that might start writting us some cease and desist letters
because it's Apple. Like when you think about when you
think about how American apple, like, Apple's one of the
biggest companies on the planet, and that is their logo.
It's just an apple with a little bite taken out
of it. It's this universal symbol that has really taken

(01:04:34):
over like every culture in a way has these this
draw to apples. But the tin caps. They eventually went
with tin caps and I'll never forget. I interviewed this guy,
Michael Limmerit's in the book.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
I call it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
It's like the moneyball aspect of the book. It's like
when I get into sports a little bit. And I
just took him for a big walk and we did
a big interview and he was just like, yeah, people
got real mad at the Tincap because it's not historically accurate.
And I was like, it's a card to like the
apple also has a face on it has anyone met
like like if you're a farm team, like you're having

(01:05:05):
some fun. And he was like, you're writing a book
about Johnny Appleseed, you'll see and he was like he
was all these armchair historians Like just really, he was like,
I thought we were making a team for like the
local area in community. Just for the record, they sell
the most merchandise of any farm league team. They've won
the division. Like they're really good. It's right downtown. If

(01:05:26):
you the tickets are inexpensive. If you ever in Fort Wayne,
go to a Fort Wing TinCaps game. It's so so fun.
That said. He genuinely was like we became a national store.
Like people were calling into CNN being like there weren't
handles on Tinca at that this is a historically inaccurate
and like this is all that, and they got dragged.

(01:05:46):
They got Yeah, people feel so like this is part
I mean, it's Daniel Boone like right. People find their
little slice of American history and they feel so impassionate
about it. And I think that's a good thing in
the end, but like eventually you do run into like, hey, guys,
it's okay, it's a it's just a baseball team.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
You can calm down. Here's what I want to do next. Yeah,
how does he die?

Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
Great questioned No No. War of eighteen twelve happens. He
becomes the Paul Revere the War of eighteen twelve. He
becomes the Paul Revere of what at the time was
the West. And again, it's so easy to forget that
Ohio used to be as far as we were when
it came to that kind of American destiny that like

(01:06:30):
march west. Eventually, and I love this fact about him.
When he enters Ohio, it is so unpopulated by white colonists.
His life and the population of white settlers is like
and never ending, like like the the years that he
was there is just what's the word I'm looking for

(01:06:52):
in math, exponential. It's an exponential graph of how many
settlers move into that land of milky money. So he's
one of the earliest, not earliest people, you know, there
were some land purveyors and surveyors and stuff, but he
is definitely one of the earliest settlers to really make
Ohio his home. And by the time he's hitting his

(01:07:13):
forties and fifties, it's gone in his mind, overpopulated by
white people, and so he keeps pushing west. Now again
this gets back to almost your wife's view of him
as a perfect capitalist. Which again, some people view him
as a religious person. Some people view him as almost
our first American saint. Some people view him as the

(01:07:35):
first pacifist hippie. Some people view him as just like
a really shrewd, albeit eccentric businessman. And so there's something
he said, for well, these people all have orchards, and
all I do is I know how to get free
apple seeds. So I have to keep moving west to
keep up with my market. So he moves westward as

(01:07:57):
things expand into Indiana. Now my thing, which is not true.
This is me just adding to the legends. This is
the part of me that's my father I like to
think of. He's trying to relive his glory days. He's
trying to recap you know, he's got Yeah. Man, they
don't talk about me in Ohio the way that they
used to. I need to get back. He makes his

(01:08:19):
way to Indiana. Indiana starts as a fort settlement. This
is where I'm sorry, I forget his name. But there's
this incredible character that I discover and I write about
briefly in the book, which is this guy who was
basically he had red hair and he was born of settlers.
Then Native Americans captured him and took him as a child.
He was raised by Native Americans. He fought on the

(01:08:41):
side of the Native Americans during again something we've touched
on but haven't given nearly enough, Like when you're taught
in education in elementary school and public school, it's like
Revolutionary War, Westward Expansion, Civil War ooh complex. Anyways, moving
on World War one, Sorry about some of that. Slavery's
moving on. But we win World War two, huzzah, and

(01:09:03):
then it kind of we we gloss over so much
of the brutality and fighting that happened to win. Basically
the middle of the country. We kind of jumped straight
to that kind of wild wild West. This character his name,
I'm sorry that I cannot remember it, but it translates
to carrot top.

Speaker 1 (01:09:23):
I'm not joking. Really, yeah, that's where it came from.

Speaker 3 (01:09:26):
It's not where it comes from at all. But he
had red hair. He fought on the side of the
Native Americans. He eventually then gets one over back by
the US government. He becomes a spy. He comes back
and fights for the Union, basically the Federal then Mary's
and moves back. He basically is a spy. He's a

(01:09:47):
like again, just like Daniel mcway. Somebody should write a
book about this guy. I will look up his name.
We can put it up later. Anyways. John Chapman is
moving into Indiana and the Fort Wayne during that and
he's redoing orchards. But he is in his sixties. He
lives into his mid seventies, which is really good for
that time period, especially sleeping outside that much. But it's

(01:10:10):
this walking. But he dies on the floor. They're not strangers.
This is part of you know. Yes, he slept on
a lot of strangers' floors, but because he walked in
these seasonal circles. He eventually strangers became friends. There's a
story of somebody building him a room off their house

(01:10:32):
just for him, right, just they construct an extra room
just for him, so he's not sleeping in the barn
or outside. But they do not build a door that
goes from that room to inside their house. Huh, because
he is covered in and this is a direct quote,
we beasties. Because at this point in his life he

(01:10:53):
has been living outside so long he is accumulating bugs.
God it, wow, he is somebody you do not He
smells pretty bad and you probably don't want him in
your house. So they like basically killed him a glorified
human dog house that is attached to the house, but
does not that what he dies, but it does not

(01:11:13):
have a dark no, I'm sorry, outside of fort wall
in the doghouse man, he dies on the floor of
a family's home. They write a beautiful piece of writing,
but they say that he looked excited to pass to
the other side, which he'd spent his whole life proselytizing.
He gave a great sermon before he died, warm by

(01:11:35):
their hearth, and they say that he walked fifteen miles
earlier that day, really, so he went out exactly how
he wanted to go out.

Speaker 1 (01:11:46):
And they recognized him as a person of notoriety at
that point.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
Again, that war of eighteen twelve and kind of pushed
him over where, like he became a known entity in
the areas. But again it's not until twenty years later,
so he dies in his seventies. But it's the eighteen
hundreds when we are really trying to figure out how
to coalesc as a country. We are looking for stories

(01:12:11):
that talk about our best ambitions. Again as we kind
of move west and as there is this brutality, and
for Harper's Bizarre, a man writes an article that's like
thirty pages all about this incredibly sweet, incredibly Christian, incredibly loving,
beloved guy who was just out there planning apples out

(01:12:35):
of the goodness of his heart so that people had
things to survive off of as they moved westward. And
that in like the eighteen especially, we're talking about civil
wars happening, So we are trying to say no, no, no, no, no,
we're not just this brutal, terrible country that's as mad
at each other fighting over these really terrible issues. No,
there's a goodness to us too. In that article is

(01:12:57):
the is the beginning of the basis of what becomes
John Chapman the man transition to Johnny Appleseed.

Speaker 1 (01:13:03):
Though, who coined what was the first What's the first
time you see Johnny apples in print?

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
It is almost certainly that, But some people did call
him that even at the time. That was like a nickname,
John Applesyn because again he would just go to sieries
and the sighteries. They didn't give that like they it
was it was, it was.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
So it came about naturally. It wasn't coined by a writer.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
No, no, no, no, yeah, we can't give it to
like one specific guy.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
Is that Does that work with the fact check?

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
Well, I was gonna yeah, they were calling them that
at the time, it seems, but like I just clearing
up a number I said earlier, the donation track. He
was fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees. Those were
the requirements. He said, fifty yes, so I was I
was had doubled them. But like if the marketing had
been different around him, he could have been Johnny peach

(01:13:52):
Pit or Johnny Johnny Fennel peach pit like talk talk
about some of the other stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
He was, thank you so much for bringing that up.

Speaker 3 (01:13:58):
Oh my gosh, I space someone the things I most
wanted to talk about. So it's alcohol. It's all alcohol, right,
we talked about that earlier. It's all for booze. So
why does that get forgotten? Well, you could easily make
the argument of well, we're trying to teach you to
elementary school and unlike the time, we don't booze up
children anymore the way that we used to. But it's not.

(01:14:21):
It's prohibition. So apples were seen as grapes. They were
an alcohol making fruit back then. It wasn't.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
Oh it's that's interesting man, that that would have been
that you'd have viewed it that way. Yeah, you would not.
It was making a little bevy. You guys are making
some pies, right exactly. It was not.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
Apples were not for they was that was their main thing.
If people were eating them on the sides, that was
like the side thing. Then prohibition happens. Grandma Hatchet, she's
making the great fight against booze across the country. You know,
Tee Toller are coming out of the woodwork and part
of their war is a war on booze, and part

(01:15:04):
of their war is a war on bars, and part
of their war is a war on apples. And it
becomes clear, like we have records of federal agencies coming
to be like your uncle has an apple tree in
his backyard. He's probably using it to make some kind
of homebrew, and so agents are literally cutting apple trees down,

(01:15:28):
and so probition happens. Then the twenty first Amendment, God
bless happens.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
We're back. Baby booze is a part of America.

Speaker 3 (01:15:35):
But we all, I think, to be honest, I always
look at probibi as like just like a drying out
period where everybody kind of got to get their legs back.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
And then they could kind of move forward from there.
All right, maybe we shouldn't be doing it all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:15:49):
And genuinely, the apple industry needs new pr And that
is when an apple a day keeps the doctor away,
I was square to God. That is when we come
to think of apples as a healthy treat. And what's
nice is they actually are. They actually are healthy. But

(01:16:09):
for a very long time they just the way that
the grape is linked to wine, apple was linked to
cider and that was their main true calling. And now
what's interesting is only with modern breweries, Like like the
other thing progress killed was small batch alcohol making. Then
these giant collomortions moved in took over the booze business,

(01:16:33):
and for many many decades, you only you know, you'd
have your five beers that you could choose at any bar.
Only recently have people become reinvigorated in remaking their own
booze or remaking small batch booze to serve local communities,
which I love, Like that's America at its best, is
when it's the most diverse. And so cider making is
also coming back in a real way, and I love

(01:16:55):
seeing that. So cider making is on the rise. Riverhead
cider House. I live on Long Island and there's a
sightery right by where I live, and that's where I
wrote a lot of this book. And they have just
had tremendous success bringing that kind of old school styles
and making cider and selling it to the local community
with no dreams of going national, no dreams of becoming

(01:17:17):
the next you know, just like this is something that
serves these towns here, This is a place to gather,
like a church, like a baseball stadium. You know, that's
what a bar is. It's a public house. It's a
place I think. You know, you guys care about conserving
land and something that's so important to me too. Like
in this book, I'm in so many state parks, national parks,

(01:17:39):
but there's also this this need to to protect places
where humans can just come together and gather, and places
like the Riverheadsider House do that which I really love.

Speaker 1 (01:17:51):
I was never able to replicate this, but at one
time made the perfect batch of Hardsider on accident. No,
we were out hunting in the winter and we found
all these frozen apples under an apple tree. It was
on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot,
and he had his orchard apples and then he had
these just stray apple trees out and about that he

(01:18:12):
didn't harvest. And I always thought that those are the
better apples. He has all these frozen apples. We put
them in one of his wooden crates, a wooden apple crate.
I took him home and put it in their frozen solid.
I put them in the basement in a five gallon bucket. Okay,
and I don't know what they had already fermented. I

(01:18:34):
don't remember like all of a sudden. It was just
that you could like dip into that and drink it
and it was booze. Dude, it was good. And we
later tried, you know, whatever I did, it never like
it just never happened again. Do you know what I mean?
That never happened again. But it just it just made
this perfect. It's just somehow these apples thawed and in

(01:18:55):
my mom and dad's basement like made a hard sider.
So you just experience and never again like you got.
I could go get apples again that are frozen with
film in my mom and dad's basement to just make
rotten apples.

Speaker 3 (01:19:07):
But we have but we have evidence of animals doing
this what you were talking about. There are some monkeys
that do it in certain places. We have evidence of
deer sometimes knowing during wet seasons to return to air,
like I think a lot of animals enjoy getting a
little tipsy. And you as like a human being, a

(01:19:32):
full grown you got high school but yeah, yeah, all right,
all right, sorry, maybe not fully grown. That's like twenty
six is when the brain is fully developed. But you
got to experience basically grabbing this thing, having it go bad,
but going so bad that it went good.

Speaker 5 (01:19:49):
I don't know if this is the right word. Mile
Man called it applejack. Yeah, that's a good Yeah. So
apple cider is the like sipping all day stuff. But
then you can make this harder apple brandy, which is
very popular at the time, and that's what you call
it apple jack.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
That's right. Here's my last question you. And I think
that this is true of you because some things you've said.
This is this is the thing I harp on all
the time about American culture, the narrative, if you imagine
your online life, your online life, the online narrative is

(01:20:26):
about that America is divided, the partisan fractures, right, we're
leading to some great civil war. And I know and
I understand, like my online life is like, I got it.
It's as true as true. The country is splitting a
part of the seams. But my lived life, my lived life,

(01:20:50):
I don't get it. I don't see it. The people
my neighbors. I've said this before, my most immediate neighbors,
I do not know what their political leanings are. I
honestly don't know what their political leanings are. I know

(01:21:10):
that if my home was on fire. They would rush
in to check if my family is okay, and I
know I would rush into their home. Amen, I do
not know their political leanings. Amen, I don't even care,
Like I don't need to know their political leanings.

Speaker 3 (01:21:23):
I'll do you one better. I know my neighbor's political leanings.
They are not mine. And I know that my blizzard blizzard,
I'm sorry. I know that a blizzard came while I
was out of town, and they were the first people
over there using their plow to plow out the driveway
with a snowblower, making sure that my wife was safe,

(01:21:44):
you know. And I know that if their house was
ever in any kind of situation, anytime, I'm able to
help them. Those are your neighbors. That is the point
of community. That is the point of trust.

Speaker 1 (01:21:55):
That you've said a couple things about your wanderings, your
American ran ambling. Yeah, that just I don't know you.
You seem to express a sort of optimism about.

Speaker 3 (01:22:07):
I have walked outside and I've seen this country at
an eye level. People are good for the most part,
Don't get me wrong. You're gonna meet jerks everywhere. The hospitality,
the kindness that one of my favorite things. The curiosity
about one another is really strong. I love going to

(01:22:31):
new places, I love meeting new people. And in no
way do we start the way that they would start
you on whatever Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. So
what do you think nobody said you don't sit down
in your yarn ass? What do you think about proposition one?
A like no man? Maybe maybe basket like maybe sports,

(01:22:53):
Maybe we can have some No. You walk into a
place and you have a meeting with another fellow human being.
And if I can say, honestly, we've talked so much
about the history because I know that's what's of interest,
talked about westward expansion because I know that's what's interest.
But the core of this book is it is a
non political look at where this country is right now

(01:23:17):
and what I saw. You know, Ron Churnou is going
to be able to write the great biography of John
Chapman that's like seven thousand pages long, or Howard Means
is this great writer. He came out with a book
about John Chapman in twenty eleven from Simon and Schuster.
It's a great, straightforward biography. What I did was slept
in a parking lot that's probably near where John Chapman

(01:23:39):
he used to sleeping and shits. That's what I did,
and I got to meet so many individuals in this country.
This country is not on the verge of civil war.
This country is not this divided partisan place that you
see when you look at your screen. Don't get wrong.
Phone's nice for a map. I can't be totally anti screen.

(01:24:00):
The phone is nice for taking photos or recording a
voice memo. But the more time I spend off of
social media, the more time I spend listening to podcasts
of people that I enjoy instead of just staring at
this large media that I believe is genuinely invested in
making sure that we feel scared, isolated, alone, and angry

(01:24:24):
at each other. The better I feel. And the tough
thing for me is there is family history in this
book as well.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
There is.

Speaker 3 (01:24:32):
Things that my family have grappled with in the last
couple of years, and I have seen firsthand what happens
when you give in to isolation, when you give in
to loneliness, you cannot be scared of your fellow neighbors.
I understand that we are human beings and we have
the potential to do harm history is long and bloody,

(01:24:55):
but at the same time, there are so many stories
of coming together, figuring out problems, working with one another
to make a safe haven for all of us. And
I think this country, we are approaching two hundred and
fifty years, this country is an experiment. Is it perfect?

Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:25:15):
Have we done some atrocious things. Absolutely, But when you
look at our ideals, when you look at the better
of our angels, when you look at the things that
we are reaching for, when you look at the way
this country comes together and still works two hundred and
fifty years later, covering vast but Montana could be its
own country, Texas could be its own country. New England

(01:25:37):
put all those nerds in their own country like that.
It could be that way. But we are one country
and it works, and I think that is a beautiful thing.
And when I walked out in the world, I want
to be very clear, my father said to me, you're
gonna get shot.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
I did not walk it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:55):
Yeah, yeah, you're gonna get shot, and not to mention
what you do. We didn't even get into the lack
of preparedness. I'm almost horrified to be on this podcast.
I want to be clear. I've learned more. I know
how tends work. I've gotten a little bit better at it.
I want to learn more, if I'm being honest, like
hunting is something that I'm trying to get more interested in.

(01:26:17):
I think that that's a really incredible part of the
human experience. But real quick, my dad was like, you're
going to get shot. I walked out into the country
with no preconceived notions. That was an important part of
this project, and what I found was so much more
life affirming, heart filling, soul booing than I expected. And

(01:26:38):
I'm so happy I did it. And I hope that
people feel that when they read this book, because this
is a book of coming together. It's a book about
walking away from loneliness and towards community.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
M Hm, did you go to Nova, Ohio?

Speaker 1 (01:26:55):
Yeah? Man, okay, did I see the lab? Oh? Here
we go, we get the real faction.

Speaker 3 (01:26:58):
Tell Steve, Okay, So, Patti Smith the Allegro Farm.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):
This is what we're talking about. Patty Smith, musician.

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
No, no, no, oh my gosh, that'd be cool. Wait hang on,
it's not Patty Smith. Sorry, let me try that again.
A woman named Patty on the Allegor farm in Novo Ohio.
There's a claim that is the last apple tree planted
by John Chapman, and it still bears fruit. And I'd
go and I talked to Patty. There is some interesting science,

(01:27:28):
exceptionally rich soil. People have taken seeds from this tree
and they have brought them to space.

Speaker 1 (01:27:36):
That is true.

Speaker 3 (01:27:38):
In the nineties, this tree was so popular that people
used to show up in buses field of dream style
just to take photos with.

Speaker 1 (01:27:46):
It in the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 3 (01:27:47):
In the nineteen nineties it then kind of the farm
kind of went through some different iterations. Patty, I think
is kind of bringing it back. I showed up. I'm
not joking that you want to talk about a wonderful
moment in America. I didn't call ahead, I didn't write
an email. I just rolled up, knocked on the door.
Immediately was apologetic. I was like, I'm so sorry, I
can't come back later. Let me leave my number. This
is weird. And she was like, stop being weird man,

(01:28:10):
and just was like, come on in, you want iced tea,
lemonade or water. And she just sat and she just
talked with me. And so the story she had about
not just the tree. She also had stories about that
that town was a stop on the underground railroad or
on the underground railroad. She had stories about her great
great grandparents and basically trying to help slaves get up

(01:28:33):
into Canada. She had stories about the ways she used
to take the apples and go. She always wanted horses,
but they only had sheeping cows on the farm, so
she'd go to the cows and pretend they were horses
when she.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
Was a child.

Speaker 3 (01:28:44):
All these wonderful like Again, this book is also very
much about what's legend, what's fact, and at the end
of the day, how much does it really matter? But
it is also a rambow tree, which some people take
a little umbrage with. Could that possibly be a tree
that John Han planet? He himself did come to that area.
That's documented because there was a Swedenborgian minister who lived

(01:29:07):
in that area, so he would come through in Commune,
so he definitely visited that farm.

Speaker 2 (01:29:12):
Do you think he planted that tree? Me?

Speaker 3 (01:29:15):
Yeah, I have to believe.

Speaker 1 (01:29:17):
Yeah, that's fun. I have to believe. I will.

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):
I will say in the book, I hedge it more.
In the book, I hedge it more. But you to
me the person that I am, Yeah, half my father,
half my mother. I go with my father on that
one that I love.

Speaker 1 (01:29:31):
The idea.

Speaker 3 (01:29:32):
There's a there's so there's three trees there now, but
one of them very very old, and basically the idea
is that the roots almost died and then regrew.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
Got it.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):
You can you can I get into the science of
it in the book you can. You can make up
your own mind.

Speaker 2 (01:29:47):
Yeah, that's it's like not uncommon. If you had a
plumb tree and it failed in year five, if you
leave it for a season or two, something else may
start growing there. And it could it could even be
a fruit that's not a plum any, so that like
could happen what you're saying it could. And there's now
multiple online sellers who will sell you a tree that

(01:30:08):
they say came from the Johnny apple seed tree. There's
a couple different places. And I see, I see my
orchard going through phases, like I have a twenty twenty
seven plan, a twenty twenty eight plan. Next year, I
want to put a Johnny appleseed tree.

Speaker 1 (01:30:21):
In the ground.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):
But I want someone to tell me that's a good
idea and be like, yes, that's a Johnny apple ste.

Speaker 3 (01:30:26):
Let me let me do it right now, because I
will say this I do. I talk to Patty about
the person that licensed the right to sell the seeds,
and that to me almost felt a little bit like
I was like, this is going to be like a
succession style. Sorry, and I decided. I was like, I
already got a lot going on this book, so I
decided not.

Speaker 1 (01:30:43):
To chase that one down.

Speaker 3 (01:30:44):
Remember I mentioned the football all right, Sorry, I remember
I mentioned the baseball team. So they have a tree
in front of the stadium which they won't cut because
it's a Johnny apple seed tree.

Speaker 1 (01:30:55):
So it's actually kind of blocking sign.

Speaker 3 (01:30:57):
It grew bigger than they expected, and I'm pretty sure
it's from that Patty tree and this guy who's kind
of licensed it and done it. But I will do
you on better, is what I'm trying to say. Please,
I have these apples. Yes, I will come back to Montana.
I'm not joking. This is the kind of dumb stuff
I do. I will come back to Montana. I will
give you the seed and you don't have to figure

(01:31:18):
out whether it's real or not. You can plant the
legendary Johnny.

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
Appleseed tree on your proper Let's do it. That's the
old centric right there. That's a future old. Just don't
stick needles in your feet.

Speaker 2 (01:31:33):
As the property value is going to go way up
once I've got a Johnny Appleseed tree there.

Speaker 1 (01:31:38):
That's great, man, all right, everybody. The name of the
book American Rambler, Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by
Isaac Fitzgerald.

Speaker 3 (01:31:49):
It's brand spanking new. It's brand spanking new. It's out
May twelfth, New York Times Bestseller. A lot of nice
people have said a lot of nice things about it. Man,
you got a boatloaded I then you can get into that.
You got a boatload of great writers saying great things
about the book.

Speaker 1 (01:32:01):
Check it out. I hope it's because they like it.
Thank you very much, man, Thanks for having me on. Gentlemen,
I really appreciate you.