September 30, 2017 • 36 mins
The image of Johnny Appleseed walking around in rags, barefooted with a bindle, planting apple trees and moving on is actually pretty accurate. Join Holly and Tracy to learn how John Chapman struck out for the frontier and became an American legend.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, it's time for another Saturday classic. And today we
have somebody who I know Tracy really finds endearing, uh,
and that is Johnny Appleseed, whould think we were both
pretty glad to learn was a real and actual person
and not just a cartoon character or a folk tale,
which is often kind of what we get in terms
of his life. Yes, there are so many things that
I find genuinely endearing about Johnny Appleseed, one of them
(00:24):
being there is a lot of walking in this story,
so much walking, and walking is one of my favorite things.
Before we do get started, I wanted to note that
when this episode originally came out, we heard from a
lot of people about our comments regarding his age when
he died. At the time, the life expectancy was about forty,
which a lot of people wrote into note is because
(00:46):
of childhood mortality skewing that number, And that's true. But
if you live to age five at the time that
he was alive, you still only had a life expectancy
of about fifty five, so he still really was quite old.
So try to grab an apple and we'll get started.
(01:07):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from House
Stuff Works Dot com hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I
(01:27):
am extremely excited about who we're talking about today. Me too.
It's one of those people who is a figure in
American history that some people may believe incorrectly to be mythical,
but was in fact real, and that is Johnny Appleseed. Yeah,
we learned about him as elementary school kids, but we
really only get a very weird, brief sliver of the
(01:47):
reality of his life. Yes, it's a sliver that almost
makes him a caricature of himself. People imagine if if
you say Johnny Appleseed, whether people think he's real or
make believe, probably going to imagine a guy walking around
in rags or skins, barefooted, with a sack full of
apple seeds, sleeping out under the stars and planning his
(02:08):
apple trees and then moving on. Well, I've seen the cartoons.
That's how it is. It's basically accurate. At the same time,
there's a whole much broader element of his life that
had nothing to do uh. Some people think of him
as the first sort of one of the first conservationists.
It's really possible to also look at him as a
(02:28):
very failed capitalist, and we're going to talk about that today.
It's interesting because he's one of those that we don't
really know a whole lot about his early life. No,
we do know that he was born on September seventy
four in Leminster, Massachusetts, and that his parents were Elizabeth
Simon's Chapman and Nathaniel Chapman, and he had an older
sister named Elizabeth. He also had other siblings eventually, um
(02:54):
he had a younger brother named Nathaniel, and his mother
died just a few weeks after Nathaniel was born, and
then the younger Nathaniel sadly also died just after that.
And that was when Johnny was He wasn't quite too
just a toddler. Yes, it's pretty unclear exactly where Elizabeth
(03:14):
and john went at that point. Uh, their father was
serving as one of the Minutemen. He fought at Bunker
Hill and he was not home until see. So they
were living with someone, presumably, but we don't know who.
It's clear that there were relatives in that part of
New England. If you look back far enough into New
England history, pretty much everyone is related to everyone at
(03:36):
some point so they had plenty of relatives in the
area where they lived. We're just not sure who wound
up taking care of them until one when dad came
home uh from from the service. He was released, along
with several other officers, with the description of unsatisfactory management
(03:56):
of the military stores. Uh. He went home without getting
a pension or land, which was often a thing when
you were when you got out of the service, you
would get a pension or land that was sort of
your payment. Um. He got neither of those, but he
did get a year's pay. So some people have looked
at this as kind of evidence that that his dad
(04:17):
was kind of shiftless, right. But at the same time,
the armory itself had outlived its usefulness a little bit,
so it may have been more like a layoff than
a firing for truly bad behavior. Yeah. I think always
here unsatisfactory management. We think there must have been something
dicey going on, but it really could have just been
part of things kind of shutting down naturally as well. Um.
(04:39):
But Nathaniel did remarry. Uh. He married Lisa Cooley and
then the family lived in Long Meadow, which is south
of Springfield, Massachusetts, and it grew and grew. It grew
so much, which is a little bit unfortunate because Nathaniel
was not the greatest with things like money or farming.
But Lisa is uh very often pregnant, and she gave
(05:02):
birth to ten more children between seventeen eighty one and
eighteen oh three. So that's ten children in twenty one
and a half years. That is not, in itself a
surprising number of children for the era. What is a
little more surprising is that they all seemed to have
survived until adulthood. And they were sharing a four hundred
square foot house with an attic for sleeping in tight
(05:23):
it's not a lot of room, uh, And so there
at some point, most likely because of a combination of
a lot of people in a little space, uh, and
the alluring prospect of land that you could get for
cheap out west, and probably not a lot of money
around the house. John and his younger brother Nathaniel, who
(05:46):
was eleven or fifteen at the time, left. The dates
are a little un clear. It was either seventeen ninety
two or seventeen ninety six, depending on yeah the accounts.
Very there's a lot of the accounts vary in this story.
So John was eighteen or twenty two. His half brother
Nathaniel was either eleven or fifteen. They left Massachusetts together
and traveled to western Pennsylvania at some point in that era. Also, uh,
(06:11):
there is a story. It's hard to substantiate a lot
of this because medical records were not very clear at
the time, but there's a story that John was kicked
on the head by a horse at age one, uh
and that the injury was severe enough that he had
to have part of his skull removed to relieve the pressure,
which is a valid treatment for that kind of injury,
(06:32):
but still at the time, that's pretty primitive medical time.
I'm I'm making the scrunched up chills in my spine face.
But right there there are people who attribute his later
eccentricities to having had this injury. That makes sense, but
since it's not well documented, we can't know for sure.
(06:53):
Together they left, I kind of imagine John kind of
going and it's too crowded in here. We have no money.
Let we we can get some land if we go west.
So let's do that. Yeah, And it was, you know,
just beyond the Ohio River was the frontier, and many
people were making their land grabs. They knew that there
was potential property to be hand, but it was very dangerous. Animals, snakes,
(07:17):
other people, a lots other people of every sort. Uh.
They're sort of a perception that the other people threat
was Native Americans who were justifiably uh, defending their land,
but also everyone, yeah, other settlers that were trying to
make their own way and trying to protect what they
perceived as their opportunities. Uh. And so there was also
(07:40):
a lot of illness and injury, presumably some of them
from interactions with other people. And there wasn't really much
in the way of medical care, right in addition to
the fact that the medical care at the time was
was often not sound from a scientific perspective. There just
weren't a lot of doctors on the frontier. There were
a few people who had actual nickel training. So if
(08:01):
you got sick or hurt on the frontier, you might
die of something that in a city would have been
more uh. And they so people and the government were
buy or trade land from the Native Americans and then
turn around and sell it for a huge profit or
divide it up like it was the original flipping model. Uh.
And sometimes Congress would grant businesses the rights to divide
(08:24):
up and dole out the land for money or in
exchange for residency and improvement requirements. So things like orchards
developing orchards uh and that you know was intended to
keep people from flipping from just reselling their stuff really quickly,
like they actually wanted development and progress and not just
(08:44):
money turnovers. Yes, apples themselves were important at a time.
We think of apples today is what we eat in
pies and and just eating them and delicious things to eat.
If you have ever seen the Disney Johnny Appleseed cartoon,
there's a lot of talk about ways to eat apples.
Eating apples was not in the primary concern at a
(09:07):
time at all. Cider was a lot more important. There
would be like little scrubby apples that were kind of
bitter that would be pressed into uh cider or made
into vinegar. A lot of people were planning apples. And
while they could be dried out and stored for the
winter and serve as a source of nourishment, that wasn't
(09:28):
their primary use. The primary use was cider, hard cider
and apple jack. It was about drunkenness. And then it
is important to just take that that moment to note
that I think we a particularly American school children are
taught like that. He sort of brought apples to the world.
It was like, look at this wonderful thing I can
bring you, But in fact everyone was trying to grow
(09:50):
apples right one. They weren't really that wonderful at that point.
They were kind of gross to eat that they did
not taste very good. They were not the big juicy
anything supermarket. There were lots of other apple people and
lots of lots of other orchard people. Uh. His personality
and things that he did just make him particularly memorable
in the world of orchard planting in those days of
(10:14):
the Frontier. He was also just he had a knack
for figuring out where people were going to go next.
So he would get seeds from Pennsylvania in the winter
by picking through the refuse at the cider presses. He
would sort of pick through, uh, this pulpy stuff that
was left over after they made cider. He would gather
up all these seeds and then he would head west
(10:37):
and he would plant the seeds. He would use um
the brush he had cleared and possibly other brush to
make offense to keep animals out, and then he would
go away. And when people made it into that territory
that year, the following year there would already be apple
seedlings growing on the land which they could buy from Chapman.
(11:00):
Uh So he was a stute in that regard. He
was super stute in that regard. Had he actually turned
that into a business model, Well, in a way he
did turn it into a that was sort of his
business model, but he didn't really care about money. It
was more of an apple making model than a money
making model. Right. He gave a lot of seedlings away. Basically,
(11:22):
if you were moving on to land that you were
hoping to make your own and you could not afford
your apple seedlings, Johnny Apples would give them to you.
He also if he saw horses that were being mistreated,
he would buy them from you and then put them
out to pasture. So endearing, he was very endearing. He
just I read a book that we'll talk more about
at the end of the podcast. In this and and
(11:45):
the writer compared him to Andrew Carnegie, except that Andrew
Carnegie amassed wealth and then gave it away, and Johnny
applese just gave away all the wealth as he got it,
so he never actually had a lot because he was
giving it all away, no accumulation. Kind of charming, but
not really effective if your goal is actually to own anything,
(12:05):
which apparently wasn't his goal, and if it was, his
goaling didn't do it very well. Uh. We don't really
know his exact route through that part of the world.
We sort of know generally that he went from New
York into Pennsylvania and then started moving into Ohio and Indiana. Uh.
Several people have tried to kind of recreate the route
(12:26):
that he followed um, with varying success. There's not a
lot of actual documentation surviving about his life at the time. Well,
and even the documentation is largely based on word of mouth,
so it's accuracy is not verifiable. It's it's yes. And
in some cases we know that the people who were
supplying these oral accounts were not necessarily all that trustworthy
(12:47):
as historians, because a lot of the travel that he
was doing was ahead of the the influx of settlers. Uh,
there weren't really roads. It would be sort of hard going.
A lot of the actual written detail that we have
comes from trading post ledgers, and one of the first
(13:09):
of these is in sev in Warren, Pennsylvania, at which
point John and Nathaniel were recorded to be there to
buy things. Some of the things that he bought included
a spike gimlet, which is a tool that he could
have used for all kinds of things out on the frontier.
It was a very multi use tool. He also bought books, cheese,
and sun drees and that truly all you need give
(13:32):
your books in your cheese. Man. If I had books
and cheese, I would be set. So yeah, he that's
we know that he was in Warren at that time.
There are other trading post ledger records of his movements,
but not enough to really piece together. This is exactly
how he traveled and when, and there is some belief
that his first orchard was actually near Warren on the
(13:53):
Allegheny River. Warren was very small, not having great luck.
A storm had knocked down all the trees, a fire
or burned up all the dead wood, and then the
relationship between the settlers and the Native Americans in the
area got really hostile. It was not really the most
welcoming or perfect place. There was pretty much one person
(14:13):
living there when they got there. Uh that was Dan
McKay or McQuay. He worked for the Holland Company, which
was one of the agencies that was dividing up and
selling off land. UM. He may have employed the Chapman
Brothers to kind of guard the land against squatters and
timber thieves, but it's a little unclear whether he was
(14:35):
actually working for this man or or if they just
knew each other. Um. But according to writings of Lancing
Wetmore UH and the Warren Ledger, john eventually picked a
location for a nursery in Uh. This is another example
of we don't really know how accurate this person's report was.
He was a lawyer and a judge and was pretty
(14:57):
well respected at the time, but he was also really
fond of a good story. Um. And we know from
other accounts that there are things that he got completely wrong,
so it discredits his discredits him a little telling a
little bit. But probably the first orchard that Johnny apples
he planted was near Warren, Uh sometime around so we
(15:19):
know Johnny wanted land, and he did buy plenty of land,
but he didn't stay on it to fulfill the terms
of his claims or claim jumpers got in there and
took it from him, right. Uh, So he had skill
and you know, acumen for planting things, but not so
much with the patients. No, he didn't stick through with things.
He would sign nine year leases on stuff and then
(15:41):
either not pay the bills or not fulfill the residency
requirements to keep that lease. So there he did a
lot of getting land and then the land would fall
out of his hands. Um. He was also choosing the
hardest way to grow apples. Uh. The an easier way
to grow apples is to graft cuttings of apples to
root stock, and that's pretty much how apple cultivation happens.
(16:04):
Now what he was doing because he felt that it
was kinder on the plants and that it was in
fact wicked to cut up plants to graph them onto things.
What he was doing was planting seeds. That is, there's
a number of reasons why that is not the best
way to cultivate apples. Yeah, I mean, I have done
some apple seedlings, and they are difficult, and they don't
(16:25):
bear fruit often very well for a long time. They
tend to grow so big that it's hard to harvest
from them, and it takes them a very long time
to actually put out apples, and then the apples that
they do put out. It's really a mix of what
you're going to get. Apple seeds are pretty cool because
they're heterozygous, so they have the code, the genetic code
(16:47):
for all kinds of different apples in one seed. You
don't really know which of those jeans are going to
express when the tree is growing, so you might plant
seeds from a delicious apple and get disgusting apples. There
are so many factors that go into something like that,
from like the soil pH you know what kind of
winters and summers it has when it's young, like if
(17:09):
it has a drought, that will affect what is produced.
So it is it's a very unpredictable and difficult way
to get fruit, right. But on the other side of that,
seeds are a lot more flexible and when you can
plant them. You can really only graft in the spring,
but you can plant seeds sort of nine months out
of the year. Uh. And because of what we said before,
(17:29):
those little bitter, very tough tart apples were in high
demand for making vinegar and cider, and also those things
were in demand because vinegar was considered to be medicinal
uh And because out on the frontier there was not
a lot to do. People were very interested in drinking,
so it didn't matter so much if you produce delicious
(17:49):
fruit now, just as long as you were producing something
that could be used in some way to make vinegar cider. Yes,
uh so some he sold, as you said, and some
he gave way. I also wonder, going back to his
various pieces of property, how many people just inherited, you know,
predeveloped apple because because he just abandoned the spot. There
(18:12):
are a lot of records that survive, whether it's because
bookkeeping with sloppy or just you know, time has kind
of erased some of the German documents. But the oral
history it's pretty unanimous in that if you couldn't afford trees,
he would just give them to you. And the lack
of records is a problem in terms of tracking many things.
(18:35):
You know, his sale of seedlings, his land, his forfeits
of the land, whether or not, and this is getting
into some interesting elements of the story. He was actually
a minister or a missionary of the Church of New Jerusalem.
The Church of the New Jerusalem is a church that
people may not have heard of now. It was also
(18:57):
known as the New Church, and it was based on
Swedish mint mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was a popular religious
figure for about a hundred years following his death in
seventeen seventy two. The Swedenborg sect was really intellectual. He
wrote volumes and volumes and volumes about his divine revelations
and his spiritual thought. He was very specific about things.
(19:20):
A lot of religious writing can be kind of general
in describing what God is like or what Heaven is like,
and he was really down to the details and described
his religious visions in extreme detail. Uh. And he was
also very influential. Some of the notable people who were
influenced by him include William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Garta, Carl Young,
(19:44):
William but earlier Yates, Walt Whitman who I love, and Emerson.
So he was a very influential writer at the time.
He had a really strong streak of intellectualism. Um his
with the church that was founded on his teaching, which
was known as the New Church, had sort of areas
of the United States that was developing at the time
(20:06):
that where that was extremely popular, and it was also
very different from a lot of the other church going
that was happening on the frontier, which was much more
about tent revivals and that sort of thing. And this
was a much thinkier sort of religion, and Johnnie Appleseed
embraced it, he really did. He actually started preaching the
(20:26):
New Church teachings while he traveled about. So when he
was in Ohio and he would take shelter with people,
he would bring them the good news straight from Heaven. Yes. Uh.
In eighteen twenty nine, a fundamentalist preacher named Adam Paine
actually asked the crowd, where is your barefoot pilgrim now?
And John Chapman, dressed in rags with unkempt hair, held
up a foot and said, here he is, yes, which
(20:48):
is so charming. And that's sort of an example of
the intersection between the more tent revival esque religion that
was pretty common in a lot of that area at
the time. And and then John Chapman he was really
an outsider and a loner and not like that at all.
Um He also he definitely was not operating in isolation.
The New Church knew that he was around and knew
(21:10):
that he was spreading their teachings UM. Because he appears
in reports of the New Church and in other writings
from the church starting in around eighteen seventeen, so he
was a known figure to the church as part of
this whole religious focus. He was a vegetarian, and he
was celibate, as in our recent episode about Marjorie Kemp,
(21:30):
though he did have spiritual relationships with people who were
not physically present. So he was having what we're going
to call spiritual intercourse um with the spirits of two
deceased women who were to He was told in a
vision that they were going to be his companions in
the afterlife. This is also something that Swedenborg wrote about
in his writings. Yeah, apparently he had apparently hoped to
(21:53):
propose to Nancy Tannehill, but she was already engaged. That's
one of those stories that exists about his life that
is sort of one person's word, and we don't really
know if that's a true story, but we do know
that he never got married. He was reported to be
celibate for his whole life. UM. I don't know if
if the Nancy Tannehill story is a true story or not,
(22:13):
but it is a thing that somebody said about him
at one point, it's a it's a side note in
the story of his relations with women and with his religion,
since those all sort of uh, they contradict each other
a little bit. Yes, and now we're getting to an
era that has often talked about in history but not
necessarily relation to him, which is a War of eighteen twelve. Yes,
(22:35):
he was really skilled at walking, like he that's walking
was something, and he was just great at and he
he was reported too often not wear shoes, and he
walked so much that his feet had these leather like calluses.
And because he was so good at walking around and
because he knew the territory so well, settlers sometimes would
hire him to kind of keep an eye on things
(22:57):
as tensions were starting to grow leading up to the
Or of eighteen twelve. UM. At least one time he
either falsely or mistakenly raised the alarm about incoming troops
who were going to attack, when it they were actually
American troops troops UM. In spite of that, or maybe
because this story had not reached where he was, he
(23:20):
did have a very Paul Revere's Ride esque race for
help that he reportedly undertook. Uh in September of eighteen twelve,
colonel named Colonel Kratzer was going to remove the Native
American population from southwest Ohio. He convinced a preacher named
James Compass, who the Native Americans they're trusted, to help
(23:42):
him move them, like remove them from their homes. He
did this by saying that he didn't want bloodshed, he
just wanted to take these people under the protection of
the government. Uh. The reverend believed him and and convinced
the people in this one village to move. The response
of the colonel's troops then was to set their homes
(24:03):
on fire. And this sparked a lot of problems, understandably
because that was a terrible thing to do. Uh. There
were acts of revenge on both sides. It's kind of
a long and drawn out story, but there was you know,
the one side would ambush another side, and then the
other side would retaliate, and then on an unfortunate fallout
(24:24):
from that, a young person would wind up being killed.
It's a very kind of long and convoluted story. But
it became clear that things were getting very bad and
that a full scale attack was incoming, and people were
very worried and and We're basically like, we need back up,
and Johnny apple Seed volunteered to be that backup or
(24:45):
to go for that backup. Um. According to the lore,
he ran bareheaded and barefooted, leaving at sunset and running
through the night, running a distance that was effectively a
marathon there and a marathon back. Holly might know about
how hard that would be. Um. It's actually more likely
that he was on horse. But the story is that
he was on foot running and he would raise the
(25:07):
alarm at farms and homesteads that he passed on the way. UM,
as he ran to a fort at Mount Vernon to
get help and to raise the alarm. This whole story
probably has a fair amount of it's been mythologize. It's
definitely been mythologized. Um. It does appear to be a
historic thing that actually happened. Probably he was not running
(25:28):
on foot the whole time. UM, But that really started
to solidify him as a mythic figure even at the time,
not just now, even though now that that's a story
that maybe people outside of that region of the United
States haven't heard about. But he was becoming a mythic
figure even while he was alive. Well, that was probably
aided by the fact that he was a little bit,
(25:50):
as you said, kind of an odd fellow. He wasn't
really a mainstream society kind of guy, so he already
had a bit of a mystique in all likelihood, and
then that combined with some of these sort of amazing
tales of his doing that really is fertile ground to
create a mythology around someone. Yes, he was very odd
and very memorable, and usually because of his pattern of
(26:11):
moving around, he would move into a place before a
lot of people were there, he would do things that
were memorable, and then the population would start to move
into this area where he previously had been and had
already made a name for himself, and they would sort
of hear these Johnny Appleseed stories. Um. So he had
a pretty huge reputation, uh in the era in which
he lived and in the years afterward, and that has
(26:35):
continued today. People don't necessarily know all these other aspects
of him, but they most people have heard of Johnny
Applesee before. Yeah, and I mean he's got the name
Johnny Appleseed and John Chapman soon. So in eighteen o five,
his family, um had moved to Duck Creek, Ohio, and
(26:57):
they were in really rough financial situation. UH. But there
isn't evidence of whether or not John reunited with them.
He was kind of a loner, as we had said,
even from the church, even though he supported it and
spread their teachings. He wasn't really you know, attending socials
or attending regular right and they're writing about him. Started
(27:17):
to fall off as he got later in his life
and maybe increasingly odd in his behavior. UM. So we
don't really know if he was on good terms with
his family when he died. We we don't really know
if he had any close relationships at that point. UM.
But he did die peacefully, but of illness at the
age of seventy at the home of William Worth in
(27:41):
His home was north of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that
was in March of eighteen forty five. UM. The official
accounts at the time kind of vary in their specific dates,
but generally recognized that sometime in the middle of March. UH.
The cause was known as winter plague, and that was
sort of a catch out term for various diseases that
people tended to get more in the winter. UH. There
(28:02):
was an obituary that ran on March eighteen forty five
and the Fort Wayne Sentinel. And what is kind of
striking to me about his death at the age of
seventy is that the life expectancy at the time was
a little over forty. So he was very, very old
when he passed away. So not at all surprising that
a man of that advanced age would succumb to winter plague.
(28:23):
I mean, we know, even in modern times, the elderly
are you know, at greater risk of even you know,
pretty minor illnesses that younger people could live through. So
to have been seventi is pretty impressive, especially when you
consider that he spent most of his time wandering around
in the woods, you know what I mean. It wasn't
like he lived a life of luxury and comfort with
(28:44):
every possible you know, cleanliness applied to his universe well,
and not even luxury and comfort, but just basic medical
care and having a home. He didn't really have any
of that. He did own some things when he died,
and among his effects after his death, uh he had
a gray mayor, uh, several parcels of land, an orchard
(29:05):
of two thousand apple trees, and various other things. Uh.
Some of the land got sold off to pay the
back taxes on that land because he had not paid it,
which is not surprising um. And then the remainder of
his possessions were sold off for a total of four
hundred and nine dollars, which would come to about nine
thousand dollars today. But pretty much all of that money
went to paying off various things that he had owed
(29:27):
during his life. Some of these claims might have been true,
and some of them might have been false, but there
were people who claims to who have to have provided
him room and board in his later life. He definitely,
as as his m O was kind of to get land,
plant things, and leave. He definitely did owe money on things.
So by the time all of that was was taken
(29:48):
care of, there was really no money left In the
John Chapman's last Johnny appleseed to state, Yeah, he had
no fiscal legacy to speak of. It is interesting I
think that the obituary from the church did not appear
until two years after he had dined. Yes, it was
much later. Just interesting, and I don't think we know
why it took so long. No that if we do,
(30:10):
I did not find that unless it's just a matter
of things taking a while to get back to them.
And here's another interesting thing about him, which sort of
I also find oddly endearing. He did a little bit
of self mythologizing and promoting in terms of his methods.
He was simultaneously a loner and someone who liked to
(30:32):
talk to people. So he did talk to people, and
he talked to people about himself. He liked to entertain
little children. He would entertain little boys by like, uh,
poking pins into his crazy calloused feet, and he liked
to give presents to uh, to children like he He
was a person who endeared himself to others. People generally
liked him a lot, but the way that he talked
(30:54):
about himself was often it's sort of selective. Like he
he didn't really talk about his many many failed purchases
of land, you know. He talked about being a vegetarian
and spreading the word of God and and planting apple trees,
and so he had sort of made himself into an
easily mythologized person before he became a sort of mythic
(31:19):
character in American history. Even at the time, there were
people pretty well known people who sort of eulogized him.
Either in in speeches or in print. Uh. There was
a reported eulogy by Sam Houston, who was a senator. UH.
That is a little bit suspect. We're not sure if
that really happened or if it's apocryphal. UH. William T.
(31:39):
Sherman is one of the people who allegedly, UH spoke
very highly of Johnny Appleseed later on. Uh. There's also
a lot of reports that he had a really good
relationship with many of the Native American tribes in the frontier,
even when those tribes were really at odds with the settlers. Uh.
(32:00):
And that is one of those oral history things that
we don't really have written substantiation of. But that sort
of the area that he had was, which was he
was friendly with everyone, even when the people he was
friendly with were not friendly with one another. Well, and
I think that either could be that you get into
a chicken or the egg thing where it's like is
that was that because he was always sort of apart
(32:23):
from everyone to some degree that he wasn't anti social,
but he wasn't really, as we said, part of a
you know, social group regularly, So he could kind of
operate between those two because he didn't have obvious allegiance
to anyone um or I mean, did he perpetrate that
and you know, continue that behavior because he recognized that
it was beneficial. We don't know. There was also the
(32:46):
part about how he did seem to you in a
lot of ways because he was not exploiting land. He
was he was sort of tending trees and not wanting
to harm things, and not wanting to harm animals. There's
the idea that he had a good relationship with other
cultures that also had a similar mentality. It's kind of
a misperception that the entirety of Native American history was
(33:08):
all about conserving the land, but that that definitely was
a thread in some tribes, and so that's sort of
a commonality that he had with other people. Also that
that there have continued to be all kinds of other
writings about Johnny Appleseeen. There was an article in Harper's
New Monthly about him in eighteen seventy one that was
extremely lengthy. He was the subject of the poem in
(33:29):
Praise of Johnny Appleseed by Vatchel Lindsay in nine and
he's also been in various other poems and films. Um
Disney has a thing from nineteen forty eight that's about
Johnny Appleseed. It is just wrong. It's completely wrong. Um.
It's one of the things that figures prominently in it
is that he wore a saucepot on his head as
(33:49):
a hat. There is actually one historical account of him
wearing three things on his head as hats simultaneously. In
the middle of them was a saucepan. But I don't
think he wore a saucepan on his head in common practice. UM. So,
if you watch it is a delightful thing to watch,
but it is so incorrect in so many ways. Um.
(34:14):
There are apple apples surviving that are probably descended from
apple trees that he planted. Apple trees don't live hundreds
of years, but because people propagate apple trees by grafting things,
those graphs are clones of the trees that they were
cut off of. So uh, there are some trees in
(34:34):
existence that that probably came from once that he planted.
But a lot of the orchards that were credited to him,
um as far as starting them, were burned down during
the Temperance movement movement because, as we said, apples at
the time were for drinking, not for eating, not as
a delightful Nature's candy treat. So yeah, Johnny apple Tree,
I had no idea of either the depths of his
(34:58):
religious devotion h or the sort of Paul Revere like run.
I didn't know of either of those two things when
I started researching this podcast. I kind of can't stop
thinking about whether or not he actually ran that because
there are people that can run that much. I mean,
they're ultramarathoners out there. Yes, And if he was wandering
around all the time, it's possible. Yes. I read the
(35:18):
book Johnny Appleseed, The Man, the Myth and the American
Story by Howard Means as part of my research for
this podcast. There is so much more information about him
and about the time in that book than we have
gone into today. But one of the things that it
talks about is people trying to just determine whether that
run was possible to have done on foot. Uh, And
the answer is sort of maybe. So yeah, So it
(35:42):
makes sense that I would be sitting here going, I
don't know, he could have done it. Maybe. Hey. Since
these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we have
some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff you've
heard before. If you want to email us, our email
(36:02):
address is History Podcast at houst works dot com, and
you can find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History. You can also find us at
missed in History dot com, and you can visit our
parent company, howst Works, at how stuff works dot com.
(36:22):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com.
Hey, it's time for another Saturday classic. And today we
have somebody who I know Tracy really finds endearing, uh,
and that is Johnny Appleseed, whould think we were both
pretty glad to learn was a real and actual person
and not just a cartoon character or a folk tale,
which is often kind of what we get in terms
of his life. Yes, there are so many things that
I find genuinely endearing about Johnny Appleseed, one of them
(00:24):
being there is a lot of walking in this story,
so much walking, and walking is one of my favorite things.
Before we do get started, I wanted to note that
when this episode originally came out, we heard from a
lot of people about our comments regarding his age when
he died. At the time, the life expectancy was about forty,
which a lot of people wrote into note is because
(00:46):
of childhood mortality skewing that number, And that's true. But
if you live to age five at the time that
he was alive, you still only had a life expectancy
of about fifty five, so he still really was quite old.
So try to grab an apple and we'll get started.
(01:07):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from House
Stuff Works Dot com hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I
(01:27):
am extremely excited about who we're talking about today. Me too.
It's one of those people who is a figure in
American history that some people may believe incorrectly to be mythical,
but was in fact real, and that is Johnny Appleseed. Yeah,
we learned about him as elementary school kids, but we
really only get a very weird, brief sliver of the
(01:47):
reality of his life. Yes, it's a sliver that almost
makes him a caricature of himself. People imagine if if
you say Johnny Appleseed, whether people think he's real or
make believe, probably going to imagine a guy walking around
in rags or skins, barefooted, with a sack full of
apple seeds, sleeping out under the stars and planning his
(02:08):
apple trees and then moving on. Well, I've seen the cartoons.
That's how it is. It's basically accurate. At the same time,
there's a whole much broader element of his life that
had nothing to do uh. Some people think of him
as the first sort of one of the first conservationists.
It's really possible to also look at him as a
(02:28):
very failed capitalist, and we're going to talk about that today.
It's interesting because he's one of those that we don't
really know a whole lot about his early life. No,
we do know that he was born on September seventy
four in Leminster, Massachusetts, and that his parents were Elizabeth
Simon's Chapman and Nathaniel Chapman, and he had an older
sister named Elizabeth. He also had other siblings eventually, um
(02:54):
he had a younger brother named Nathaniel, and his mother
died just a few weeks after Nathaniel was born, and
then the younger Nathaniel sadly also died just after that.
And that was when Johnny was He wasn't quite too
just a toddler. Yes, it's pretty unclear exactly where Elizabeth
(03:14):
and john went at that point. Uh, their father was
serving as one of the Minutemen. He fought at Bunker
Hill and he was not home until see. So they
were living with someone, presumably, but we don't know who.
It's clear that there were relatives in that part of
New England. If you look back far enough into New
England history, pretty much everyone is related to everyone at
(03:36):
some point so they had plenty of relatives in the
area where they lived. We're just not sure who wound
up taking care of them until one when dad came
home uh from from the service. He was released, along
with several other officers, with the description of unsatisfactory management
(03:56):
of the military stores. Uh. He went home without getting
a pension or land, which was often a thing when
you were when you got out of the service, you
would get a pension or land that was sort of
your payment. Um. He got neither of those, but he
did get a year's pay. So some people have looked
at this as kind of evidence that that his dad
(04:17):
was kind of shiftless, right. But at the same time,
the armory itself had outlived its usefulness a little bit,
so it may have been more like a layoff than
a firing for truly bad behavior. Yeah. I think always
here unsatisfactory management. We think there must have been something
dicey going on, but it really could have just been
part of things kind of shutting down naturally as well. Um.
(04:39):
But Nathaniel did remarry. Uh. He married Lisa Cooley and
then the family lived in Long Meadow, which is south
of Springfield, Massachusetts, and it grew and grew. It grew
so much, which is a little bit unfortunate because Nathaniel
was not the greatest with things like money or farming.
But Lisa is uh very often pregnant, and she gave
(05:02):
birth to ten more children between seventeen eighty one and
eighteen oh three. So that's ten children in twenty one
and a half years. That is not, in itself a
surprising number of children for the era. What is a
little more surprising is that they all seemed to have
survived until adulthood. And they were sharing a four hundred
square foot house with an attic for sleeping in tight
(05:23):
it's not a lot of room, uh, And so there
at some point, most likely because of a combination of
a lot of people in a little space, uh, and
the alluring prospect of land that you could get for
cheap out west, and probably not a lot of money
around the house. John and his younger brother Nathaniel, who
(05:46):
was eleven or fifteen at the time, left. The dates
are a little un clear. It was either seventeen ninety
two or seventeen ninety six, depending on yeah the accounts.
Very there's a lot of the accounts vary in this story.
So John was eighteen or twenty two. His half brother
Nathaniel was either eleven or fifteen. They left Massachusetts together
and traveled to western Pennsylvania at some point in that era. Also, uh,
(06:11):
there is a story. It's hard to substantiate a lot
of this because medical records were not very clear at
the time, but there's a story that John was kicked
on the head by a horse at age one, uh
and that the injury was severe enough that he had
to have part of his skull removed to relieve the pressure,
which is a valid treatment for that kind of injury,
(06:32):
but still at the time, that's pretty primitive medical time.
I'm I'm making the scrunched up chills in my spine face.
But right there there are people who attribute his later
eccentricities to having had this injury. That makes sense, but
since it's not well documented, we can't know for sure.
(06:53):
Together they left, I kind of imagine John kind of
going and it's too crowded in here. We have no money.
Let we we can get some land if we go west.
So let's do that. Yeah, And it was, you know,
just beyond the Ohio River was the frontier, and many
people were making their land grabs. They knew that there
was potential property to be hand, but it was very dangerous. Animals, snakes,
(07:17):
other people, a lots other people of every sort. Uh.
They're sort of a perception that the other people threat
was Native Americans who were justifiably uh, defending their land,
but also everyone, yeah, other settlers that were trying to
make their own way and trying to protect what they
perceived as their opportunities. Uh. And so there was also
(07:40):
a lot of illness and injury, presumably some of them
from interactions with other people. And there wasn't really much
in the way of medical care, right in addition to
the fact that the medical care at the time was
was often not sound from a scientific perspective. There just
weren't a lot of doctors on the frontier. There were
a few people who had actual nickel training. So if
(08:01):
you got sick or hurt on the frontier, you might
die of something that in a city would have been
more uh. And they so people and the government were
buy or trade land from the Native Americans and then
turn around and sell it for a huge profit or
divide it up like it was the original flipping model. Uh.
And sometimes Congress would grant businesses the rights to divide
(08:24):
up and dole out the land for money or in
exchange for residency and improvement requirements. So things like orchards
developing orchards uh and that you know was intended to
keep people from flipping from just reselling their stuff really quickly,
like they actually wanted development and progress and not just
(08:44):
money turnovers. Yes, apples themselves were important at a time.
We think of apples today is what we eat in
pies and and just eating them and delicious things to eat.
If you have ever seen the Disney Johnny Appleseed cartoon,
there's a lot of talk about ways to eat apples.
Eating apples was not in the primary concern at a
(09:07):
time at all. Cider was a lot more important. There
would be like little scrubby apples that were kind of
bitter that would be pressed into uh cider or made
into vinegar. A lot of people were planning apples. And
while they could be dried out and stored for the
winter and serve as a source of nourishment, that wasn't
(09:28):
their primary use. The primary use was cider, hard cider
and apple jack. It was about drunkenness. And then it
is important to just take that that moment to note
that I think we a particularly American school children are
taught like that. He sort of brought apples to the world.
It was like, look at this wonderful thing I can
bring you, But in fact everyone was trying to grow
(09:50):
apples right one. They weren't really that wonderful at that point.
They were kind of gross to eat that they did
not taste very good. They were not the big juicy
anything supermarket. There were lots of other apple people and
lots of lots of other orchard people. Uh. His personality
and things that he did just make him particularly memorable
in the world of orchard planting in those days of
(10:14):
the Frontier. He was also just he had a knack
for figuring out where people were going to go next.
So he would get seeds from Pennsylvania in the winter
by picking through the refuse at the cider presses. He
would sort of pick through, uh, this pulpy stuff that
was left over after they made cider. He would gather
up all these seeds and then he would head west
(10:37):
and he would plant the seeds. He would use um
the brush he had cleared and possibly other brush to
make offense to keep animals out, and then he would
go away. And when people made it into that territory
that year, the following year there would already be apple
seedlings growing on the land which they could buy from Chapman.
(11:00):
Uh So he was a stute in that regard. He
was super stute in that regard. Had he actually turned
that into a business model, Well, in a way he
did turn it into a that was sort of his
business model, but he didn't really care about money. It
was more of an apple making model than a money
making model. Right. He gave a lot of seedlings away. Basically,
(11:22):
if you were moving on to land that you were
hoping to make your own and you could not afford
your apple seedlings, Johnny Apples would give them to you.
He also if he saw horses that were being mistreated,
he would buy them from you and then put them
out to pasture. So endearing, he was very endearing. He
just I read a book that we'll talk more about
at the end of the podcast. In this and and
(11:45):
the writer compared him to Andrew Carnegie, except that Andrew
Carnegie amassed wealth and then gave it away, and Johnny
applese just gave away all the wealth as he got it,
so he never actually had a lot because he was
giving it all away, no accumulation. Kind of charming, but
not really effective if your goal is actually to own anything,
(12:05):
which apparently wasn't his goal, and if it was, his
goaling didn't do it very well. Uh. We don't really
know his exact route through that part of the world.
We sort of know generally that he went from New
York into Pennsylvania and then started moving into Ohio and Indiana. Uh.
Several people have tried to kind of recreate the route
(12:26):
that he followed um, with varying success. There's not a
lot of actual documentation surviving about his life at the time. Well,
and even the documentation is largely based on word of mouth,
so it's accuracy is not verifiable. It's it's yes. And
in some cases we know that the people who were
supplying these oral accounts were not necessarily all that trustworthy
(12:47):
as historians, because a lot of the travel that he
was doing was ahead of the the influx of settlers. Uh,
there weren't really roads. It would be sort of hard going.
A lot of the actual written detail that we have
comes from trading post ledgers, and one of the first
(13:09):
of these is in sev in Warren, Pennsylvania, at which
point John and Nathaniel were recorded to be there to
buy things. Some of the things that he bought included
a spike gimlet, which is a tool that he could
have used for all kinds of things out on the frontier.
It was a very multi use tool. He also bought books, cheese,
and sun drees and that truly all you need give
(13:32):
your books in your cheese. Man. If I had books
and cheese, I would be set. So yeah, he that's
we know that he was in Warren at that time.
There are other trading post ledger records of his movements,
but not enough to really piece together. This is exactly
how he traveled and when, and there is some belief
that his first orchard was actually near Warren on the
(13:53):
Allegheny River. Warren was very small, not having great luck.
A storm had knocked down all the trees, a fire
or burned up all the dead wood, and then the
relationship between the settlers and the Native Americans in the
area got really hostile. It was not really the most
welcoming or perfect place. There was pretty much one person
(14:13):
living there when they got there. Uh that was Dan
McKay or McQuay. He worked for the Holland Company, which
was one of the agencies that was dividing up and
selling off land. UM. He may have employed the Chapman
Brothers to kind of guard the land against squatters and
timber thieves, but it's a little unclear whether he was
(14:35):
actually working for this man or or if they just
knew each other. Um. But according to writings of Lancing
Wetmore UH and the Warren Ledger, john eventually picked a
location for a nursery in Uh. This is another example
of we don't really know how accurate this person's report was.
He was a lawyer and a judge and was pretty
(14:57):
well respected at the time, but he was also really
fond of a good story. Um. And we know from
other accounts that there are things that he got completely wrong,
so it discredits his discredits him a little telling a
little bit. But probably the first orchard that Johnny apples
he planted was near Warren, Uh sometime around so we
(15:19):
know Johnny wanted land, and he did buy plenty of land,
but he didn't stay on it to fulfill the terms
of his claims or claim jumpers got in there and
took it from him, right. Uh, So he had skill
and you know, acumen for planting things, but not so
much with the patients. No, he didn't stick through with things.
He would sign nine year leases on stuff and then
(15:41):
either not pay the bills or not fulfill the residency
requirements to keep that lease. So there he did a
lot of getting land and then the land would fall
out of his hands. Um. He was also choosing the
hardest way to grow apples. Uh. The an easier way
to grow apples is to graft cuttings of apples to
root stock, and that's pretty much how apple cultivation happens.
(16:04):
Now what he was doing because he felt that it
was kinder on the plants and that it was in
fact wicked to cut up plants to graph them onto things.
What he was doing was planting seeds. That is, there's
a number of reasons why that is not the best
way to cultivate apples. Yeah, I mean, I have done
some apple seedlings, and they are difficult, and they don't
(16:25):
bear fruit often very well for a long time. They
tend to grow so big that it's hard to harvest
from them, and it takes them a very long time
to actually put out apples, and then the apples that
they do put out. It's really a mix of what
you're going to get. Apple seeds are pretty cool because
they're heterozygous, so they have the code, the genetic code
(16:47):
for all kinds of different apples in one seed. You
don't really know which of those jeans are going to
express when the tree is growing, so you might plant
seeds from a delicious apple and get disgusting apples. There
are so many factors that go into something like that,
from like the soil pH you know what kind of
winters and summers it has when it's young, like if
(17:09):
it has a drought, that will affect what is produced.
So it is it's a very unpredictable and difficult way
to get fruit, right. But on the other side of that,
seeds are a lot more flexible and when you can
plant them. You can really only graft in the spring,
but you can plant seeds sort of nine months out
of the year. Uh. And because of what we said before,
(17:29):
those little bitter, very tough tart apples were in high
demand for making vinegar and cider, and also those things
were in demand because vinegar was considered to be medicinal
uh And because out on the frontier there was not
a lot to do. People were very interested in drinking,
so it didn't matter so much if you produce delicious
(17:49):
fruit now, just as long as you were producing something
that could be used in some way to make vinegar cider. Yes,
uh so some he sold, as you said, and some
he gave way. I also wonder, going back to his
various pieces of property, how many people just inherited, you know,
predeveloped apple because because he just abandoned the spot. There
(18:12):
are a lot of records that survive, whether it's because
bookkeeping with sloppy or just you know, time has kind
of erased some of the German documents. But the oral
history it's pretty unanimous in that if you couldn't afford trees,
he would just give them to you. And the lack
of records is a problem in terms of tracking many things.
(18:35):
You know, his sale of seedlings, his land, his forfeits
of the land, whether or not, and this is getting
into some interesting elements of the story. He was actually
a minister or a missionary of the Church of New Jerusalem.
The Church of the New Jerusalem is a church that
people may not have heard of now. It was also
(18:57):
known as the New Church, and it was based on
Swedish mint mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was a popular religious
figure for about a hundred years following his death in
seventeen seventy two. The Swedenborg sect was really intellectual. He
wrote volumes and volumes and volumes about his divine revelations
and his spiritual thought. He was very specific about things.
(19:20):
A lot of religious writing can be kind of general
in describing what God is like or what Heaven is like,
and he was really down to the details and described
his religious visions in extreme detail. Uh. And he was
also very influential. Some of the notable people who were
influenced by him include William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Garta, Carl Young,
(19:44):
William but earlier Yates, Walt Whitman who I love, and Emerson.
So he was a very influential writer at the time.
He had a really strong streak of intellectualism. Um his
with the church that was founded on his teaching, which
was known as the New Church, had sort of areas
of the United States that was developing at the time
(20:06):
that where that was extremely popular, and it was also
very different from a lot of the other church going
that was happening on the frontier, which was much more
about tent revivals and that sort of thing. And this
was a much thinkier sort of religion, and Johnnie Appleseed
embraced it, he really did. He actually started preaching the
(20:26):
New Church teachings while he traveled about. So when he
was in Ohio and he would take shelter with people,
he would bring them the good news straight from Heaven. Yes. Uh.
In eighteen twenty nine, a fundamentalist preacher named Adam Paine
actually asked the crowd, where is your barefoot pilgrim now?
And John Chapman, dressed in rags with unkempt hair, held
up a foot and said, here he is, yes, which
(20:48):
is so charming. And that's sort of an example of
the intersection between the more tent revival esque religion that
was pretty common in a lot of that area at
the time. And and then John Chapman he was really
an outsider and a loner and not like that at all.
Um He also he definitely was not operating in isolation.
The New Church knew that he was around and knew
(21:10):
that he was spreading their teachings UM. Because he appears
in reports of the New Church and in other writings
from the church starting in around eighteen seventeen, so he
was a known figure to the church as part of
this whole religious focus. He was a vegetarian, and he
was celibate, as in our recent episode about Marjorie Kemp,
(21:30):
though he did have spiritual relationships with people who were
not physically present. So he was having what we're going
to call spiritual intercourse um with the spirits of two
deceased women who were to He was told in a
vision that they were going to be his companions in
the afterlife. This is also something that Swedenborg wrote about
in his writings. Yeah, apparently he had apparently hoped to
(21:53):
propose to Nancy Tannehill, but she was already engaged. That's
one of those stories that exists about his life that
is sort of one person's word, and we don't really
know if that's a true story, but we do know
that he never got married. He was reported to be
celibate for his whole life. UM. I don't know if
if the Nancy Tannehill story is a true story or not,
(22:13):
but it is a thing that somebody said about him
at one point, it's a it's a side note in
the story of his relations with women and with his religion,
since those all sort of uh, they contradict each other
a little bit. Yes, and now we're getting to an
era that has often talked about in history but not
necessarily relation to him, which is a War of eighteen twelve. Yes,
(22:35):
he was really skilled at walking, like he that's walking
was something, and he was just great at and he
he was reported too often not wear shoes, and he
walked so much that his feet had these leather like calluses.
And because he was so good at walking around and
because he knew the territory so well, settlers sometimes would
hire him to kind of keep an eye on things
(22:57):
as tensions were starting to grow leading up to the
Or of eighteen twelve. UM. At least one time he
either falsely or mistakenly raised the alarm about incoming troops
who were going to attack, when it they were actually
American troops troops UM. In spite of that, or maybe
because this story had not reached where he was, he
(23:20):
did have a very Paul Revere's Ride esque race for
help that he reportedly undertook. Uh in September of eighteen twelve,
colonel named Colonel Kratzer was going to remove the Native
American population from southwest Ohio. He convinced a preacher named
James Compass, who the Native Americans they're trusted, to help
(23:42):
him move them, like remove them from their homes. He
did this by saying that he didn't want bloodshed, he
just wanted to take these people under the protection of
the government. Uh. The reverend believed him and and convinced
the people in this one village to move. The response
of the colonel's troops then was to set their homes
(24:03):
on fire. And this sparked a lot of problems, understandably
because that was a terrible thing to do. Uh. There
were acts of revenge on both sides. It's kind of
a long and drawn out story, but there was you know,
the one side would ambush another side, and then the
other side would retaliate, and then on an unfortunate fallout
(24:24):
from that, a young person would wind up being killed.
It's a very kind of long and convoluted story. But
it became clear that things were getting very bad and
that a full scale attack was incoming, and people were
very worried and and We're basically like, we need back up,
and Johnny apple Seed volunteered to be that backup or
(24:45):
to go for that backup. Um. According to the lore,
he ran bareheaded and barefooted, leaving at sunset and running
through the night, running a distance that was effectively a
marathon there and a marathon back. Holly might know about
how hard that would be. Um. It's actually more likely
that he was on horse. But the story is that
he was on foot running and he would raise the
(25:07):
alarm at farms and homesteads that he passed on the way. UM,
as he ran to a fort at Mount Vernon to
get help and to raise the alarm. This whole story
probably has a fair amount of it's been mythologize. It's
definitely been mythologized. Um. It does appear to be a
historic thing that actually happened. Probably he was not running
(25:28):
on foot the whole time. UM, But that really started
to solidify him as a mythic figure even at the time,
not just now, even though now that that's a story
that maybe people outside of that region of the United
States haven't heard about. But he was becoming a mythic
figure even while he was alive. Well, that was probably
aided by the fact that he was a little bit,
(25:50):
as you said, kind of an odd fellow. He wasn't
really a mainstream society kind of guy, so he already
had a bit of a mystique in all likelihood, and
then that combined with some of these sort of amazing
tales of his doing that really is fertile ground to
create a mythology around someone. Yes, he was very odd
and very memorable, and usually because of his pattern of
(26:11):
moving around, he would move into a place before a
lot of people were there, he would do things that
were memorable, and then the population would start to move
into this area where he previously had been and had
already made a name for himself, and they would sort
of hear these Johnny Appleseed stories. Um. So he had
a pretty huge reputation, uh in the era in which
he lived and in the years afterward, and that has
(26:35):
continued today. People don't necessarily know all these other aspects
of him, but they most people have heard of Johnny
Applesee before. Yeah, and I mean he's got the name
Johnny Appleseed and John Chapman soon. So in eighteen o five,
his family, um had moved to Duck Creek, Ohio, and
(26:57):
they were in really rough financial situation. UH. But there
isn't evidence of whether or not John reunited with them.
He was kind of a loner, as we had said,
even from the church, even though he supported it and
spread their teachings. He wasn't really you know, attending socials
or attending regular right and they're writing about him. Started
(27:17):
to fall off as he got later in his life
and maybe increasingly odd in his behavior. UM. So we
don't really know if he was on good terms with
his family when he died. We we don't really know
if he had any close relationships at that point. UM.
But he did die peacefully, but of illness at the
age of seventy at the home of William Worth in
(27:41):
His home was north of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that
was in March of eighteen forty five. UM. The official
accounts at the time kind of vary in their specific dates,
but generally recognized that sometime in the middle of March. UH.
The cause was known as winter plague, and that was
sort of a catch out term for various diseases that
people tended to get more in the winter. UH. There
(28:02):
was an obituary that ran on March eighteen forty five
and the Fort Wayne Sentinel. And what is kind of
striking to me about his death at the age of
seventy is that the life expectancy at the time was
a little over forty. So he was very, very old
when he passed away. So not at all surprising that
a man of that advanced age would succumb to winter plague.
(28:23):
I mean, we know, even in modern times, the elderly
are you know, at greater risk of even you know,
pretty minor illnesses that younger people could live through. So
to have been seventi is pretty impressive, especially when you
consider that he spent most of his time wandering around
in the woods, you know what I mean. It wasn't
like he lived a life of luxury and comfort with
(28:44):
every possible you know, cleanliness applied to his universe well,
and not even luxury and comfort, but just basic medical
care and having a home. He didn't really have any
of that. He did own some things when he died,
and among his effects after his death, uh he had
a gray mayor, uh, several parcels of land, an orchard
(29:05):
of two thousand apple trees, and various other things. Uh.
Some of the land got sold off to pay the
back taxes on that land because he had not paid it,
which is not surprising um. And then the remainder of
his possessions were sold off for a total of four
hundred and nine dollars, which would come to about nine
thousand dollars today. But pretty much all of that money
went to paying off various things that he had owed
(29:27):
during his life. Some of these claims might have been true,
and some of them might have been false, but there
were people who claims to who have to have provided
him room and board in his later life. He definitely,
as as his m O was kind of to get land,
plant things, and leave. He definitely did owe money on things.
So by the time all of that was was taken
(29:48):
care of, there was really no money left In the
John Chapman's last Johnny appleseed to state, Yeah, he had
no fiscal legacy to speak of. It is interesting I
think that the obituary from the church did not appear
until two years after he had dined. Yes, it was
much later. Just interesting, and I don't think we know
why it took so long. No that if we do,
(30:10):
I did not find that unless it's just a matter
of things taking a while to get back to them.
And here's another interesting thing about him, which sort of
I also find oddly endearing. He did a little bit
of self mythologizing and promoting in terms of his methods.
He was simultaneously a loner and someone who liked to
(30:32):
talk to people. So he did talk to people, and
he talked to people about himself. He liked to entertain
little children. He would entertain little boys by like, uh,
poking pins into his crazy calloused feet, and he liked
to give presents to uh, to children like he He
was a person who endeared himself to others. People generally
liked him a lot, but the way that he talked
(30:54):
about himself was often it's sort of selective. Like he
he didn't really talk about his many many failed purchases
of land, you know. He talked about being a vegetarian
and spreading the word of God and and planting apple trees,
and so he had sort of made himself into an
easily mythologized person before he became a sort of mythic
(31:19):
character in American history. Even at the time, there were
people pretty well known people who sort of eulogized him.
Either in in speeches or in print. Uh. There was
a reported eulogy by Sam Houston, who was a senator. UH.
That is a little bit suspect. We're not sure if
that really happened or if it's apocryphal. UH. William T.
(31:39):
Sherman is one of the people who allegedly, UH spoke
very highly of Johnny Appleseed later on. Uh. There's also
a lot of reports that he had a really good
relationship with many of the Native American tribes in the frontier,
even when those tribes were really at odds with the settlers. Uh.
(32:00):
And that is one of those oral history things that
we don't really have written substantiation of. But that sort
of the area that he had was, which was he
was friendly with everyone, even when the people he was
friendly with were not friendly with one another. Well, and
I think that either could be that you get into
a chicken or the egg thing where it's like is
that was that because he was always sort of apart
(32:23):
from everyone to some degree that he wasn't anti social,
but he wasn't really, as we said, part of a
you know, social group regularly, So he could kind of
operate between those two because he didn't have obvious allegiance
to anyone um or I mean, did he perpetrate that
and you know, continue that behavior because he recognized that
it was beneficial. We don't know. There was also the
(32:46):
part about how he did seem to you in a
lot of ways because he was not exploiting land. He
was he was sort of tending trees and not wanting
to harm things, and not wanting to harm animals. There's
the idea that he had a good relationship with other
cultures that also had a similar mentality. It's kind of
a misperception that the entirety of Native American history was
(33:08):
all about conserving the land, but that that definitely was
a thread in some tribes, and so that's sort of
a commonality that he had with other people. Also that
that there have continued to be all kinds of other
writings about Johnny Appleseeen. There was an article in Harper's
New Monthly about him in eighteen seventy one that was
extremely lengthy. He was the subject of the poem in
(33:29):
Praise of Johnny Appleseed by Vatchel Lindsay in nine and
he's also been in various other poems and films. Um
Disney has a thing from nineteen forty eight that's about
Johnny Appleseed. It is just wrong. It's completely wrong. Um.
It's one of the things that figures prominently in it
is that he wore a saucepot on his head as
(33:49):
a hat. There is actually one historical account of him
wearing three things on his head as hats simultaneously. In
the middle of them was a saucepan. But I don't
think he wore a saucepan on his head in common practice. UM. So,
if you watch it is a delightful thing to watch,
but it is so incorrect in so many ways. Um.
(34:14):
There are apple apples surviving that are probably descended from
apple trees that he planted. Apple trees don't live hundreds
of years, but because people propagate apple trees by grafting things,
those graphs are clones of the trees that they were
cut off of. So uh, there are some trees in
(34:34):
existence that that probably came from once that he planted.
But a lot of the orchards that were credited to him,
um as far as starting them, were burned down during
the Temperance movement movement because, as we said, apples at
the time were for drinking, not for eating, not as
a delightful Nature's candy treat. So yeah, Johnny apple Tree,
I had no idea of either the depths of his
(34:58):
religious devotion h or the sort of Paul Revere like run.
I didn't know of either of those two things when
I started researching this podcast. I kind of can't stop
thinking about whether or not he actually ran that because
there are people that can run that much. I mean,
they're ultramarathoners out there. Yes, And if he was wandering
around all the time, it's possible. Yes. I read the
(35:18):
book Johnny Appleseed, The Man, the Myth and the American
Story by Howard Means as part of my research for
this podcast. There is so much more information about him
and about the time in that book than we have
gone into today. But one of the things that it
talks about is people trying to just determine whether that
run was possible to have done on foot. Uh, And
the answer is sort of maybe. So yeah, So it
(35:42):
makes sense that I would be sitting here going, I
don't know, he could have done it. Maybe. Hey. Since
these episodes that we're sharing our past classics, we have
some updated information that will supersede the contact stuff you've
heard before. If you want to email us, our email
(36:02):
address is History Podcast at houst works dot com, and
you can find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History. You can also find us at
missed in History dot com, and you can visit our
parent company, howst Works, at how stuff works dot com.
(36:22):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com.
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