The Life of Johnny Appleseed

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

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I

(00:20):
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

(00:41):
reality of his life. Yes, it's a slipper that almost
makes him a caricature of himself. People imagine 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, sleep,
being out under the stars and planning his apple trees

(01:02):
and then moving on. Well, I've seen the cartoons. That's
how it is 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 very

(01:22):
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 his parents were Elizabeth Simon's
Chapman and Nathaniel Chapman. And though he had an older
sister named Elizabeth, he also had other siblings. Eventually, um

(01:47):
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 was pretty unclear exactly where
Elizabeth and john went at that point. Uh, their father

(02:12):
was serving as one of the minutemen. He fought at
Bunker Hill and he was not home until 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
some point, so they had plenty of relatives in the

(02:32):
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 of
the military stores. Uh. He went home without getting a

(02:54):
pension or land, which was often a thing when you
were When you got out of the service, you would
get a pension or end that was sort of your payment. Um.
He gotten either 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 was kind of shiftless, right.
But at the same time, the armory itself had outlived

(03:15):
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 right. Um, But Nathaniel did remarry. Uh. He

(03:35):
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 was very often pregnant, and she

(03:56):
gave birth to ten more children between see and eighteen
o 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 attict for sleeping in. That's tight.

(04:17):
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 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 was

(04:40):
eleven or fifteen at the time, left. The dates are
little n clear. It was either seventeen or seventeen ninety six,
depending on the accounts. Very there's a lot of the
accounts vary in this story, so John was either eighteen
or twenty two. His half brother Nathaniel was either eleven
or fifteen. They left Massachusetts together and trave old to

(05:00):
western Pennsylvania at some point in that era. Also, uh,
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
in the head by a horse at age twenty one,
and that the injury was severe enough that he had
to have part of his skull removed to relieve the pressure,

(05:22):
which is a valid treatment for that kind of injury,
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.

(05:46):
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,
up just beyond the Ohio River was the frontier, and
many people were making near land grabs. They knew that
there was potential property to be hand, but it was

(06:08):
very dangerous. Animals, snakes, 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
h defending their land, but also everyone, yeah, other settlers
that were trying to make their own way and trying

(06:29):
to protect what they perceived as their opportunities. Uh. And
so there was also 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.
In addition to the fact that the medical care at
the time was was often not sound from a scientific perspective.

(06:49):
There just weren't a lot of doctors on the frontier.
There were a few people who had actual medical training.
So if you got stick or hurt on the frontier,
you might die of something that in a city would
have been more pop 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

(07:10):
huge profit or divide it up like it was the
original flipping model. Uh. And sometimes Congress would grant businesses
the rights to divide 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

(07:32):
reselling their stuff really quickly, like they actually wanted development
and progress and not just money turnovers. Yes, apples themselves
were important at the 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

(07:52):
seen the Disney Johnny apple Seed cartoon, there's a lot
of talk about ways to eat apples. Eating apples was
not in the primary concern at the 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

(08:12):
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 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

(08:33):
we petically 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 apples right that 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, yummy things
we find supermarket. There were lots of other apple people

(08:56):
and a 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 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

(09:17):
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 and he would plant the seeds. He would use
um the brush he had cleared and possibly other brush

(09:38):
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. Uh So he was a stute in that regard.
He was super stute in that regard. Had he actually

(10:00):
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,
if you were moving on to land that you were
hoping to make your own and you could not afford

(10:21):
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 the
writer compared him to Andrew Carnegie, except that Andrew Carnegie

(10:42):
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. It's kind of charming,
but not really effective if your goal is actually to
to own anything, which apparently wasn't his goal, and if
it was a goaling didn't do it very well. Uh.

(11:04):
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 that he followed um, with
varying success. There's not a lot of actual documentation surviving

(11:26):
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 as historians.
So because a lot of the travel that he was
doing was ahead of the the influx of settlers, there

(11:50):
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
of these is in seventeen nine seven 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 gemlet, which is a tool that

(12:11):
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 sundries and that truly
need your books in your chief. 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,

(12:34):
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
Allegheny River. Warren was very small, not having great luck.
A storm had knocked down all the trees, a fire
burned up all the dead wood, and then the relationship
between the settlers and the Native Americans in the area

(12:55):
got really hostile. It was not really the most welcome
ing or perfect place. There was pretty much one person
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

(13:17):
Brothers to kind of guard the land against squatters and
timber thieves. But it's a little unclear whether he was
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

(13:37):
location for a nursery in se 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 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 discredits him a little telling a

(13:58):
little bit. But probably the orchard that Johnny apples he
planted was near Warren uh sometime around so we 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

(14:19):
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
either not pay the bills or not fulfill the residency
requirements to 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

(14:41):
the hardest way to grow apples. Uh. The an easier
way to grow apples is to graft cuttings of apples
onto rootstock. And that's pretty much how apple cultivation happens. Now,
what he was doing because he felt that it was
kinder on the plants and that it was in fact
wicked to it up plants to graph them onto things.

(15:02):
What he was doing is planting seeds that 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 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

(15:24):
put out apples, and then the apples that they do
put out. It's really a mix of what you're gonna get.
Apple seeds are pretty cool because they're heterozygous, so they
have the code, the genetic code 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

(15:46):
apple and get disgusting apples. Yeah, 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 it has a drought,
that will effect 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

(16:09):
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, 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

(16:31):
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 fruits, just as long
as you were producing something that could be used in
some way to cider. Yes. Uh so some he sold,
as you said, and some he gave away. I also wonder,
going back to his various pieces of property, how many

(16:53):
people just inherited, you know, predeveloped apple right because it
just never went because he just a and in the spot.
There 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

(17:17):
afford trees, he would just give them to you. And
the lack of records is a problem in terms of
tracking many things. 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

(17:38):
of New Jerusalem. The Church of the New Jerusalem is
a church that people may not have heard of now.
It was also known as the New Church, and it
was based on Swedish men 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

(17:59):
really antellectual. He wrote volumes and volumes and volumes about
his divine revelations and his spiritual thought. He was very
specific about things. 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.

(18:23):
And he was also very influential. Some of the notable
people who were influenced by him include William Blake, Charles Baudelaire,
Garta car Carl Young, 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

(18:43):
streak of intellectualism. UM his with the church that was
founded on his teachings, which was known as the New Church.
UM had sort of areas of the United States that
was developing at the time 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

(19:06):
of thing. And this was a much thinkier sort of religion,
and Johnny Appleseed embraced it, he really did. He actually
started preaching the 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

(19:27):
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 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

(19:47):
John Chapman, who was really an outsider and a loner
and not like that at all. Um he also he
definitely was not operating in isolation that the New Church
knew that he was around and knew 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

(20:08):
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, 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

(20:32):
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 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 and we don't really know if that's
a true story, but we do know that he he

(20:53):
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, but
it is a thing that somebody said about him at
one point. Yeah, 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

(21:15):
a little bit. And now we're getting to an era
that it's often talked about in history but not necessarily
relation to him, which is the War of eighteen twelve. Yes,
he was really skilled at walking, like he that's walking
was something that 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.

(21:37):
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
as tensions were starting to grow leading up to the
War of eighteen twelve. UM. At least one time he
either falsely or mistakenly raised the alarm about incoming troops

(21:58):
who were going to attack, when it they were actually
American troops. UM. In spite of that, or maybe because
this story had not reached where he was, he did
have a very Paul Revere's Ride esque race for help
that he reportedly undertook UH in September of eighteen twelve,

(22:19):
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
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

(22:39):
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
on fire, and this sparked a lot of problems, understandably
because that was a terrible thing to do. Uh. There
were of revenge on both sides. It's kind of a

(23:02):
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
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

(23:25):
very worried and and we're basically like, we need back up,
and Johnny Appleseed volunteered to be that backup or 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

(23:48):
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 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 mythologized.

(24:11):
It's definitely been mythologized. Um. It does appear to be
a historic thing that actually happened. Probably he was not
running unfit 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

(24:34):
figure even while he was alive. Well, that was probably
aided by the fact that he was a little bit,
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

(24:54):
create a mythology around someone. Yes, he was very odd
and very memorable, and usually the because of his pattern
of 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

(25:17):
had a pretty huge reputation, uh in the era in
which he lived and in the years afterward, and that
has continued today. People don't necessarily know all these other
aspects of him, but they most people have heard of
Johnny Appleseed before. Yeah, and I mean he's got the
name Johnny Appleseed and John Chapman. So so in eighteen

(25:37):
o five, his family, UM had moved to Duck Creek, Ohio,
and they were in really rough financial situation. 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

(25:59):
or attending regular right and they're writing about him. Started
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

(26:21):
age of seventy at the home of William Worth in
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 recognize that sometime in the middle of March. UH.
The cause was known as winter plague, and that was
sort of a catch all term for various diseases that

(26:43):
people tended to get more in the winter. UH. There
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.

(27:07):
I mean, we'd 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 seventies 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 every possible you know,

(27:30):
cleanliness applied to his universe, 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 his effects after
his death he had a gray mare, uh, several parcels
of land, an orchard of two thousand apple trees, and

(27:51):
various other things. 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 during his life. Some of these

(28:13):
claims might have been true, when 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 care of, there

(28:33):
was really no money left In the John Chapman's last
Johnny attle Sea 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 now that if we do, I did

(28:55):
not find that unless it's just a matter of things
taking a while to get back to them. Uh. 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 likes to talk

(29:17):
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 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 about

(29:39):
himself was often 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. Uh. But or he became a sort of

(30:02):
mythic 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.

(30:24):
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.

(30:45):
And that is one of those oral history things that
we don't really have written substantiation of that. That sort
of the aura 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

(31:08):
from everyone to some degree, Like 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. Yes. There was also

(31:31):
the 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

(31:52):
was all about conserving the land, but that that definitely
was a threat 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 Appleseen. 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

(32:13):
in Praise of Johnny Appleseed by Batchel lindsay In, and
he's also been in various other poems and films. Um
Disney has a thing from N 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 a hat.

(32:35):
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 con practice. Um.
So if it is a delightful thing to watch, but
it is so incorrect in so many ways. Um. There

(32:58):
are apple or apple holes 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 existence that that probably came from once that

(33:21):
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

(33:42):
of his religious devotion 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
is wandering around all the time, it's possible. Yes. I

(34:02):
read the 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 talked about is people trying to determine whether
that run was possible to have done on foot. Uh,
And the answer is sort of maybe. So yeah, So

(34:26):
it makes sense that I would be sitting here going
I don't he could have done it? Maybe. Do you
also have listener mail? I do have listener mail, and
this listener mail is about an episode that is from
before you or I joined this podcast, UM, which is
probably gonna be a theme that crops up for a
little while. For a little while as we continue to
UH to put out new episodes with the two of

(34:48):
us UM. This one is from Zara or Zara. I
apologize if I said your name wrong, UH, and Zara says,
I really enjoy your podcast, but I hadn't been able
to listen to it for a i'll due to large
amounts of homework. I've been catching up over the past
few days by listening to old episodes as I put
this semester's notes into my computer before mid terms. I

(35:10):
love that listening to the podcast while studying other things
is pretty cool. I was listening to your October episode
on Madam La Lourie when I heard something that reminded
me of my African American Studies class. You mentioned that
a lot of people thought that the La Lori's were
not must not be so bad because their coachman was
always very well dressed and looked well fed and clean.

(35:30):
While I'm sure people used to convince themselves that the
Lo Loris weren't up to anything, that actually wouldn't have
been a very good indicator of how they treated the
rest of their slaves. As slave owners would often take
pride in keeping their coachman particularly well fed, groomed, and dressed.
This wasn't so much because they cared about the coachman,
but because it was a way of showing off how
wealthy they were. Anyway, I thought you might find this

(35:52):
interesting and thanks for all the great listening material. Thank
you so much. That is interesting. That's a great episode too,
and it's also it's fast dating to me to look
at the various things that people use to express their
wealth in previous eras. That is also why we have
sweet tea in theself, because if you could afford ice
and sugar, you must be doing it right right. So yes,

(36:14):
thank you very much for writing to us. If you
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(36:38):
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