What did Johnny Appleseed actually do?
I know what you’re thinking. In an age of global upheaval, existential threats, and outrageously overpriced Taylor Swift tickets, why is your columnist writing about a guy who’s been dead for the better part of two centuries and whose chief claim to fame is that he … planted trees?
I’ll tell you why. Because, to the inquiring mind, Johnny Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, is the most inexplicable figure in American history – a matter worth some study. Around us we see countless individuals striving desperately for power, fame, wealth, or some combination of the three. Chapman sought none of these things and pursued none of the usual routes to glory, yet he’s remembered to this day – and if you think his reputation is fading, try a Web search for “Johnny Appleseed” and see how much comes up.
Chapman held no high office, led no armies, made no discoveries, created no works of art. Setting aside a few incidents and some poorly attested stories, nothing momentous happened in his life. Despite the efforts of a small army of historians, journalists, and researchers, who seem to have turned up every scrap of documentation mentioning the man, little is known about him. He was solitary, never marrying or living anywhere for long. Sociable and by all accounts an entertaining conversationalist, he had many acquaintances but few if any close friends or confidantes. Although articulate and literate – he had beautiful handwriting – he kept no journal, and though he seems to have written letters occasionally, nothing by his hand has survived other than a few promissory notes and such. Most of what we think we know about him was recorded long after the fact.
Despite this – some might say because of it – he became an American icon. One has to ask: how did the guy do it, and what did he actually do?
The question remains controversial to this day. Among the theories: (1) he was a saint – the accepted view in simpler times but out of fashion now; (2) he was one of the chief enablers of frontier boozing in the form of hard cider – the default view currently, from what I can tell; and (3) he didn’t do squat.
We’ll tackle each of these in their turn. As so often in complex cases, it seemed wisest to proceed with a FAQ. We start with this observation: the Johnny Appleseed legend isn’t primarily about apples.
What? Didn’t the guy introduce apple trees to the American frontier?
No. Apple trees were an Old World import carried west by pioneers (and perhaps Native Americans in some cases), but even in the early days Chapman was seldom the first person to plant apple trees in a given area. Settlers in the Midwest – Chapman spent most of his life in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and eastern Indiana – were typically required to plant fruit trees to establish their land claims. Chapman, perennial wanderer that he was, had no interest in staying in one place long enough to start an orchard. Instead he made a business out of anticipating where settlers would head next as the frontier pushed inland, getting there first, clearing and fencing off some land, and scattering some apple seeds. Then he’d head off somewhere else – apple seeds will grow almost anywhere and require minimal tending. When settlers arrived a few years later, he’d return to sell them some apple saplings to plant on their homesteads. Not the world’s most sophisticated business model, but it evidently made him enough to live on and earned him his nickname.
OK, but even if he wasn’t the first guy to show up with apple trees, he provided a lot of the feedstock for later orchards, right?
Right. Richard Price, whose 1954 biography Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth was the first rigorous account of Chapman’s life, lists 35 nurseries he started for which there’s written evidence. “In Ohio and Indiana the traces of … orchards that were started from John Chapman’s stock alone extend over hundreds of square miles,” Price writes.
Still, let’s not get ridiculous. Chapman didn’t provide the makings for all U.S. orchards, or even a significant percentage of them – that’s a myth at least partly attributable to journalistic exaggeration. In an 1871 article in Harper’s magazine that introduced Johnny Appleseed to a national audience, writer W.D. Haley claimed Chapman’s “labors had literally borne fruit over a hundred thousand square miles of territory.” In some quarters this has now morphed into the idea that the man personally planted a hundred thousand square miles of apple orchards – a notion, I regret to say, that found its way into a Straight Dope staff report. Chapman didn’t plant any orchards. He had a nice little business planting and selling apple trees, but he didn’t build a mighty industry out of it, and, to hear some tell it, it wasn’t the main interest in his life.
Which was what?
He was a religious proselytizer. At some point he’d been exposed to the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic who claimed to have received revelations from God, which he described in several books. To promote Swedenborg’s ideas, his followers established the Church of the New Jerusalem, also known as the New Church, an esoteric offshoot of Christianity. The church never gained many adherents but did have a U.S. branch based in Philadelphia, and a few believers made their way west of the Alleghenies. Chapman may have encountered one of these people, or perhaps just read the books, but anyway he got hooked. He preached the good news according to Swedenborg for the rest of his life.
He was literally a preacher?
Missionary would be a better term. He preferred the personal approach. He’d make friends with local settlers, perhaps while selling them trees, and get himself invited over for dinner. He’d entertain the family with tales of his adventures traveling in the woods, then segue into a sermon of sorts, possibly including readings from the works of Swedenborg. At the end of his stay he might leave behind a chapter torn from one of Swedenborg’s books. Much of what we know about Chapman’s habits and personality stems from these humble encounters.
Such as what?
He was famous for his eccentricities. His clothes were shabby even by frontier standards. Sometimes he wore burlap sack for a shirt, with holes cut out for his head and arms, and it’s said he wore a metal pot for a hat, although that may be a fable. He disliked wearing shoes, eating at a table, or sleeping in a bed. He seems to have gotten along well with Native Americans – this in an era when attacks and massacres were common. He was kind to animals – providing pasturage for a lame horse, regretting the accidental killing of a snake.
So how did he get started doing this?
We don’t know. Truth is, we don’t know much of anything about his early life, except that he was born on September 26, 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts – a fact not established until 1935. Intelligent by all accounts, he learned to read and write, then headed out for the territory. One account has him crossing the Alleghenies in a snowstorm in 1799, accompanied by his half-brother. He collected apple seeds for planting from cider mills in western Pennsylvania, spent the middle third of his life in southern Ohio, and the last 20 years or so in eastern Indiana. He died near Fort Wayne in 1845 at the home of some friends, leaving an estate with a cash value of $409 (the equivalent of $9,300 in 2011, according to one biographer), including one nursery with 2,000 apple seedlings on it and another with 15,000. His movements can be traced in a general way through bills of sale, property deeds, and so on, but what exactly he was up to from one day, one year or even one decade to the next nobody can say.
So how did this guy get to be an American icon?
That’s the inexplicable part. At a certain point – certainly after the 1871 Harper’s piece – the myth took on a life of its own. But underneath it all was a real guy, and how the man gave rise to the myth is far from obvious. When you read biographies of Chapman, you keep thinking you’ll get to some watershed moment that explains how an amiable oddball got launched into the pantheon. But it never comes – not while he’s alive, anyway. His biographers, one senses, all asked themselves: what did this guy actually do to warrant his rep?
Price had the easiest job. Johnny Appleseed was then at the height of his fame, having been featured in the 1948 Disney film Melody Time, and Price’s task was simply to separate the man from the myth. But subsequent biographers seeking to make sense of the Johnny Appleseed story have had a tougher time of it. Some attempts:
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Chapman didn’t do jack. That’s the view of David Diamond, whose crotchety takedown appeared in the journal Agricultural History in 2010. Chapman, he contends, did nothing to advance the American apple industry, as evidenced by the fact that he simply planted seeds, a practice shunned by knowledgeable growers. Apples, Diamond reminds us, exhibit extreme heterozygosity, meaning progeny grown from seed bear minimal resemblance to their forebears and generally produce inedible fruit. The only way to ensure an apple variety “breeds true” is grafting, which requires time, patience, and a willingness to stick around and tend the trees, which wasn’t Chapman’s style. All true, but so what? Chapman was the nurseryman who provided the rootstock, not the farmer who planted the orchard. No serious biographer contends otherwise.
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“Johnny Appleseed … was the American Dionysus.” These astonishing words appear in Michael Pollan’s 2001 bestseller, The Botany of Desire, in which a long chapter is devoted to apples and Johnny Appleseed’s contributions thereto. Pollan argues that, since the fruit from Chapman’s seedlings was inedible (see above), it was good only for making hard cider, and thus, just as Dionysus had brought civilization the gift of wine by teaching mortals how to ferment grapes, Johnny Appleseed had given the frontier the makings of a new form of alcoholic revelry. This argument seems to be the prevailing view nowadays – my brother-in-law quoted it back to me the other day – but, meaning no disrespect to Michael Pollan, it’s ridiculous. Hard cider was a frontier staple, and no doubt the fruit of many apple trees descended from Chapman’s saplings went into making it, but it was hardly the only form of alcohol available – corn whisky was considerably stronger – Chapman hadn’t invented it, and it’s silly to argue that an evangelist’s chief motive for selling apple trees was to introduce his listeners to further occasions of sin.
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“By our modern definitions, John Chapman was almost certainly insane.” This comes at the end of an otherwise reasonable biography by Howard Means, Johnny Appleseed – the Man, the Myth, the American Story (2011). Please. Chapman may have been strange, but few thought he was crazy. On the contrary, his 1845 obituary in the Ft. Wayne Sentinel remarked on his “shrewdness and penetration.”
What confounds the modern mind, one suspects, is the religious element, which makes it difficult to square the man with the legend. A sentence from an 1822 account of Chapman’s missionary work in a New Church publication gets to the heart of the matter: “His temporal employment consists in preceding the settlements, and sowing nurseries of fruit trees, which he avows to be pursued for the chief purpose of giving him an opportunity of spreading the doctrines throughout the western country.”
So planting apple trees was just a means to an end.
Exactly. You see the problem this presents. The Johnny Appleseed of legend thinks it’s his mission to bring the gift of apple trees to the frontier. John Chapman, on the other hand, apparently thought the purpose of his life was to evangelize for an obscure religion. Kinda takes the air out of the myth.
So the legend was based on a misunderstanding of what Chapman was actually up to?
Not necessarily, but understanding what he was up to means grappling with the religious angle. Modern biographers, it’s fair to say, don’t know what to make of Swedenborgian doctrine, which seems to have little to do with planting apple seeds. But there’s more of a connection than you might think. A key concept in Swedenborg’s thought is that there are correspondences between the spiritual and material worlds, or, to put it another way, nature is a manifestation of the divine. Romantic artists and transcendentalist philosophers were much taken with this idea, and no great leap is required to think it must have had a big impact on Chapman, who loved the outdoors, spent as much time as he could wandering around in it, and preached the virtues of living in harmony with God’s creations.
Looked at in this light, planting apple trees seems like a fitting day job for a Swedenborgian missionary. “There is sort of an immensity and eternity inherent in the seed of any animal or vegetable,” Swedenborg wrote in one of his books. Did Chapman see it that way? I’m betting he did.
Once you buy that idea, many of Chapman’s apparent eccentricities make more sense. He refused to graft apple cuttings as orchardists did because it contravened the divine plan. He cherished all living creatures, including the ickier ones such as spiders and snakes. He preferred the natural world to creature comforts such as sleeping in a bed. Did that make him the “oddest character in all our history,” as one chronicler put it? Maybe. But you can also make the case that he was a friend to the earth, and if you want to use that to justify his promotion to the immortals, you won’t hear any complaining from me.
– CECIL ADAMS
After some time off to recharge, Cecil Adams is back! The Master can answer any question. Post questions or topics for investigation in the Cecil’s Columns forum on the Straight Dope Message Board, boards.straightdope.com/.
