Some people have an uncanny sense of direction and could easily do that. I, on the other hand, get lost in my own neighborhood.
I was curious about this too. It wouldn’t even be dishonest. How would they even know that the trees even belonged to someone? I suspect that they were planted remotely just a short-ish hike away so they were unlikely to be found.
Thanks for a fascinating column.
I had a friend whose father was a preacher, and who convinced me to go to a few “church school” nights where games would be played and hot dogs served. This included being told a few stories and singing a song before eating.
Oh, the Lord is good to me.
So I’ll be good to the Lord
For giving me the things I need
The Sun. And the rain. And the Appleseed.
The Lord is good to me.
Johnny Appleseed.
(Bang glass on table twice).
The idea of (mustard) seeds has obvious religious symbolism. I learned from your column why religious groups might keep alive this memory, and find the idea of natural deism likely. But part of the reason for the popularity is simply this, that it is a cool sounding name. And if cider was a safer and less problematic alternative to harder liquor, what’s not to like from a religious perspective? Even Ned Flanders likes cider!
I’ll add to the voices declaring this a fascinating entertaining and informative column.
Perhaps you missed the bit in the column where it said he fenced off the land where he planted his apple seeds?
And yeah, probably some settlers did just steal his trees, despite the fences. But with Chapman’s modest lifestyle, it didn’t take many honest folks to keep him in business.
Very interesting indeed. Maybe I missed it, but the story I heard was, back then there were no liquor stores or bars everywhere. And the easiest to produce alcohol, for even the rank amateur was hard cider. A process the peoples doing the settling were very familiar with. Yes, beer and wine would come. But if it’s just you and you fancy a drink, apples are the quickest path to alcohol.
So, Johnny was really just assuring that whoever followed, or, if he was by this way again, hard cider could be had!
I can’t even remember how long ago someone offered me this explanation. I was much younger then, and I immediately thought it made a lot more sense than the story they told us in school.
Now even more possibilities to consider. Very interesting indeed!
I’d always understood that grapes were the easiest to turn into alcohol, because they naturally had the right sugar-to-water ratio?
Apple juice turns to cider on is own, like grape juice turns to wine. It doesn’t get as strong, as it starts with less sugar. But it takes no skill to make tasty cider.
And remember that cider was generally safe to drink, when water might not be.
Quick to make cider tastes pretty good. Grapes WILL make alcohol as quickly, but the drinkability of early wine is pretty harsh. It takes weeks to months to reach pleasant I think.
If you go to YouTube and enter Johnny Appleseed: American Weirdo you will get a video listing from a guy named Max Miller who has a historical cooking show. I LOVE his shows, and this gives some more baskground info on Johnny.
Really enjoyed this column and learned new things. Thanks, Cecil!
Grapes turn to alcohol pretty readily, but most of the world’s wine is made from vitis vinifera varieties, which were not introduced successfully into Mr. Appleseed’s stomping grounds until many years later. Folks on the frontier would have had access to native grapes in the area, though. Grapes like Niagara, Catawba, or Concord. Given the choice between wine made from concords or cider, I’d choose the cider every time.
This.
On a larger scale, that’s how new varieties are developed. Let some plausible parents pollinate, plant a whole lot of seeds, plant out a whole lot of saplings, cull them as defects are found; hope to wind up with one or a few that are better than what’s already on the market.
That thick bitter skin was an effective defense mechanism. All the various other things besides humans that want to bite apples didn’t want to bite that one any more than the people did.
Johnny Appleseed: 1774 - 1845 (source, Cecil’s OP.)
Concord grape: deliberately bred in 1849.
Concord Grape Association: History .
Niagara grape: deliberately bred in 1868.
niagara grape history - Google Search …
Catawba grape: the only one old enough to overlap, dating to the early 1800’s; and possibly not deliberately bred, but probably a cross between the native grapes and imported varieties.
Pennsylvania Wine School: What is a Catawba? | Pennsylvania Wines .
The fully native grapes are generally small, seedy, and sour. The terminology can get confusing, though, because the term “native” grapes can also mean grape varieties bred in the country they’re primarily grown in, though their ancestors may have come from elsewhere.
Yeah, couldn’t you see my sarcasm? My guess is the skin was tough enough that it was mechanically hard for insects to pierce it. And the bitterness was probably mildly toxic and protected it as well.
I really liked that apple. It probably wasn’t a great commercial apple, because people want to buy a perfect apple and just bite into it. But again, as a backyard tree, it had a lot to recommend it. Uncle David didn’t spray or do anything else to protect the fruit, and 90% of the apples on that tree were perfect. And after scraping the skin off, with either my pocket knife or my teeth, the flesh was delicious.
Good column, Cecil!
I’m not much of an apple lover, but if Johnny were to have planted banana trees all over the nation (at least in the South), I’d be a fan-boy. And besides, Johnny Bananas has a cooler ring to it—almost mafioso.
And, I’d really be on board if he also started up a bunch of pig farms along his way, because you can never have too much bacon.
Johnny Appleseed has fascinated me for quite a while. It seemed clear to me that he was planting what would become the rootstock for future orchards – later settlers need only pay the grafting man with his collection of grafts of edible apples and you’d have a viable orchard.
But then along comes someone like Michael Pollan (and people quoting him) to say that Chapman was really spreading alcoholic cider, because those extremely heterozygositic apples won’t breed true, and the fruit more than likely would be gnarly and sour and good only for crushing in a cider mill and making apple hooch. And we know that Chapman thought it was even to graft, or even prune his trees.
Except that the people who bought the orchards Chapman planted probably didn’t share his extremist views, and would be perfectly happy grafting new shoots onto that rootstock.
On top of which, there’s evidently one of Chapman’s original apple trees, and you can buy grafts from it (Chapman would be shocked). They’re evidently sweet and good-tasting, and I’ve read about pies being made from them. So the fact is that at least some of Chapman’s “all natural” apples weren’t all unfit for anything but cider.
Except that it’s not really an effective defense mechanism. Apples have big, tasty fruits because they want animals to eat them, because in the process of eating them, we tend to transport the seeds. An apple tree with sweet fruits with tough, bitter skin is wasting all of that valuable sugar for nothing.
Naw, the horses loved them. A person, or a horse or a bear, gets a lot of sweet delicious fruit under that skin. The insect just has a lot of tough skin to cut through.
My understanding is that before Prohibition, everyone drank cider. It’s delicious, and safer than water. And those seedling trees would have been totally useful.
Also, of course some of his trees produced tasty raw fruit. “Apples don’t breed true” doesn’t mean every seedling tree produces sour or bitter fruit, it just means that a lot of them do. And the vast majority produce fruit that’s inferior to the fruit of the select few trees that have been selected to be graded from. But those selected trees all started out as seedlings.
None of this contradicts anything I’ve written. Yes, I know that in early days people drank cider (and small beer) in preference to possibly infected water. And even ungrafted trees could produce edible apples. My beef is with the people claiming that Johnny Appleseed’s apples were ONLY good for cider. This seems to have become the popular line these days.
It’s true that more indifferent farmers just grew seedling apples, and ate the fruit of the tastier ones. It’s also true that even back then, there was a lot of demand for the better apples you could guarantee by grafting. But a lot of the crop went to cider, and only a little of it was eaten fresh. So “only good for cider”? No. But “primarily desired for cider”? Probably.
Also, it’s a shame there’s not more small beer on the market today. It’s really much nicer than the stuff they make that’s better to get drunk on.