Short Stuff: Johnny Appleseed

you know. Oh I hate a lazy salute, so uh yeah, I salute you because this is um people think of they hear the words Johnny Appleseed, they hear that name and immediately they think of the Disney version, or they think of folk tale. But Johnny Appleseed was a real dude named John Chapman who planted apple trees. Yeah. It's one of those amazing, awesome myths that turns out to be virtually accurate. Yeah, so it's not a myth at all. No,

not really. I mean, there's only like some stuff about about that legend that are that is somewhat mythical, but really most of it's pretty accurate. It's not like he had like a giant ox or anything that followed him

around that was blue. He was basically I think the thing right, the thing that um that that people usually get wrong in the retelling with with Johnny Appleseed is that he was basically like the world's first flower child, and that he was just basically like kind of trapesing along the frontier at the turn of the from the eighteenth of the nineteenth century, planting trees just because he loved nature. That is not correct. Necessarily, this guy did

love nature. He's a businessman, he was. He was. He did this four like out of a business a sense of business, for sure, but he was not like any kind of um, hard nosed, hard hitting, like I'll come to your house and break your legs kind of businessman. He would never double cross anybody or do something in business that would make someone else suffer. He apparently was well known for never ever reminding someone that they owed

a debt. He believed that the he believed the good Lord would tell that person you need to go Paige, Johnny apples He because you owe him some money, and it really didn't matter anyway if you bothered him, because they knew that they owed the debt. And who was he to go bug somebody and make him feel down you never knew someone was going through. So he was

that kind of business man. And yet even with that mentality, even with that attitude, he had everything he needed in life and more which was not necessarily substantial, because he used to sleep on a bed of leaves and little twig huts that he made of his own construction on the frontier. Well, let's talk about apples for a second. Um. Apples, as far as we know, started out in what we would call Kazakhstan today. They gained a lot of popularity in Rome because they grafted apples and a lot of

fruit trees. If you want them to grow and fruit like you are accustomed to, or like you want them to, you don't plan from seed. You you graph them, which is when you take a stem with a bud on it and through magic, not technique as a gardener, but through magic you uh graph that onto another tree instead of planting from seed, uh and you would get a more reliable outcome, especially in the case of apples, because

apparently growing apples from seed. If you have a wonderful, red, delicious apple and you go spit a seed out into the ground, your it might grow into something and maybe I mean, obviously an apple tree, but it probably will not be a red delicious apple that you can eat. No, there were called spitters. Apples grown from seed were called spitters at least scoring. According to this um the Smithsonian article that we found um because they are way, way sour like. Apples did not used to be like what

we think of apples today. They were very, very sour, at least the one's grown from seeds. There were sour um, and Henry David Thoraux said, did I mention they were sour? Henry David thoros said that they would put a squirrels teeth on edge. It's pretty sour. That's super sour. And I love the way you put it so folksy. And now he was a proto hippie, I'll tell you that. But this these were the trees that Johnny apple Seed was planning. He was planning them from seed um, not

from grafting. And apparently one reason why he planted them from from seed and not grafting was because he was a member of the sweden Borgian church Work Work Work, which UM which kind of held that plants could feel uh, and therefore grafting was inherently cruel because it could conceivably create suffering in the plants. So he grew from seed. Alright,

let's take a break. Oh wow, and we'll we'll come back and we'll talk about why John Chapman wanted to plant all these apples to begin with from seed right after this. All right, So Mr Chapman was from Ohio, and uh, it's it's funny. We don't know a lot about his early years. He was born in actually born in Massachusetts, but kind of lived his life in Ohio, I think, uh for the most part, and which was the west at the time, which is funny. And said,

all right, here's the deal. The Ohio company associate said, all right, you want to go out west and settle. If you want to form a permanent homestead beyond Ohio, then you can get it. You can get a hundred acres. But what you have to do, though, is you have to plant fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees in three years. Um. I guess it's an incentive to make the land rich with with plants. Well, also to show that you planned to be there in a few years

when these things started bearing fruit. It was it was a way to show that you meant to settle there permanently. I guess, well, yeah, but it was it's not like build a house. I mean it it had an agricultural benefit. I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess that would

have been part of it then too. Yeah. So he says, all right, he sees a business opportunity, and he's like, if I can start heading west from Pennsylvania and I can get just ahead of these settlers and plant these things, like claim this land and plant these trees and these orchards, then I can turn around and sell them at a much higher value. Yeah, because he improved the land. He was the first squatter kind of in a way, I guess.

But the other thing that I saw he did too was he would establish nurseries in the area as well. So if if you didn't buy attractive land that he had already developed, you could also still just come and buy his trees from him. Um. And he did this for decades, going up and down the frontier, because the frontier kept kept growing further and further west. And at first, I mean when he when he first embarked out, and I mean we're talking Ohio. Ohio was the frontier there

was there was no United States beyond that. I don't think Ohio was even a state quite yet. So he's walking up and down these unsettled lands, um like growing these orchids, planning apple trees, and then also creating nurseries. But at the same time too, he was also serving as a liaison between these incoming settlers and the Native Americans who know now suddenly had neighbors, whether they wanted

them or not. UM And he apparently uh spent a lot of time learning the languages of the different tribes that he encountered, and they grew to trust him, and so he became an advocate for the settlers, but also was able to advocate for the Native Americans too. He was just that kind of a guy. He was that he was that that's kind of the cut the cloth he was cut from. I bet he put his mouth around a piece piper too, speaking of one of the

first hippies. Uh, all right, So he's going around, he's planting all these apple orchards and I guess presumably peach because he was required to. But he's not known as Johnny Peachtree. No, just apple seed or peach seed, I guess. Uh. And he Here's the thing though, with these apples, like we said, because he's planning them from seed only and not grafting them. It's pretty wild, like it's like the wild West. Apple wise, you don't know what's gonna come up.

Um many times, like you said, they're much too sour to eat, But what they weren't too sour for is to make booze out of them in the form of cider. And cider was a big, big part of frontier life. Like they drank it. It's apparently, um New Englanders that transplanted out on the western edges of Ohio would drink

close to eleven ounces of hard cider per day. And it was a time when water quality was suspect, and you knew you could count on that cider, right because I mean it's alcoholic, so it's fermented, which means that any harmful bacteria has been killed. It can't really survive in an alcoholic drink, right, It's wonderful, So they would drink cider instead of water, which, by the way, eleven ounces is it's like a bottle of cider today. No it's not not too much, No it's not. But everyone

drank it every day. Instead of water. So there was you know, a certain amount of buds going on, I'm sure, and who knows what the alcoholic content of the cider, right, but that was I mean, that was what apples were used for. Um. I think Michael Pollan said that up until prohibition, an apple in the United States had a much greater chance of being turned into hard cider than

it did it just being eaten. And again it was because most apples in the US were grown from seed, meaning they were sour, meaning they were much better or for cider than they were for eating, right, And that's how it was again up until prohibition. And one of the reasons why cider just kind of went away is because prohibition. Apparently the Feds used to chop down apple trees where they saw him to kind of say, no, you're not gonna make any cider out of this, you

hay seed hick. You got it. I'm gonna cut down this tree right in front of your face, right exactly. Uh. You like cider, Yeah, I love it? Yeah, Yeah, it's great stuff. Um. My initial introduction to cider was you know, really sweet, like I guess the first wave of the resurgence, like back in college in those days, what was the one that everyone drank would chuck? Yeah, that was it. Yeah, it was basically the zema of cider, at least back then.

I haven't had it in a while, so maybe they kind of I don't know, so that's what I'm saying. They may have toned it down just regular hard cider. Oh yes, And it's not supposed to be it's it was never supposed to be sweet. That was just a weird anomally. So I think the cider now is much closer to the traditional citer, which is it's it's got like a deadbit of sweetness to it, but it's it's definitely a lot more um beery than than apple juicy. I'm gonna have to dip my toe in the cider

pond once again. Do not do that, Just drink it. Uh what else we have? Do we have anything else? In this guy? Johnny Appleseed? Um No, I think I mentioned he was a sweet businessman. He was a friend to the Native American and the European settler check and check he uh oh. There's supposedly a tree in Nova,

Ohio on a farm. It's a hundred and seventy five year old tree, and some people believe that it is the last remaining tree that can be found that Johnny Chapman a k a. Johnny Appleseed actually planted, because again the prohibition federalis chopped all his other stuff down. So that's Johnny Appleseed. Everybody, Drink it up. If you want to get in touch with us, send us an email. You can do worse than that. Just send it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.