John Chapman Johnny Appleseed Easy English News Paper
Nosotros larn as children that Johnny Appleseed spread the gospel of the apple throughout the Midwest. But how did John Chapman, the actual (strange, possibly insane) person behind the legend, become this virtuous borderland character?
It took a good century after Chapman's death to fully root out his truthful biography, William Kerrigan explains in "The Invention of Johnny Appleseed." Born in Massachusetts in 1774, Chapman planted his first orchard on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1790s. For virtually of the first half of the 19th century, he tramped around Ohio and Indiana, where his anarchistic ways gave birth to plenty of alpine tales.
And those tall tales grew like apple tree orchards. "Johnny Appleseed" made his first major appearance in 1871, decades after Chapman'south decease in 1845, in Harper's Monthly via W.D. Haley, an abolitionist-turned-family subcontract crusader for the Patrons of Husbandry, also known equally the Grange movement. Haley historic the "religion, hope, charity, and allegiance" of economically-battered mail service Ceremonious War Midwestern farms and thought Chapman embodied the "values of piety, frugality, and clemency championed by the Grange." Haley's Johnny Appleseed was such a good guy he wouldn't hurt a serpent or an Indian.
Rosella Rice, who had met Chapman when she was a girl, added to the growing myth. Kerrigan notes how Rice and Haley freely copied each other in painting "a kind of magical Santa Claus responsible for almost all the apples trees planted across Ohio." The myth was farther solidified by a Lydia Marie Child verse form in 1881. Johnny Appleseed had get the gentler avatar of the American origin myth, an anti-Daniel Boone. People who remembered the actual Chapman complained nearly this sentimental hogwash, only to no avail. This was an "American creation story" equally Kerrigan says, with Appleseed as a sort of frontier St. Francis of the Apples, a "benign symbol to use to gloat the process of American empire-edifice."
According to Kerrigan, still, Chapman's Fort Wayne Sentinel obituary paints a different story. The obit described Chapman every bit "well known through this region by his eccentricity and atypical garb." That included a "coarse coffee sack" with a hole for his neck and the waists of 4 pairs of pants "shingled" 'round him. Chapman was a footloose nurseryman and promoter of both apples and the teachings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. In fact, the very first notice of Chapman was English, from a 1817 report by the Manchester Swedenborgian society on proselytizing efforts in America. As it happened, Chapman was a star evangelist for the Church of the New Jerusalem. "Johnny Appleseed" mythology ignores the cultish Swedenborgism and the eccentricity of dress, wandering, and homelessness, along with the expanding frontier'southward displacement and destruction of Native American communities.
Of course, myths are always products of their time, equally Kerrigan shows by tracing the Appleseed legend through its many incarnations as Popular Front icon in the 1930s, Cold War hero in the 1950s, 1960's proto-hippie, and Reagan-era entrepreneurial genius in the 1980s, was well as environmentalist, friend of the natives, and gimmicky tourist magnet. A 2011 biography argued that Chapman should be considered insane by our standards.
So what to tell the kids adjacent fourth dimension the family unit's out apple tree-picking? Equally Kerrigan puts it, "a compelling tall tale will e'er take more sticking ability than a conscientious rendering of facts."
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The Antioch Review, Vol. lxx, No. four, Johnny Appleseed and Other Legacies (Fall 2012), pp. 608-625
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