Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
Speaker 1: there's Jerry. Let's get to it. I thought this is
Speaker 1: an interesting pick from you, and I salute you because, um, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I'm I'm literally saluting you. I see my hand.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty good at it too. You really are, like
Speaker 1: how high and tight that is you? And you did
Speaker 1: like the little snap where you're hand kind of reverberates,
Speaker 1: you know. Oh I hate a lazy salute, so uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I salute you because this is um people think of
Speaker 1: they hear the words Johnny Appleseed, they hear that name
Speaker 1: and immediately they think of the Disney version, or they
Speaker 1: think of folk tale. But Johnny Appleseed was a real
Speaker 1: dude named John Chapman who planted apple trees. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: one of those amazing, awesome myths that turns out to
Speaker 1: be virtually accurate. Yeah, so it's not a myth at all. No,
Speaker 1: not really. I mean, there's only like some stuff about
Speaker 1: about that legend that are that is somewhat mythical, but
Speaker 1: really most of it's pretty accurate. It's not like he
Speaker 1: had like a giant ox or anything that followed him
Speaker 1: around that was blue. He was basically I think the
Speaker 1: thing right, the thing that um that that people usually
Speaker 1: get wrong in the retelling with with Johnny Appleseed is
Speaker 1: that he was basically like the world's first flower child,
Speaker 1: and that he was just basically like kind of trapesing
Speaker 1: along the frontier at the turn of the from the
Speaker 1: eighteenth of the nineteenth century, planting trees just because he
Speaker 1: loved nature. That is not correct. Necessarily, this guy did
Speaker 1: love nature. He's a businessman, he was. He was. He
Speaker 1: did this four like out of a business a sense
Speaker 1: of business, for sure, but he was not like any
Speaker 1: kind of um, hard nosed, hard hitting, like I'll come
Speaker 1: to your house and break your legs kind of businessman.
Speaker 1: He would never double cross anybody or do something in
Speaker 1: business that would make someone else suffer. He apparently was
Speaker 1: well known for never ever reminding someone that they owed
Speaker 1: a debt. He believed that the he believed the good
Speaker 1: Lord would tell that person you need to go Paige,
Speaker 1: Johnny apples He because you owe him some money, and
Speaker 1: it really didn't matter anyway if you bothered him, because
Speaker 1: they knew that they owed the debt. And who was
Speaker 1: he to go bug somebody and make him feel down
Speaker 1: you never knew someone was going through. So he was
Speaker 1: that kind of business man. And yet even with that mentality,
Speaker 1: even with that attitude, he had everything he needed in
Speaker 1: life and more which was not necessarily substantial, because he
Speaker 1: used to sleep on a bed of leaves and little
Speaker 1: twig huts that he made of his own construction on
Speaker 1: the frontier. Well, let's talk about apples for a second. Um. Apples,
Speaker 1: as far as we know, started out in what we
Speaker 1: would call Kazakhstan today. They gained a lot of popularity
Speaker 1: in Rome because they grafted apples and a lot of
Speaker 1: fruit trees. If you want them to grow and fruit
Speaker 1: like you are accustomed to, or like you want them to,
Speaker 1: you don't plan from seed. You you graph them, which
Speaker 1: is when you take a stem with a bud on
Speaker 1: it and through magic, not technique as a gardener, but
Speaker 1: through magic you uh graph that onto another tree instead
Speaker 1: of planting from seed, uh and you would get a
Speaker 1: more reliable outcome, especially in the case of apples, because
Speaker 1: apparently growing apples from seed. If you have a wonderful, red,
Speaker 1: delicious apple and you go spit a seed out into
Speaker 1: the ground, your it might grow into something and maybe
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously an apple tree, but it probably will
Speaker 1: not be a red delicious apple that you can eat. No,
Speaker 1: there were called spitters. Apples grown from seed were called
Speaker 1: spitters at least scoring. According to this um the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: article that we found um because they are way, way
Speaker 1: sour like. Apples did not used to be like what
Speaker 1: we think of apples today. They were very, very sour,
Speaker 1: at least the one's grown from seeds. There were sour um,
Speaker 1: and Henry David Thoraux said, did I mention they were sour?
Speaker 1: Henry David thoros said that they would put a squirrels
Speaker 1: teeth on edge. It's pretty sour. That's super sour. And
Speaker 1: I love the way you put it so folksy. And
Speaker 1: now he was a proto hippie, I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1: But this these were the trees that Johnny apple Seed
Speaker 1: was planning. He was planning them from seed um, not
Speaker 1: from grafting. And apparently one reason why he planted them
Speaker 1: from from seed and not grafting was because he was
Speaker 1: a member of the sweden Borgian church Work Work Work,
Speaker 1: which UM which kind of held that plants could feel uh,
Speaker 1: and therefore grafting was inherently cruel because it could conceivably
Speaker 1: create suffering in the plants. So he grew from seed. Alright,
Speaker 1: let's take a break. Oh wow, and we'll we'll come
Speaker 1: back and we'll talk about why John Chapman wanted to
Speaker 1: plant all these apples to begin with from seed right
Speaker 1: after this. All right, So Mr Chapman was from Ohio,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's it's funny. We don't know a lot
Speaker 1: about his early years. He was born in actually born
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts, but kind of lived his life in Ohio,
Speaker 1: I think, uh for the most part, and which was
Speaker 1: the west at the time, which is funny. And said,
Speaker 1: all right, here's the deal. The Ohio company associate said,
Speaker 1: all right, you want to go out west and settle.
Speaker 1: If you want to form a permanent homestead beyond Ohio,
Speaker 1: then you can get it. You can get a hundred acres.
Speaker 1: But what you have to do, though, is you have
Speaker 1: to plant fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees in
Speaker 1: three years. Um. I guess it's an incentive to make
Speaker 1: the land rich with with plants. Well, also to show
Speaker 1: that you planned to be there in a few years
Speaker 1: when these things started bearing fruit. It was it was
Speaker 1: a way to show that you meant to settle there permanently.
Speaker 1: I guess, well, yeah, but it was it's not like
Speaker 1: build a house. I mean it it had an agricultural benefit.
Speaker 1: I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess that would
Speaker 1: have been part of it then too. Yeah. So he says,
Speaker 1: all right, he sees a business opportunity, and he's like,
Speaker 1: if I can start heading west from Pennsylvania and I
Speaker 1: can get just ahead of these settlers and plant these things,
Speaker 1: like claim this land and plant these trees and these orchards,
Speaker 1: then I can turn around and sell them at a
Speaker 1: much higher value. Yeah, because he improved the land. He
Speaker 1: was the first squatter kind of in a way, I guess.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that I saw he did too
Speaker 1: was he would establish nurseries in the area as well.
Speaker 1: So if if you didn't buy attractive land that he
Speaker 1: had already developed, you could also still just come and
Speaker 1: buy his trees from him. Um. And he did this
Speaker 1: for decades, going up and down the frontier, because the
Speaker 1: frontier kept kept growing further and further west. And at first,
Speaker 1: I mean when he when he first embarked out, and
Speaker 1: I mean we're talking Ohio. Ohio was the frontier there
Speaker 1: was there was no United States beyond that. I don't
Speaker 1: think Ohio was even a state quite yet. So he's
Speaker 1: walking up and down these unsettled lands, um like growing
Speaker 1: these orchids, planning apple trees, and then also creating nurseries.
Speaker 1: But at the same time too, he was also serving
Speaker 1: as a liaison between these incoming settlers and the Native
Speaker 1: Americans who know now suddenly had neighbors, whether they wanted
Speaker 1: them or not. UM And he apparently uh spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time learning the languages of the different tribes
Speaker 1: that he encountered, and they grew to trust him, and
Speaker 1: so he became an advocate for the settlers, but also
Speaker 1: was able to advocate for the Native Americans too. He
Speaker 1: was just that kind of a guy. He was that
Speaker 1: he was that that's kind of the cut the cloth
Speaker 1: he was cut from. I bet he put his mouth
Speaker 1: around a piece piper too, speaking of one of the
Speaker 1: first hippies. Uh, all right, So he's going around, he's
Speaker 1: planting all these apple orchards and I guess presumably peach
Speaker 1: because he was required to. But he's not known as
Speaker 1: Johnny Peachtree. No, just apple seed or peach seed, I guess. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he Here's the thing though, with these apples, like
Speaker 1: we said, because he's planning them from seed only and
Speaker 1: not grafting them. It's pretty wild, like it's like the
Speaker 1: wild West. Apple wise, you don't know what's gonna come up.
Speaker 1: Um many times, like you said, they're much too sour
Speaker 1: to eat, But what they weren't too sour for is
Speaker 1: to make booze out of them in the form of cider.
Speaker 1: And cider was a big, big part of frontier life.
Speaker 1: Like they drank it. It's apparently, um New Englanders that
Speaker 1: transplanted out on the western edges of Ohio would drink
Speaker 1: close to eleven ounces of hard cider per day. And
Speaker 1: it was a time when water quality was suspect, and
Speaker 1: you knew you could count on that cider, right because
Speaker 1: I mean it's alcoholic, so it's fermented, which means that
Speaker 1: any harmful bacteria has been killed. It can't really survive
Speaker 1: in an alcoholic drink, right, It's wonderful, So they would
Speaker 1: drink cider instead of water, which, by the way, eleven
Speaker 1: ounces is it's like a bottle of cider today. No
Speaker 1: it's not not too much, No it's not. But everyone
Speaker 1: drank it every day. Instead of water. So there was
Speaker 1: you know, a certain amount of buds going on, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: and who knows what the alcoholic content of the cider, right,
Speaker 1: but that was I mean, that was what apples were
Speaker 1: used for. Um. I think Michael Pollan said that up
Speaker 1: until prohibition, an apple in the United States had a
Speaker 1: much greater chance of being turned into hard cider than
Speaker 1: it did it just being eaten. And again it was
Speaker 1: because most apples in the US were grown from seed,
Speaker 1: meaning they were sour, meaning they were much better or
Speaker 1: for cider than they were for eating, right, And that's
Speaker 1: how it was again up until prohibition. And one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why cider just kind of went away is
Speaker 1: because prohibition. Apparently the Feds used to chop down apple
Speaker 1: trees where they saw him to kind of say, no,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna make any cider out of this, you
Speaker 1: hay seed hick. You got it. I'm gonna cut down
Speaker 1: this tree right in front of your face, right exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: You like cider, Yeah, I love it? Yeah, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: great stuff. Um. My initial introduction to cider was you know,
Speaker 1: really sweet, like I guess the first wave of the resurgence,
Speaker 1: like back in college in those days, what was the
Speaker 1: one that everyone drank would chuck? Yeah, that was it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was basically the zema of cider, at least back then.
Speaker 1: I haven't had it in a while, so maybe they
Speaker 1: kind of I don't know, so that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: They may have toned it down just regular hard cider.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, And it's not supposed to be it's it
Speaker 1: was never supposed to be sweet. That was just a
Speaker 1: weird anomally. So I think the cider now is much
Speaker 1: closer to the traditional citer, which is it's it's got
Speaker 1: like a deadbit of sweetness to it, but it's it's
Speaker 1: definitely a lot more um beery than than apple juicy.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to dip my toe in the cider
Speaker 1: pond once again. Do not do that, Just drink it.
Speaker 1: Uh what else we have? Do we have anything else?
Speaker 1: In this guy? Johnny Appleseed? Um No, I think I
Speaker 1: mentioned he was a sweet businessman. He was a friend
Speaker 1: to the Native American and the European settler check and
Speaker 1: check he uh oh. There's supposedly a tree in Nova,
Speaker 1: Ohio on a farm. It's a hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: year old tree, and some people believe that it is
Speaker 1: the last remaining tree that can be found that Johnny
Speaker 1: Chapman a k a. Johnny Appleseed actually planted, because again
Speaker 1: the prohibition federalis chopped all his other stuff down. So
Speaker 1: that's Johnny Appleseed. Everybody, Drink it up. If you want
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us, send us an email.
Speaker 1: You can do worse than that. Just send it off
Speaker 1: to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.