Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 886: Who Was the Real Johnny Appleseed?

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Ep. 886: Who Was the Real Johnny Appleseed? · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is the me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
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  Speaker 1: T E dot com. All right, everybody, Today we're joined
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: by writer Isaac Fitzgerald, who has a brand new book
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  Speaker 1: i'll called American Rambler. Walk in the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.
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  Speaker 1: Johnny Appleseed being one of those dudes that I that
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  Speaker 1: I I feel like I know about, but I don't
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  Speaker 1: know about. Now.
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  Speaker 3: You probably know the disneyfied version, you know the version
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  Speaker 3: that they teach you in elementary school. But he is
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  Speaker 3: an American legend, but he's he was a real guy.
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  Speaker 3: His name was John Chapman. That's one of the things
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  Speaker 3: I love about him. When I first brought it up
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  Speaker 3: to the woman that's now my wife, I was thinking
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  Speaker 3: about writing a book about him. I said, Johnny Appleseed,
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  Speaker 3: he was this great Walker. He was kind of into faith.
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  Speaker 3: I'm kind of coming back into faith a little bit
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  Speaker 3: in my life. And she was like, he's not a
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  Speaker 3: real dude. And she's like Paul Bunyan Peko spill and
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  Speaker 3: I was.
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  Speaker 1: Like, you're a real guy.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I was like, those are not real dudes. You're right,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: you're right.
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  Speaker 3: But Johnny Appleseed was a real guy named John Chapman,
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: born around the Revolutionary War. So I wanted to kind
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  Speaker 3: of walk where he walked and explore the country.
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  Speaker 1: I want to start out by telling you might not
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: realize who you're in the presence of this is Johnny
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  Speaker 1: Johnny Spencer, you could call him Spencer apple Seed, tell
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  Speaker 1: him he's tell him he's an aspiring you know.
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  Speaker 2: I want to start an orchard. I set aside my
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: whole spring. I didn't do any hunting this year. WHOA
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  Speaker 2: just so I can focus on planting. I plant did
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  Speaker 2: sixty fruit trees, dwarf fruit trees and fruit shrubs in
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  Speaker 2: my yard.
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  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
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  Speaker 3: I want I want to just say I love that
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  Speaker 3: we have like a fact checker here on the podcast.
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  Speaker 1: That's helpful.
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  Speaker 3: You don't even know that, but were you were you
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  Speaker 3: planning seeds or were you grafting?
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  Speaker 2: I have not done any grafting. It's a mixture of things.
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  Speaker 2: So there's stuff that was done by like bear root,
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  Speaker 2: you know, which just like comes out of a cellar
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: at the nursery. Uh, and up to the biggest thing
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  Speaker 2: being like an eight foot tall pear tree.
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  Speaker 1: That a variety of stuff. Why don't you know he
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  Speaker 1: was doing this? When I heard he was doing it,
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  Speaker 1: I was like, hey, we got a dude coming out
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  Speaker 1: and talk all about that. He said, you should, you
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: should be in there. Very exciting.
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  Speaker 3: Can I ask, like, what what gave you the level?
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  Speaker 3: Like obviously like your hunter, but that to take off
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  Speaker 3: a full season is a lot.
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  Speaker 2: Well, I like foraging and now I don't have to
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  Speaker 2: leave to do it. I can just do it in
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  Speaker 2: my backyard. I also like the idea of perennials rather
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: than annuals. I feel like the gardeners in the office here,
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: which there are many of u, they talk about it
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: with more frustration than love. You disagree, Oh no, okay.
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  Speaker 1: The garden from the place to anger.
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  Speaker 2: That's what I have witnessed, And so I'm like, I
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  Speaker 2: don't want to be the one who's mad that my
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: tomatoes froze on June fourth. I would rather just like
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  Speaker 2: put a perennial on the ground, and and then it's
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  Speaker 2: like gonna keep doing its thing, and I don't have
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  Speaker 2: to be the one who gets mad every year.
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  Speaker 1: It doesn't. You'll find plenty of reasons. I will.
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  Speaker 3: But you're trying to start from a place of joy.
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  Speaker 3: You're trying to start from place. But what you said
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  Speaker 3: earlier too is like you like gathering, but now you
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  Speaker 3: want to do it from your backyard. That's why most
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  Speaker 3: people start a little more farming, a little more harvesting,
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  Speaker 3: a little more seasonal, which is what Chapman did himself.
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  Speaker 1: Spencer's too young to call him oldiecentric, but when he's older,
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  Speaker 1: he will absolutely be regarded as an old ecentric. Chapman asks,
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  Speaker 1: aspiring old you're on your way? I love all right, Man,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: tell people before we get into the book and everything,
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  Speaker 1: tell everybody where you're from in your other book.
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  Speaker 3: So listen, I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, but then
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  Speaker 3: I lived out in north central Massachusetts. You know, if
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  Speaker 3: you know you go far enough western Massachusetts, it gets
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  Speaker 3: real pretty yeah. Before there.
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  Speaker 1: Before where people go on color tours.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly exactly, kind of like the rust belt of Massachusetts.
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  Speaker 3: And that's what my first books about. It's called Dirtbag Massachusetts,
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: and it's really I really love to write about juxtapositions.
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  Speaker 3: I love about like kind of wrestling with the ways
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  Speaker 3: in which things are contradictory. And Massachusetts is a very
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  Speaker 3: rich state, but it still has very very low income areas,
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  Speaker 3: one of which I grew up in.
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  Speaker 1: Ye, you guys grew up poor. You grew up poor.
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  Speaker 1: I grew up.
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  Speaker 3: I grew up on the house, which on paper you
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: would think those are like kind of the worst years
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  Speaker 3: of my childhood. But I actually loved those years because
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: I was surrounded by other adults. I was part of
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  Speaker 3: this community in inner city Boston, was Catholic worker. It
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: was very much everyone kind of taking care of one another.
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  Speaker 3: Is really community driven. Loved it. And then when I
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: moved out to this farming kind of north central Massachusetts,
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  Speaker 3: that's when things got lonely. But a few towns over
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  Speaker 3: is where John Chapman was born. Like I said, during
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  Speaker 3: the Revolutionary.
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  Speaker 1: Well, I don't want to talk about him yet, not yet,
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  Speaker 1: so I was, but I I want to ask you
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  Speaker 1: thing about growing up though. Oh yeah, no, ask me
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  Speaker 1: your dad. You're like, you're your dad would take you
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  Speaker 1: guys out on Okay, in your book American Rambler, Yeah
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  Speaker 1: you're roaming around. Yeah, but your your dad was a roamer,
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  Speaker 1: was and he would drag you on his roams.
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  Speaker 3: Absolutely a wanderer and a rambler. Because again, we didn't
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  Speaker 3: have any money for any kind of vacation, and so
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  Speaker 3: my father would take me out on these long camping trips,
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  Speaker 3: these long hikes. We would sleep outside, we'd go up
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  Speaker 3: into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I love the
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  Speaker 3: White Mountains and we were part of this thing. It
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: was it was you know, it wasn't anything official, but
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: it's called the four thousand Footers Club, and you were
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: just trying to climb all the four thousand foot mountains,
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: which I know out here probably sounds a little small
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  Speaker 3: to y'all, but for us, those are the big mountains
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  Speaker 3: out out here.
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  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, want one of the deadliest mountains in
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  Speaker 1: the entries in the White Mountains.
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  Speaker 3: Right, that's right? Is that George Washington?
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  Speaker 1: Right? Yeah?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, And so absolutely just growing up with him and
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: what he would do. You know, when you're walking and
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  Speaker 3: I think about this a lot in all sorts of
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: different ways. But when you're walking with an adult and
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: you're a child, it's actually pretty tough. They got these
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  Speaker 3: long strides and you're just trying to keep up. And
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: so my dad looking at exactly, and my dad would
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  Speaker 3: tell me these long, meandering stories to try and get
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  Speaker 3: me to keep up with him, trying to make sure.
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  Speaker 3: He'd be like, oh, if we just hit this peak,
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  Speaker 3: or if we just hit this kind of turn in
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  Speaker 3: the trail, I'll tell you what happens next in the story.
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  Speaker 3: So he'd almost give me these like cliff Cliffhanger cereals
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  Speaker 3: to keep me going. Now, when I started consuming culture
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  Speaker 3: as I got older, all of a sudden it'd be like, Luke,
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  Speaker 3: I am your father, And I was like, this sounds familiar,
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  Speaker 3: like he was just he was just ripping off all
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  Speaker 3: these things and telling them. But I loved I adored
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  Speaker 3: those times with my dad.
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  Speaker 1: I ajorined like, wait, they stole that from my dad exactly.
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  Speaker 3: Just start reading Lord of the Rings and be like,
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  Speaker 3: how did this guy talk to my dad? That's nuts?
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  Speaker 3: But genuinely, I just I love them so much, And
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  Speaker 3: I loved those times spent with my father because it
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  Speaker 3: was one. It was bonding, you know how it is
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  Speaker 3: when you get out there, it's just it's beautiful. It's gorgeous.
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  Speaker 3: We'd sleep under the stars or in a tent. Every
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: once in a while the weather would be pretty rough.
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  Speaker 3: He had this beat up old Toyota, like blue, rusted
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  Speaker 3: out truck that had like that plastic covering on the bed,
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  Speaker 3: and so if things got real bad, we'd try to
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  Speaker 3: get back to that and we'd sleep in there. And
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  Speaker 3: I just remember kind of like curled up in my
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  Speaker 3: dad's chest. Those walks were the most spectacular times, like
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  Speaker 3: some of my best memories with him as a father.
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  Speaker 3: And he does come down to this kind of storytelling
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  Speaker 3: that he used to do, and he would also be
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  Speaker 3: ripping off American legends as well.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, intro. What's the first you ever heard of
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  Speaker 1: Johnny Appleseed? I thought about this. When I was thinking
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  Speaker 1: about I was like, I think the only thing I
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  Speaker 1: can think about Johnny apple Seed is he had he
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  Speaker 1: wore around a pot on his head.
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  Speaker 3: That's all right, which, by the way, sadly I hate
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: to dispel that rumor, but probably it's not factually accurate.
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  Speaker 3: I'm so sorry, man, I I apologize he did probably
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  Speaker 3: wear a bucket. He usually had a bucket, but that
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: the tin pot with a handle off of it really
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  Speaker 3: hadn't been thought up yet at that point. That's kind
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: of almost a few decades later.
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  Speaker 1: But yes, Pump, they gave that idea to him decades later.
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  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, his whole his whole deal is he
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  Speaker 3: gets lionized a few decades after his death, and we'll
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: get to that.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: But no, So the first time, are you are are
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: you aware that Boone didn't wear a coonskin cap?
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  Speaker 3: Don't break my heart.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Crocket wore a coonskin cap, but he wore it almost
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: like like a provocation, like it was a goof as
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: a troll.
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  Speaker 3: Basically, he was like, Oh you think I'm such an
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: outdoor being.
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  Speaker 1: Oh my god, here he comes in his coonskin hat.
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  Speaker 3: He was he was, He was like being audacious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no,
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  Speaker 3: yeah again. These things get put back on these legends
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: right as we learn about them and as we try
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: to basically flatten them and make them less complex so
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: that they can be consumed by young children. But the
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: first time I heard about Johnny Appleseed was very much
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: my dad, because he would tell these kind of giant,
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: elaborate stories, and my Johnny Appleseed of my father. He
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: walked all the way to California. He brought apples here
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: over the Atlantic Ocean on his shoulders. My dad was
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: such a storyteller. He went so big, and so my
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: mother's job was kind of to bring me back to earth.
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  Speaker 3: She'd be the one that would take the encyclopedia out
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  Speaker 3: and be like, hey, he was actually a real guy.
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  Speaker 3: His name was John Chapman, who was born right down
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  Speaker 3: the road in Lemonstar, Massachusetts. Maybe not the tinpot hat,
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: definitely not the getting to California. But he was a proselytizer.
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: He was a wanderer. He planted orchards. He did not
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: throw seeds willy nilly. He actually was pretty committed to
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: an almost haphazard style of land speculation. And so my
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: mom kind of taught me all about that. But it
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: wasn't until later in my life when walking came into
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: my life again in a really big way, the same
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: way my father loved walking, and faith came back in
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: my into my life the same way. My mom has
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: always been interested in prayer. I was I was approaching
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: forty and I was realizing these things were returning into
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: my life. After a lifetime of kind of trying to
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: be different than my parents, I all of a sudden
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: realized I was coming to their traditions again. And that's
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: when I started thinking about who's one of the walkers
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: in history that I would love to explore? And that's
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: like I said. I was like to my wife, I said,
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: Johnny Applese. She said, not a real guy, And I
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: said no, well, actually I got to push up my
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: little nerd glasses and go well actually, And that's that's
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: how this book was born.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Tell me what you were telling me the other day
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: about that wasn't like eating out.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: He didn't make tasty apples. Oh no, made spitters spitters.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Walt Whitman would describe it as tart enough to
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: make a blue jay scream spitters. That's tart, and that's
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: and it's coming from seeds, right, Yeah, that's what happens
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: if you grafted an apple tree. If you graft an
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: apple tree, you let's say you have a honeycrisp. You
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: graft that apple tree, you're gonna get that same apple
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: you're cloning at that point exactly. But what happens if
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: you hit it with seeds.
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  Speaker 2: Well, if you do a seed, it's sort of you
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: don't know what product you're going to get. And I
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: feel like what Johnny Appleseed was doing was sort of
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: a survival of the fittest almost he was allowing the
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: seeds to become their own apples that then like evolved
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: and diversified what the apple crop was on the continent.
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right, And it was this version of basically,
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: because of cross pollination, you had no idea whatever seed
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: you put in the ground, you had no idea what
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: kind of apple you'd get. But they were usually small,
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: and they were usually tart. And despite what Disney teaches
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: you in Melody Time, which I won't sing the song
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: because we don't have the rights to it, but if
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: you were a kid that grew up, especially around Churchill,
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: remember the Lord's been good to me. And so I
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: think the Lord forgiving me the things I need, the
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: birds and the bee in the apple seeds, the Lord's
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: been good to me. It is very much all about
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: apple tarts for the settlers, It's all about apple pies.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: It's all about this wholesome American story of westward expansion,
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: which again, after his death he kind of becomes the
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: Mickey Mouse of westward expansion, so we can kind of
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: ignore the brutality and the bloodshed that went into that.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: But it's not true. Every single apple, the seeds that
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: he got even came from sighteries, and the apples he
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: was making were all for alcohol. And that's really when
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: I was like, Oh, this is my guy. Now, this
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: is my guy. He was moving westward ahead of settlers.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: He was very smart thinking about the fur trade business
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: is something you guys talk on here all the time.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: He was doing a kind of land speculation business but
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: also an orchard business where he was getting ahead of
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: settlers and as they were arriving, he would be like, oh, look,
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: do you want to just pay me a little bit
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: of money all these apple trees are here, or we
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: could partner because he's going to keep moving on. He
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: never had a home address. He's going to keep wandering,
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: but he would partner with these people to kind of
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: basically lay claim to the land. And at the same
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: time they would be so excited because there was putable
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: water was kind of hard to get their hands on.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: There was something that they consumed so much of which
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: was alcoholic sider and apple jack.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Huh yeah. Yeah.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: At the time, like a hard sider was more reliable
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: than water. Exact, you were drinking it, like I'm not
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: going to get sick from this hardsider, but water there's
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: a decent chance, so.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: We'll give it to the kids too. Yeah, yeah, you know,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: I read this book long ago. It was called a
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: I think the book was a boy an author named
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Andrew Barr, and it was just called Drink, and it
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: was like a history of alcohol consumption in the country,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: and he pointed out a thing that hadn't encountered this elsewhere,
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: but he pointed out a thing I believe it was
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: going back to the Plymouth Rock the Plymouth colonies. They
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: had an idea that the water was good to drink,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: like water wasn't good to consume, and they would consume
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: as a thirst quencher, mildly alcoholic beverages as a sort
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: of that it was just more peer than water. And
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: you're right about the mildly.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: I will say that, sorry to the IPA drinkers of
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: the world, nobody was doing like a heavy nine percent.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: It was.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: It was often something that you could just like consume
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: to kind of get you through the day, keep yourself
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: somewhat hydrated. But yeah, it kind of meant that the alcohol,
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: the alcohol consumption of that time period was so much more.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: I don't have the stats on hand, but they are
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: in the book. It was so much more high than
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: it is now. And and it was just part of
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: the culture.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: So to explain that a little bit better when you
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: say the land speculating aspect of it.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: So land was land, wash, land was money, land was power,
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: Land was everything back then, right, And so I can
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: talk about it real quick, and and and bringing it
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: into his into what John Chapman was trying to achieve.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: But it's interesting because he also had this religious aspect
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: to him. And I would argue that in the eighteen
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: hundreds coming up with a new version of Christianity was
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: the same as starting a website today, like genuinely like
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: you were like, this is my new startup. And at
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: the time, the Shakers were around, which shout out to
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: the Shakers. I don't know if you're familiar with them.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: They basically dance as a form of praise. They were
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: not really into sex though, so their numbers have dwindled
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: over the years to the point where there are now
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: two practicing Shakers.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Wow, and books they were appropriating.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: Because they were not. That's a tough Catholics figured it out.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: A lot of other dimssions figured it out. Shakers didn't
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: really didn't go with the procreation. So they only have
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: two practicing Shakers. They are in their seventies maybe eighties.
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: They live in Maine. But I'm happy to report that's
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: in the book. But since the book has been published,
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: you could make the argument that Shakers of fastest growth
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: in religion in America, because they call it the doubled,
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: they have at increase member has recently joined. Isn't that fantastic?
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: I was just gonna say, in the Animal Kingdom, that's
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: called functionally extinct. There, like if there's like one of
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: this kind of rhino left and it can't reproduce, that's
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: labeled as functionally extinct. So I thought you were going
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: to tell us that they were functioningly.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: Now they're fighting back the other they're klawn on h Swedenborganism. Swedenborganism.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: It's a tough one, but it's it's the teachings of
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: Emmanuel Swedenborg. And around the time that Chapman was like
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: in his teens early twenties. It comes over from Europe,
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: it comes from Sweden. Swedenborg himself was a philosopher who
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: in his fifties kind of got into like i can
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: see ghosts, I'm talking to God. I'm figuring out this
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: right way to live. It's all in the book. We
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: don't have to really get like into the weeds on
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: that right now. But what you need to know is
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: that Chapman was a strong believer in Swedenborg.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: But is it is it of the Judeo Christian.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: One hundred percent? It's Christian one hundred percent. It's Christian.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: And they have they have actually somewhat progressive views for
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: the time. They really didn't believe in slavery.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: They were early abolitionists. One might say.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: They almost pedestaled what you might say, like Native Americans
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: and other kind of like around the world, people that
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: were not living in the European style and almost maybe
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: to a way.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Where that feels weird too.
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: But they they had really eccentric viewpoints on a lot
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: of different issues of the day. But one thing was
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: the harder your life was in this realm, the easier
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: your life would be in the next, which is a
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: very classic religious thing. Right now, there are still practicing
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: Swedenborgians here in the United States. I go, really yes,
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: Yet they have a giant, beautiful cathedral in Brynathen, Pennsylvania,
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: outside of Philadelphia. I celebrated Easter with them in this book.
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: It's a fascinating religion, it's a fascinating culture. In all
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: these different ways, they've actually amassed a lot of wealth.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: But at the time Chapman was accumulating land. To get
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: back to your question, which is a way of accumulating wealth.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: But he also didn't want to partake in it because
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: he felt like it would actually mess with his chances
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: in the afterlife. Got it, and so he would walk
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: around again, no house, no address, partnering with these folks,
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: with these settlers to have the orchard running, but never
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: sticking around to kind of reap their bounty. There's a
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: joke that at one point he lost some paperwork and
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: he lost like half of Ohio. But when he dies
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: at the ripe old age of his seventies, not to
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: get ahead of ourselves, but when he dies, he has
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: one thousand and two hundred acres to his name, and
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: he had no progeny he had no family, but he
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: had it got dispersed to like brothers, siblings, half siblings,
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: so the Chapman family did keep it. But he actually
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: had a mask quite a bit of wealth, despite the
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: fact that you would often either sleep on strangers floors
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: or proselytize in a town and hope somebody befriended him
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: and took him in, or sleep in the woods. So
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: he lived this kind of Popper's life. So the timpot
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: on the hat not so much, but he often dressed
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: in like a coffee sack like kind of almost a
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: scratchy Yeah. So there is this like interesting and there's
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: all these different theories about him. Was he this way
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: because he got kicked in the head by a horse?
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: Was he this way because he got broken hearted? There's
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: all these different stories about him. But what really threads
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: through is here's a man that accumulated land, love to
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: move west, love to do business. There's a real capitalist
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: theme through Chapman, yet at the same time he never
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: enjoyed the benefits of it.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Can we back up? I feel like the Johnny Appleseed
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: story kind of starts when he's an adults, But what
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: do we know about.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: His childhood fantastic, absolutely, Okay, So he's born in Lemonsterear, Massachusetts.
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: And shout out to Florence E. Wheeler, who is a
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: woman in the sixties. You know those historical societies you
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: find in every round. They're maybe not focused on the
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: big hits, but they are focused on what happens in
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: their community. So she is the one. There was so
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: many rumors about Chapman. Nobody knew where he was born.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: Some people said that his mother was Native American. Some
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: people say that his father was a Harvard preacher. None
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: of that was true. Florence E. Wheeler, one of these
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: historical society women, really dug into the ledgers basically, because
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: that's how we find so much of history is who
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: owed who money? Right, You guys talk about this on
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: the pod, like this is how people were keeping track
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: of things. And so what we found was he's born
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: of a minuteman. Oh, so his dad was partook in
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: the Revolutionary War. His father eventually became a guard of
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: an armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Not long after Cha is born,
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: his mother dies, his father remarries, and they relocate to
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Long Meadow.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: Message do his mom die from complications a child. Yeah,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I believe it was a sibling. I believe that's correct.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: Again, as always with history, somebody else says it might
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: have been a disease. I can't remember which one, but
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: I do. I think the overwhelming idea is that it
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: was a complications a child because he has a lot
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: of siblings, a lot of half siblings his father. After
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: the war, like so many people that worked in the
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: Revolutionary War, and this is the story of my area,
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: which is again this low income part of Massachusetts, a
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: lot of those soldiers were not paid the money that
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: they were supposed to be paid.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: They were paid in scripts.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: Then people from Boston came and bought the scripts for
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: pennies on the dollar's. Basically, if you were a Revolutionary War,
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: if you were a soldier, they would the government that
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: was very new wrote you and I owe you. And
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: then you needed seeds, as you know, you needed seeds
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: for your farm for the coming harvest. So you just
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: needed anything that would get you seeds. So a bunch
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: of people from Boston came out, bought all the scripts
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: for very very cheap, gave them enough money to buy
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: seeds so they could survive, and then passed the law
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: in Boston, you have to make good on the scripts,
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: and so they became It's just another way of the
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: wealthy elite. Basically a massed more wealth and ripped off
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: all of these guys that had fought in the Revolutionary War.
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: And so Chapman's father is dealing with that kind of stuff.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: He falls into debt, he falls into drinking. So at
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: a very young age, Chapman and his half brother Nathaniel,
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: I think kind of sensing that things are rough around
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: the house, set out and they go west. More and
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: more people are moving onto the East coast. It's becoming
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: what would feel like, especially to somebody like Chapman. I
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: think had a little bit of itchy feet and liked
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: to spend people alone. Again, remember I said I love juxtaposition.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: You said he had a little bit of a what
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: itchy feet? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a wonder. He's
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: a rambler. But you know how I like juxtaposition. Like, again,
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: he liked to be alone, but he clearly also enjoyed
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: the company of others. But I do think he wanted
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: to set out, and so he set off. We don't
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: know much about him and how he gets to Western Pennsylvania.
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: But he and his half brother get to west sometimes
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: they get over the Alleghenies. They get to western Pennsylvania
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: where Broken Straw Creek meets the Allegheny around the area
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: of what is now Worn Pennsylvania. There's a story again eleg.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: But that's a bloody ground at that time.
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: Right, Well, this is why there's this is this is
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: a story that is kind of impressive. He don't get
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: me wrong. He runs into a lot of trouble the
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: further west he gets, especially in Ohio.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: But there's a story.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: Again, can't really fact check these, right, we're talking about
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: stories that kind of get passed down. This is not
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: a written down. That's one thing that's difficult about Chapman.
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: Think about other stories from the time, right, we're talking
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: about like early eighteen hundreds, Lows and Clark kept journals, right,
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: you have there's many people from that time in history
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: that write, and they write so so much, so we
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: have so much to draw from. Chapman could read, and
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Chapman could talk. He was a proselytizer. He could really preach.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: There's all these this documentation of people being interviewed after
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: his passing talking about what a great preacher and speaker
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: he was. But he did not write anything down. He
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: did not write anything down. He didn't So we have
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: no letters, we have no journals. We all have sources
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: from around him. But this one story is that Nathaniel
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: fell Ill Chapman went looking for help, and supposedly Native
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: Americans in the area, probably the Seneca, taught his little
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: brother how to hunt, how to fish, and how to
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: sustain himself while his brother was off looking for help.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: And there's a story of a theory that that begins
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: part of Chapman's legend, which is that he was a
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: friend to Native Americans because he always kind of felt
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: a debt to the way that they helped out his brother.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry you asked, and I'm really running with it.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: I'm monologue and let me know if you want to
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: get a word in here sideways. No, we're coming up
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: on a favorite part of mine.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: It was the only thing I just want to set
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: what when he embarks out to the frontier of the time, which.
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: Again we think of the wild West as the West,
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: but we are talking before the Ohio state border.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there are still in the post American
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Revolutionary War and even post War of eighteen twelve, there
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: are often there are open hostilities up and down the
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: Ohio and full fledged Indian wars happening up and down
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: the Ohio. So when you go to those places, it
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: is at that time, to go into those areas, it
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: would it was reasonable that you would wind up tomahawked
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: one hundred percent in the head in your sleep one hundred.
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: Percent, and it was violence like That's That's one of
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: the parts of this book that I want to make
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: so clear is not to jump quick to the philosophies
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: behind it. But I understand that this country, we have
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: our issues, and that we have our arguments, and we
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: have our political differences, but we must acknowledge how brutal
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: things used to be. And that's something that I love.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: A lot of this book is about the history of Chapman.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: A lot of it is also me just looking at
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: the country at a n eye level and the hospitality
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: I meet along the way, the wonderful people that open
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: up their homes to me along the way. Because I
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: traveled where he traveled, and I kind of did what
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: he did. I had a rule, which is I either
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: sleep outside or I get invited to somebody's home and
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: how much of this country works. When you think about
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: how much of this country functions, this is a vast land.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: This is a huge place, and when you look at
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: it in the modern day versus Yeah, there was a
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: time when this was a hugely dangerous situation that he
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: was putting himself and Nathaniel in. But to get back
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: to it real quick, he gets out to Warren Pennsylvania,
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: Tim and his brother and they meet one guy, Daniel McQuay.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: Daniel McQuay, I think should almost have his own book
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: written about him.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: You've written books before.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: You know what it is to hit a character, and
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, and
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: my barking up the wrong job. Maybe I should be
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: writing about this. Oh, Daniel McQuay was hired by the
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: Holland Land Company to do land speculation. And we've all
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: been young men before, right, you know when you meet
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: another guy and he kind of look up to him.
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: I swear I don't have any facts to back this up,
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: but I just just the philosophy of it. The theory
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: behind it is that John Chapman met Daniel McQuay and
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: really looked up to him. He was described by a
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: historian from the eighteen hundreds a true son of Aaron.
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: He drank, he fought, he was a bit of a maniac.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: He lived in a log like y remind me that
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: it's like the houses, it's like wider on the top.
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: And then it's this I'm not gonna remember anyways, he
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: basically lives in a log cabin.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: What's the son of Aaron? Son of it? Like?
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: He's just from Scotland, Ireland. He's just he's just like
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: a big, massive, boozy adventurer. And Holland is paying him
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: just to try and claim as much land as they can.
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: He's also in trade, so he'll cut all these trees down,
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: put them on rafts, takes them down the Alleghany feeds
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: into the Ohio, feeds into the Mississippi, all the way
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: down to New Orleans.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: What sells it?
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: Rivers only run one way, walks a thousand, two hundred
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: miles up? Does it all over again? Kid on paper?
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: What kind of trees is he cutting?
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: I mean, he's kind of all he's cut everything that's
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: down there. He's and he's going out and genuinely another
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: peat that I quote like eighteen hundreds historian basically says,
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: on the walk back Wild Animals Thicket, there's small, small
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: settlements are starting to appear, like small European settlements are
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: starting to appear along these rivers, but not many. And
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: also there's Native Americans, of course, and highwaymen, and he
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: braved all of that. And it's hard not to think
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: that John Chapman wasn't a little bit influenced by this
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: guy in that same way, you know, when you're younger
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: and you're looking and you're like, oh, maybe I could
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: do some version of that, which gets back to that
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: this land speculation where I'm gonna if you put fruit
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: trees in the ground under the expanding colonial and eventually
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: US American government meant that you were laying claim to
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: that ground. Yet at the same time he had no
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: interest in actually settling. And so that begins his story
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: of he gets past western Pennsylvania, his half brother says,
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: love you come out he and the rest of the point.
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: The dad comes from Long Meadow. They settle somewhere around Dexter, Ohio.
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: They suted like southern Ohio, close to West Virginia. But
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: Chapman then starts this life of wandering rambling planning apple
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: seeds and running into very much what you just talked about,
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: a huge hute, multiple multiple conflicts, and he becomes the
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: Paul Revere of the War of eighteen twelve.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: He did, I don't know that part of them. Nobody does.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: They kind of later on. I feel like it was
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: as signed to Chairman that he was sort of a
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: walking newspaper, right because he was going around to so
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: many different places, and like he'd get information from Pennsylvania
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: that he would deliver to West Virginia. Correct, to hear
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: some in West Virginia that then travels to Ohio with him.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Correct.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: That's that's sort of what you're saying.
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: Yes, And there's there's a little bit of debate whether
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: he made it to West Virginia or not. I kind
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: of like to think that he did. No, there weren't
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: borders that they and they touch up, and I did
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: drive through West Virginia at one point in the book,
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: so it helps me if I think Katy did. But genuinely,
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: that's exactly right. He would carry the good news, which
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: were the teachings of Swedenborgianism, which again which is this
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: very interesting view of looking at Christianity. But it's still
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: I mean Swedenborgianism influences.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: I mean we're talking numbers. You say that word real slow.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: Sorry, sweden Borgianism, I've read it. Gusalem Church or yes,
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: New Jerusalem Church is what it's called now or sweden
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: borgian isn't like that's you would call it practitioner, But yes,
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: they now refer to themselves as the New Jerusalem Church.
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: They have ten thousand practitioners around the world. I believe
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: it's five thousand in and around bren Atham. They have
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: their own town, they have their own fire department, they
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: have their own police. It's a really interesting area. But
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: if we're talking numbers, they're doing better than the Shakers,
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: but not as good as somebody that was influenced by
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: watching that religion take off, which was John Smith and Mormonism.
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: So Mormonism was heavily influenced by watching how sweden Work's
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: teachings took off.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: God did when Chapman took off. Like let's say you'd
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: caught Chapman out and you would have said, real quick,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: what are you doing? What are you doing? Would he
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: have said, I'm carrying my religion forth one hundred poor?
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: Would you have said I am carrying my apple seeds forth.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: I listen again.
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: You don't know the answer every but I would argue
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: he one hundred percent believed that the teachings of Swedenborg
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: were his Emmanuel Swedenborg, those were his passion, those were
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: his reasons. But I mean, this is this is why
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: I love this story. It's such an American story. You
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: can have your passions, but you gotta be able to
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: pay the bills. Granted his were very, very low, but
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: you have to have a little bit of a business.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: You have to have a little bit of an underpinning
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: of capitalism to get you out there, to make sure
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: you've got it. You can grab some food when you
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: need it or whatever's happening. And so for him that
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: those were the orchards, those that the preachings I believe
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: were the ideals. And then the land speculation, the laying
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: claim to this land was the aspect of it that
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: he knew meant he had something to fall back, even
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: if again he never really even tapped into it, I
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: think he sensed some type of security from it. If
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, real quick, do you have a favorite like
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: American legend? Yeah, who's your favorite American legend Boone, it's
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: a Boone all the way.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: And on that point, you just said a thing that
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: reminded me. You know the guy who said that that
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: you could picture Chapman talking to that Scottish wild man,
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: Daniel McQuay.
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, guy, there's like a there's a similar tell me,
• 33:31
  Speaker 4: tell me, tell me when when Boone wasn't when Boone
• 33:35
  Speaker 4: was wrapped up in Lord Dunmore's warm.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: Okay, there's a similar story where he was. He was
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: a wagon driver, a mule like a mule driver. He
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: runs into a real wander who and some people kind
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: of have it pinned down to the campfire they were
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: sitting around where he said, you know this might interest you.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: There's this path I found through the mountains, the Cumberland Gap,
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: young fellow, like you might write. And that's and some
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: people attribute that that was the beginning of that was
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: the beginning of Daniel Booms And isn't that wanderer right?
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: A guy through a tip?
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, threw him a tip and that's such a great
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: way to put it through him a tip that then
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: he took such advantage of and it actually led to
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: a person who became larger than life and That's what
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: I love about Chapman too, and it does I mean,
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: we have this today we talk about a writer's writer. Right,
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: everybody knows Stephen King, but who's the Who's the guy
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: Stephen King? Admires is maybe not as well known or
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: a comedians comedian and we all know the big names,
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: but who are those littler guys who maybe never got
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: out of the honky tonks, but they influenced. You know,
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: our great outlaw country singers are our great comedians. And
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: that's I love finding those moments of history. Do you
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: know who the guys?
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: I do? And I've written and said it a thousand times.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Randall's here, he'd remember, it's all yeah, it's all right, No,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: not John Finley? Was John Finley? John Finley?
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: Well, I listen while I was working on almost certainly
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: johns John Finley. All right, well shut John Finley.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: We can go back.
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: But there I found a bunch of these guys. And
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: I'm I'm going to blank on the name, but uh,
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: I think we should talk about him becoming the Paul
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: Revere of the War of eighteen twelve.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: I got a more detail oriented question. It was John Finley,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: all right, Hey, yeah, John Finley was like he and
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: his grave. It's like, oh ma, dude, I told him
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: about like why is he and all like why is
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: he in all the paintings going to comfor the gad
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: It's like I was there way before that. I told
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: him about it. He goes through there and it's like,
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: good lord.
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: But again, I'm sorry. There's something so American about that.
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: It's what I love. It is oftentimes the loudest or
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: the person who maybe and Chapman is I don't think
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: he really even sought out fame. It really happened to
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: him after his death. And that's a whole other part
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: of this. He I genuinely believe, was trying to be
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: a humble person. But you have no control over what
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: parts of history get kind of scooped up and then
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: lionized and then put on a pedestal. And then you
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: do you have the person who's right your character, Johnny,
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: He's right. He's like, I should be more famous than
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: the Boon. But for some reason, whether they pushed it
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: themselves or it's just the way history worked out, Boon's
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: the one that gets put in the paintings.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: In that why him? I'm not gonna get into it
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: cause I got Johnny was in his story. Why him?
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: It also comes down to why him because of a
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: guy he met, A guy he met and it started
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: the thing. I mean, the guy he met wrote like
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: a oh, I met this crazy, you know guy, and
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: he like built him up and made him crazy and changed,
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: you know, took aspects of his biography and birthed a legend. Exactly.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: He just happened to run into a guy that put
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: him into a book and birthed the legend. And it
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: probably and it winds up being similar. But this story,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: I'm sitting here, he had a pot on his head.
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but it is so often a writer who comes
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: across the story is maybe getting paid at the time
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: by some magazine or and and they're the ones that
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: absolutely I'm also drawn thinking of writers. Mark Twain a
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: great example of somebody chat Chapman is this way too.
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: Every state he enters, and some that he didn't, they
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: like to lay claim to. They like to build a
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: statue to him, often carved out of wood. Lemonster has
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: a wooden statue, they usually carve it out of a tree.
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: Mark Twain the same way. Right, here's this man who
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: gets so many statues built about him. They all across
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: the country, all these different states lay claim to oh
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: home of Mark Twain. Well he lived here once. I
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: mean George Washington too, right, like we have this like
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: George Washington slept here, or like tales that have more
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: of a sense of humor, like George Washington took a
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: shit here, like all these different ways of doing it right.
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: But what I love about that kind of that aspect
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: of it is that it makes the person first and
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: foremost larger than life. But when you actually look at
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: Mark Twain, what he used to do was just go
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: to bars listen to stories, usually for the price of
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: a couple of drinks. Sometimes he would give them a
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: little extra cash. He would then just say to the person,
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: can I use your story? And he would pay them
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: just a little bit of money and next thing, you know,
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: that's how so much of his work got built. And
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: again that is that it just feels so American to me,
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: the way that these stories kind of start to outgrow
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, I want to say outgrow history, but the
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: fact of the matter is sometimes the stories become history
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: even though they aren't factually accurate.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: Like the TIMPI had in return of a more detailed
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: the kind of like practical matter. Yeah, can you explain
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: real quick You've touched on it, But can you explain
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: real quick that the land the land speculator orchard. Yes, connection, Yes.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: Saying you've asked me this twice, I apparently have not
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: done a good enough job.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: How does that work? Like, walk me through that?
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: Okay, I mean I am probably not fully educated in
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: the history of how this country was taken over to
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: speak about it super accurate.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: No, just me from his perspective, but yes, from.
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: Our from our perspective, I can easily say you basically
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: have European settlers coming over and wanting to lay claim
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: to land. You have Native American countries, you have Native
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: American peoples, you have Native American tribes that already exist here.
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: So there is as we know, right, and again how
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: historically accurate is this? But there's a lot of trading.
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: There's Manhattan sold for beads, which again maybe not exactly.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: Accurate, but you get the idea.
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: Europeans start coming in and basically making trades for different
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: parts of the country as they continue to move westward,
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: all the while of course signing treaties where they say
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: we swear we're not going west of the Alleganies. We swear,
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: we're not going west to the Ohio. We swear, And
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: of course those then become violent confrontations, as makes sense,
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: as has been true of all history. Like that's the
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: other part that I think is so important. We can
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: look at these moments in American history and be like, oh,
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: this is brutal, and oh this is difficult, which don't
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: get me wrong, it is, but this is how land
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: has been taken and fought over in the Old World
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: and everywhere else. But part of what happened with land speculations.
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: You had giant European corporations like the Dutch halland Land Company.
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: They would pay somebody like Dan McQuay to just go west,
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: build a log cabin, lay claim, put down marker basically
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: to the rights for that forest so that he could
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: log it if there were native peoples there. See, if
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: you can figure out a way to say, hey, can
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: we cut down some of these trees?
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: Is that cool?
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: Sometimes that works out, Sometimes it turns into a confrontation.
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: So the that's like the massive scale. That's like I'm
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: sorry to use like modern terms, but like that's like
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: the Facebook that's like the Google. That's like the big
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: scale stuff was you literally had European governments, East Indian
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: training companies something like. That's like the big On the
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: much smaller scale, you had this desire right for westward
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: expansion and settlers. And so the idea was if you
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: were to plant the land and I can't remember the
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: exact number, but there was like X number of trees,
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: you know.
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: It was called the donation tract, and I think it
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: was like one hundred apple and fifty peach, yep or
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: something like that.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: It was.
• 41:53
  Speaker 4: It was those.
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: It was those two specifically, and then I think you
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: had to have a structure on the property. And those
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: were like your requirements and their thought when they were
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: making those requirements, like if you are dedicated enough to
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: put a fruit tree in the ground, then you're married
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: to that property kind of you're gonna see it through
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: to where you can harvest that fruit. If you're putting
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty fruit trees in the ground, that's
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: gonna make you want to stay there and just like
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: keep improving that zone.
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: Okay, First off, I'm so glad you're here. So that
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: was perfect because that's correct. Second, that's what makes Chapman
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: such an interesting person. So he wanted to do that.
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: He wanted his name down as somebody who owned that land,
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: but he did not want to stick around to see
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: it through. So that was his type of lands back.
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: Like Dan McQuay builds the hut, stays there, is getting
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: paid by the Holland company. It's taking the wood down
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: the rivers, coming back. That's his place.
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: Chapman just starts bouncing around. Now he'll he'll walk back.
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: Seasonally he comes back. That's It's something that's very beautif
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: in his movements that I found that I actually try
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: and do a little bit of in the book too.
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: There's almost the seasonal, circular nature to it that I
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: absolutely love. But he basically will partner with somebody say hey,
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: will you stick around, will you look over this land?
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: It's now our land, which again he lost so much
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: of it, especially when he passes away like a bunch
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: of I'm sure not everyone went looking for his siblings
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: to be like by the way I was in.
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: A fifty to fifty splace. I think they were like,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: look at that, now this is mine.
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: But that was the way that you got to lay
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: claim and I mean, to think about it in modern terms,
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: imagine if we could just I mean, this country is
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: so vast. Don't get me wrong, it is so big,
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: it's so beautiful. But the idea that you could just
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: go and plant a few trees and be like this
• 43:45
  Speaker 3: now is mine. Of course, especially to young people, that
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: was such a drawer. And so it's such a draw
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: and so that kept people moving westward.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: And one of the goals of the Donation tract was
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: to like put buffer zone between the east and the
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: native tribes that were further west. And so Johnny is
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: sort of encountering some of these tribes along the way.
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: Can you talk about his relationship with them?
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, so again I mentioned I mean, this is
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: part of the book that fascinates me. I grew up
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: in this area where the wappanog led by this guy
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: who the Europeans called King Philip. His name was Metacom
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: and his father and basically a colonialist's father, were the
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: ones that made peace around Thanksgiving. And then a generation later,
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: you can just see the way the younger generation was like,
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: neither of us like how this is working out in
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: a very interesting fact, just real quick, this is not
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: so much linked to Chapman. But one of the issues
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: was gun control because settlers brought guns and very quickly
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: through trade, Native Americans then had guns, and then all
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: of a sudden, the colonists started to make rules around guns,
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: and the Native Americans are like, what are you talking about.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: The tendency to want to be the guy with the
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: gun and the other guys don't have the guns is
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: not gone away. It never, never, never will. It's a joke.
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry, but it is a joke I could not
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: make in the book. Was like, and then the Second
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: Amendment was ratified and there's never been any gun issues since,
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: which of course has not been the case. But so
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: that started what was called King Philip's War of Medicom's Rebellion.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: As with everything back then, there's a bunch of different names.
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: Three thousand Native Americans perish, a thousand colonists perish. In
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: a very interesting again, Oftentimes, especially in elementary school and
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: earlier histories, this is seen as like civilization versus the wild,
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: which of course it's not. It's so much more complex
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: than that. The colonists do eventually kill Medicom. They then
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: get his head and they put it on a pike
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: outside of Plymouth for decades, which is amazing because that's
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: such a European like that's you know, that's William Wallace
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: type stuffing, right that there is this like history of that,
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: and there's a play somebody made kind of making fun
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: of bureaucracy much more modern that was Metacom's head is
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: still rotting on a pike down the road, like basically
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: they basically make it to play about what the town
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: hall meetium was to be, Like where what point should we,
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: like the ninety year old guys still really like it,
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: but at what point should we actually take this head down? Maybe?
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: But yeah, so there was this brutality. Chapman himself runs
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: into the Seneca. He runs into the Shawnee in Ohio
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: one hundred percent. You have to remember a lot of
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: the tribes that we think of as westward and Plains
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: Indians actually were pushed out that way, so they kind
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: of started around here. The one that that I in
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: my head really link him to, though, is the sense
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: like they you don't know for sure, but you really
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: think the Seneca are probably the ones in the area
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: of Warren, Pennsylvania that helped him with the with his brother.
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: But the War of eighteen twelve is, oh, you might
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: have to fact check me on this, because the War
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: of eighteen again like like with all these right, like
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: like with the French Indian War and the which was
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: part of the Seven Year War.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: You have natives on.
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: Both sides, oh right, So like the Mohawk and the
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: Mohegan actually side with the settlers in King Philip's war.
• 47:35
  Speaker 3: It's the Narragansett and the Wampaogue and many other smaller
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: tribes that are kind of at that are fighting. And
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: Metacom's father made peace with the earliest colonists because he
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: was in a fight with the Narraganset and so right,
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: so there's all this, there's this ever shifting generational divides.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the War of eighteen twelve is kind of like
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: the American Revolution part two exactly. And the English still
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: had certain holdings, they had certain tribal affiliations they and
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: there was a lot of there were some issues that
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: had been sort of punted around borders and things at
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: the end of the American Revolution, and the War of
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: eighteen twelve brought all those hostilities forward and led to
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: a further diminishment of English influence. I want defeated a
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: lot of tribes because there was a lot of tribes
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: in the Ohio Valley that threw in with the English
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: during the War of eighteen twelve and it led to
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: their defeat well.
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: And also because they were basically saying, we will make
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: sure the colonists stop extending. Was that was part of
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: the way the British I want to say that Delaware.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: The Delaware is what's popping into my mind. But again
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: probably a fact check, but basically, during that time, Chapman
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: has made it far enough west to Mansfield. And if
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: you'll allow me just real quick, Ohio is an incredible
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: thing to look at. It is the heart of the country.
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: It's shaped that way. There's nobody thinks of it as
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: the West. At one point, especially for land speculators, Ohio
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: was like the land of milk and honey. That's where
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: they really We had all these kind of deals that
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: we'd made that were holding us back from it, and
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: basically settlers just said screw those deals and they started
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: moving inland. Then the War of eighteen twelve breaks out.
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: Chapman is in and around Mansfield, Ohio. Again, he never
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: has a home address, but it's probably as close to
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: a home base as he has because he's walking in
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: these seasonal circles. He's coming back to Mansfield a lot.
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: And there is rumor a shopkeeper gets murdered. To this day,
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: we're not actually sure what happened, but a shopkeeper is murdered.
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: Very quickly.
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: News travels Native Americans killed the shopkeeper, and they're coming,
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: and they're backed by the British, which was, just to
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: be clear, a very understandable fear at the time that
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: was not delusional to think that that might be happening.
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: Town gathers, a call goes out, there are soldiers in
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: Mount Vernon, Ohio, which is about thirty five miles west. Again,
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: can't remember the tribe. I believe it might be Delaware,
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: but Native Americans might be coming to attack. We need
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: those reinforcements. Sun is setting. Who will go? Who will go?
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: Thirty five miles basically the length of a marathon. Then
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: some to go. Get some soldiers down in Mount Vernon,
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: alert them to our plight and bring them back. And
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: the way this story is told is that a shiny eyed,
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: long haired, uncaptned, skinny probably mid to late thirties at
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: this point in his life has already gotten a reputation,
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: as you said, as like almost a news carrier, as
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: a man who was a little bit of an eccentric
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: in the area seasonally would come around preaching about Swedenborg
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: raises his hand and says, I'll go no gun, depending
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: on the legend, no shoes, but no horse. No horse
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: for real's legit, and he on foot goes on a
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: newly cut, newly cut road.
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: Down to Mount Vernon.
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: A lot of the facts that we have about Chapman
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: come from children of the time because he gets lionized
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: after his death, like I mentioned, so those children eventually
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: grow into adults, and then they're the ones that are.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: Recorded, which again, of course there's a legend, but recording,
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: oral history, version of firsthand experience from an eight year old.
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: So take it all with a great assault.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: Of course, he's like the way I remember it right.
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: But they he apparently was running by basically saying, the
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: Native Americans are attacking Mansfield. The Native Americans are attacking Mansfield.
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: I run to Mount Vernon to get to get help.
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: And again this is one of those interesting things which
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: I love. This is what I love about this project
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: that I got to do. I think this country is
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: more interesting when you look at it in its three
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: dimensional complexities. I think my family, which is also a
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: tie through this story, starting with my father and those
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: lovely walks that I had back in the day, is
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: more complex when you look at it through this three
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: dimensional complexity. My first book was very much like the
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: worst moments of my family story. This is more about
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: what about the camping, what about the canoeing trips? Yes,
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: we grew up really broke, but what were those nice
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: moments that happened as well? And then John Chapman's story
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: is so much more interesting when you think about it
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: with this complexity. So was he a friend of Native Americans?
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of proof that he was. But again,
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: when war showed up right in front of him, he
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: chose a sign and he went and he got those soldiers,
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: brought the soldiers back, came back with them. Mind you,
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: So he went the thirty miles down and did the
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: thirty miles back. Which that's the last walk that I
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: do in this book is I also walked from Mansfield
• 52:48
  Speaker 3: to Mount Vernon, Ohio, and then turned around the next
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: day and did it back. Wasn't fun wasn't fun, but
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: he did it. Turned out the attack doesn't come, but
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: that gives him notoriety and fame in his lifetime. That
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: is what almost gets him, That's what levels him up,
• 53:06
  Speaker 3: and he becomes known as the Paul Revere of the
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: War of eighteen twelve, which again is a story they
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: Disney never tells us. They never tell you're in their
• 53:12
  Speaker 3: elementary school, because it makes him more complex, and therefore
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: it's easier to just brush it to the side.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: What is the Disney version? You've mentioned it a couple times,
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: but I don't even That's probably the one I have
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: in my head.
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: But what is the Disney the Disney version, there's this
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: it's nineteen forty seven, maybe forty eight, nineteen forty seven,
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: late forties. Ah, there is a melody time. They make
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: all these different kinds of musicals. I mean, basically, what
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: what Disney's looking for if we can get into the
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: capitalism aspect of that real quick is what's the story
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: we can tell without having to pay anybody money?
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: American legends.
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: Nobody's gonna come knocking on our door looking for the
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: life rights some cartoons. What Pocahontas exactly exactly yeah, exactly. Yeah,
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: beauty and the beat, all the things like that.
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: The producers where he says next time, no writers, No.
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right, that's exactly right. And so one of
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: the they came out with a bunch of these different
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: melody times. One of them was the story of John Chapman,
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: and it starts with him. He looks super skinny and
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: he's meek because it's true. He is the gentlest of
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: our American legends. He is this country at its most
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: peaceful ideals. It's one of the things that I really
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: love about him. It's one of the things I really
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: respect about him. They give him a Bible. Did they
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: get into Swedenborgianism? No, little just got a straight up Bible. Yeah.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he just gets the Bible.
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: He gets the right down the middle of the lane
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: and the whole the whole video opens up. And they
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: showed this in elementary schools across the country. They showed
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: this after churches. If this isn't ringing any bells for you,
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: that means you might have had an interest in upbringing No.
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: And I also picture the character played by him. He's
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: got like a like a canvas sad with.
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: His seat exactly. He's got a man purse full of
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: seeds and back and it opens with like all these
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: very hardy men walking west, and he's kind of like, oh,
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: I can't go west, Like an angel comes to him
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: and is like, yeah, you can. They need apples. And
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: then he walks west and he throws his apple seeds
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: willy nilly, no orchards, no capitalism, just out of the
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: goodness of his heart. And then they grow, and then
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: people have apple pies and they have apple tarts, and
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: even I will say it gives it gives Swedenborg like
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: a little bit of a nod, because they do believe
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: in angels and they do believe in ghosts. And so
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: then he gets older and everyone loves him. The animals
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: love him, the Native Americans love him, the settlers love him.
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: He's got no shoes on. And we can get into
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: those facts real quick, like this is this is the
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: same John Chapman that like befriended a wolf and had
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: a pet wolf for many years. Yes, this is the
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: same John Chapman who like once came across some bears
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: living his stomach, but that he called his home and
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: he decided, oh, I should let the bears have the
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: stump because he's a good man. No, because it's bears.
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: Because it's bears. You don't go mess with bears, I
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: think is the easier part of that start.
• 56:11
  Speaker 2: He purchased a horse that was about to be slaughtered
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: because he didn't want to see it killed and suppose.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: That one might be real.
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: Okay, they do, And then he wouldn't even ride, right
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: because that that was wrong to him, was to like
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: put the horse, you know, make it do his labor.
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he really there was some part of Sweeten organism
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: that really made him respect to animals. So he didn't
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: hunt supposedly, which is that's what we also have ledgers
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: where he got jerky like you know, like but like
• 56:36
  Speaker 3: maybe but he wasn't armed. He might have been eccentric later, right,
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: he wasn't armed. The horse thing was that there is
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: paperwork that he bought a horse. That's great, and then
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: partnered with one of his ordered guys and was like,
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: will you just make sure this horse takes out the
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: rest of its days?
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Huh?
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: So like he had he was apparently really good with children.
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: He would often because he did have big, thick, callous
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: feet from how much walking he did, so he would
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: like walk on embers or stick his feet with needles
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: too much, to like the horrification of children.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: To like wow little kids.
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, to like wow little kids exactly.
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: So if you wind up being an eccentric old man, yeah, yeah,
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: don't do the wow and little kids. Yeah, that's that.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: You got to stay away from that one a little bit.
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: We had one of those in our town. Yeah, we
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: had them. Right, that's a bad joke. That's a bad joke.
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: Wait a lot, but no, Jenny, Like.
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: Another one is he didn't use a campfire because he
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: thought it would kill mosquitos because they were drawn to
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: the light. Another one was he thought he stepped on
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: a warm ones and that's why he didn't wear shoes.
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: So there's all these eccentric eccentricities.
• 57:42
  Speaker 2: And it's it's why he wouldn't graf trees, because you're
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: like causing some pain by cutting into a tree, right,
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: and so that's why he goes straight to.
• 57:51
  Speaker 3: See Well, so this this is a two This is
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: a two parter. I think it's both. Some people argue
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: it's one or the other. He either didn't graft trees because,
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: like you just said, he did not believe in hurting
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: other living creatures and a tree in his like, this
• 58:06
  Speaker 3: is like the prototype hippie. In a way, he is
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: the American legend for our first Jesus driven hippie.
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Because by grafting, you're cutting into live trees.
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: Exactly, you're cutting a hunk of the live tree. You're
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: replanting it. That's how you can ensure that you are
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: getting the clone. As you so beautifully put it earlier.
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: Other people say he just loved God so much that
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: to do that would be to mess with God's plan God,
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: which is I'm just gonna put the seed in. If
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: the best apple happens to grow from it, it'll be great.
• 58:40
  Speaker 3: Of course that never happened, but I would argue it's
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: probably both.
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: My cynical wife has a third theory. When I told
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: her about Johnny Appleseed, the real version a few years ago,
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: she's like, well, no, he was clearly a business man,
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: and so he was saving money by just like using seed.
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: He wasn't following his real religion he was. He didn't
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: have all their motives because.
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: You know, you know what I get these seeds for? Yeah,
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: zero dollars. No, that's to be honest.
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: Your wife is probably, if not one hundred percent, right,
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: A big part of the pie. But anyways to get
• 59:14
  Speaker 3: back to that is the Disney The Disney version of
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: him was the sweet Person, and the Disney film ends
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: with Angel Michael coming down from heaven, taking his old
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: hobo looking soul up and putting him in like the wall,
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: like he's our first American saint.
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: This has some very Mormon like tones. It's I'm glad
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: to hear you say that some of that was influenced.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: I need to. I think it's importin here that I
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: betray that I admit to a level of ignorance about apples.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: Oh's this is what you're going to you're going to
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: come in here. I thought that I thought for some
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: reason that when you do buy seed, like in America,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: when you do buy seed, it doesn't work out. And
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: the you they always grafted onto American crab apple.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: No, that that the root.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: I bet someone's going to write in maybe that the
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: root that all if you go to any apple or
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: yeah in America, yep, that it is that it is
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: grafted onto the American crab apple rootstock.
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: I well, I think our apples have become so corrupted.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: At one point I think they say there were seventeen
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: thousand species of apple on the continent. Now we're down
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: to only a few thousand. And there's like these dudes
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: and women who their whole life goal after they retire,
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: they like, you know, have a have a job that
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: allows them to retire at fifty two. They become lost
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: apple hunters and they're going out looking for these varieties.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: So I'm sure.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: I'm sure we have many species that I know, the
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: nastiest apple tree in the world, but somebody would like
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: to know about that.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: I'm sure.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: But the version you're saying that they're all grafted onto
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: crab apples, Some certainly are, but not all.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: And I thought somehow when you planted a seed it
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: just like it's not like an idiot. No, I thought
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: it somehow just didn't work.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: No, it works.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: You just get a bad You.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: Just get a really bad apple, unless you want to
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: make alcohol, in which case it's a great apple because
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: you just need to be able to grind grind them up.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: What I will say, real quick shout out to Michael
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: Pollan who wrote a great book Botany of Desire, one
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 3: of those which gets into some of the different aspects
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: and very much was informative for this book as well,
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: because apple. The other thing is everyone thinks American as
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: apple pie, So we think of apples as American, not
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: they they're patriotic, they're from the Kazakhstan, they were brought
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: over here. And I have, like, I have a few
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: different apple theories which are just like more barroom talk
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: than science what you're talking, which is I think delicious
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: apples have the best pr on the planet. They look delicious, yeah,
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: but they're not delicious. They're terrible and doing great.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: And the gland a real ship apple is the Macintosh. Oh,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: here we go, Macintosh. It's a junk apple. What do
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: you think of gold chrisp has taken over the apple world?
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: What do you think of Golden Delicious?
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Man? The Macintosh? That's a mealy, thick skinned, bullshit apple Macintosh.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: No, no, I'm I'm with you one hundred percent.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: Johnny apple Seed get some credit for the Golden Delicious,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: which is a modern apple that's you know, survived to
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: make it the grocery store shelves. He didn't make that,
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: but he made its like parents in the Apple lineage,
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: which was like a West Virginia Delicious or a West
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: Virginia golden something like that. So uh, like of all
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: this Johnny apple seed talk, you'd still see a little
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: bit of them in the grocery store.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: Listen, when you when you take that many at bats,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: actually you gotta you gotta have a couple of good ones,
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: is what you're saying.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: Does that check out?
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: I really said I I will say, I think this
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: man knows apple's better than me. And when it comes
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: to that, when it comes to the botany aspect of this,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: this is where I get that. This is where I
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: get the loosest in my research. The one thing you
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: bring up McIntosh. One thing that's fun is that in
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: the book, I go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: where his story ends. It's where he dies. But they
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: now have this incredibly, huge, beautiful, wonderful Johnny Appleseed Festival.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: It happens every year.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: If you have a chance that you get it was
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: so much bigger and more spectacular than I thought it
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: could be. I had some of the best food I've
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: ever had. Granted, some of it was like chicken dumplings
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: by Amish people.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: And when you have.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: That much workforce for free, of course you're going to
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: make some really really good stuff. But one of the
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: other aspects of it is that Fort Wayne has a
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: farm league team that their players go to San Diego,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: which is interesting, it's very far away, but they are
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: called the Fort Wayne TinCaps. Oh, and it is a
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: gorgeous stadium to this day to this day. But the
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: reason you say McIntosh brought it up for me was
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: I was like, so, how did you come up with
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: the name? And they had all these different aspects, and
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: they had some voting and there are other parts that
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: were linked to Fort Wayne. And one of their aspects
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: was well, we know we want to do something with Apple.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: And immediately they.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: Were like, oh, there's a little company in Coopertino, California
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: that might start writting us some cease and desist letters
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 3: because it's Apple. Like when you think about when you
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: think about how American apple, like, Apple's one of the
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 3: biggest companies on the planet, and that is their logo.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: It's just an apple with a little bite taken out
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: of it. It's this universal symbol that has really taken
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: over like every culture in a way has these this
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: draw to apples. But the tin caps. They eventually went
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: with tin caps and I'll never forget. I interviewed this guy,
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 3: Michael Limmerit's in the book.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: I call it.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: It's like the moneyball aspect of the book. It's like
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 3: when I get into sports a little bit. And I
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: just took him for a big walk and we did
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 3: a big interview and he was just like, yeah, people
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 3: got real mad at the Tincap because it's not historically accurate.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 3: And I was like, it's a card to like the
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: apple also has a face on it has anyone met
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: like like if you're a farm team, like you're having
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 3: some fun. And he was like, you're writing a book
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: about Johnny Appleseed, you'll see and he was like he
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: was all these armchair historians Like just really, he was like,
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: I thought we were making a team for like the
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: local area in community. Just for the record, they sell
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: the most merchandise of any farm league team. They've won
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: the division. Like they're really good. It's right downtown. If
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: you the tickets are inexpensive. If you ever in Fort Wayne,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: go to a Fort Wing TinCaps game. It's so so fun.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: That said. He genuinely was like we became a national store.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 3: Like people were calling into CNN being like there weren't
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 3: handles on Tinca at that this is a historically inaccurate
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: and like this is all that, and they got dragged.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: They got Yeah, people feel so like this is part
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's Daniel Boone like right. People find their
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: little slice of American history and they feel so impassionate
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: about it. And I think that's a good thing in
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: the end, but like eventually you do run into like, hey, guys,
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: it's okay, it's a it's just a baseball team.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: You can calm down. Here's what I want to do next. Yeah,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: how does he die?
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: Great questioned No No. War of eighteen twelve happens. He
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: becomes the Paul Revere the War of eighteen twelve. He
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: becomes the Paul Revere of what at the time was
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: the West. And again, it's so easy to forget that
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: Ohio used to be as far as we were when
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: it came to that kind of American destiny that like
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: march west. Eventually, and I love this fact about him.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 3: When he enters Ohio, it is so unpopulated by white colonists.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 3: His life and the population of white settlers is like
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 3: and never ending, like like the the years that he
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: was there is just what's the word I'm looking for
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: in math, exponential. It's an exponential graph of how many
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: settlers move into that land of milky money. So he's
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: one of the earliest, not earliest people, you know, there
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 3: were some land purveyors and surveyors and stuff, but he
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: is definitely one of the earliest settlers to really make
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: Ohio his home. And by the time he's hitting his
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: forties and fifties, it's gone in his mind, overpopulated by
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: white people, and so he keeps pushing west. Now again
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: this gets back to almost your wife's view of him
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: as a perfect capitalist. Which again, some people view him
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: as a religious person. Some people view him as almost
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: our first American saint. Some people view him as the
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 3: first pacifist hippie. Some people view him as just like
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: a really shrewd, albeit eccentric businessman. And so there's something
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 3: he said, for well, these people all have orchards, and
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: all I do is I know how to get free
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 3: apple seeds. So I have to keep moving west to
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 3: keep up with my market. So he moves westward as
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: things expand into Indiana. Now my thing, which is not true.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: This is me just adding to the legends. This is
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: the part of me that's my father I like to
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: think of. He's trying to relive his glory days. He's
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: trying to recap you know, he's got Yeah. Man, they
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: don't talk about me in Ohio the way that they
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: used to. I need to get back. He makes his
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: way to Indiana. Indiana starts as a fort settlement. This
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: is where I'm sorry, I forget his name. But there's
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: this incredible character that I discover and I write about
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: briefly in the book, which is this guy who was
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: basically he had red hair and he was born of settlers.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: Then Native Americans captured him and took him as a child.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: He was raised by Native Americans. He fought on the
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: side of the Native Americans during again something we've touched
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: on but haven't given nearly enough, Like when you're taught
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: in education in elementary school and public school, it's like
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: Revolutionary War, Westward Expansion, Civil War ooh complex. Anyways, moving
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: on World War one, Sorry about some of that. Slavery's
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: moving on. But we win World War two, huzzah, and
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: then it kind of we we gloss over so much
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 3: of the brutality and fighting that happened to win. Basically
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: the middle of the country. We kind of jumped straight
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 3: to that kind of wild wild West. This character his name,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry that I cannot remember it, but it translates
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: to carrot top.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: I'm not joking. Really, yeah, that's where it came from.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 3: It's not where it comes from at all. But he
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: had red hair. He fought on the side of the
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 3: Native Americans. He eventually then gets one over back by
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 3: the US government. He becomes a spy. He comes back
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: and fights for the Union, basically the Federal then Mary's
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: and moves back. He basically is a spy. He's a
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: like again, just like Daniel mcway. Somebody should write a
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: book about this guy. I will look up his name.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 3: We can put it up later. Anyways. John Chapman is
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 3: moving into Indiana and the Fort Wayne during that and
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: he's redoing orchards. But he is in his sixties. He
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: lives into his mid seventies, which is really good for
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: that time period, especially sleeping outside that much. But it's
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: this walking. But he dies on the floor. They're not strangers.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 3: This is part of you know. Yes, he slept on
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: a lot of strangers' floors, but because he walked in
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: these seasonal circles. He eventually strangers became friends. There's a
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 3: story of somebody building him a room off their house
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 3: just for him, right, just they construct an extra room
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: just for him, so he's not sleeping in the barn
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: or outside. But they do not build a door that
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: goes from that room to inside their house. Huh, because
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: he is covered in and this is a direct quote,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: we beasties. Because at this point in his life he
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 3: has been living outside so long he is accumulating bugs.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: God it, wow, he is somebody you do not He
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: smells pretty bad and you probably don't want him in
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: your house. So they like basically killed him a glorified
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 3: human dog house that is attached to the house, but
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 3: does not that what he dies, but it does not
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: have a dark no, I'm sorry, outside of fort wall
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 3: in the doghouse man, he dies on the floor of
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 3: a family's home. They write a beautiful piece of writing,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 3: but they say that he looked excited to pass to
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 3: the other side, which he'd spent his whole life proselytizing.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 3: He gave a great sermon before he died, warm by
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 3: their hearth, and they say that he walked fifteen miles
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 3: earlier that day, really, so he went out exactly how
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 3: he wanted to go out.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: And they recognized him as a person of notoriety at
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: that point.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: Again, that war of eighteen twelve and kind of pushed
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: him over where, like he became a known entity in
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: the areas. But again it's not until twenty years later,
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: so he dies in his seventies. But it's the eighteen
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: hundreds when we are really trying to figure out how
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: to coalesc as a country. We are looking for stories
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: that talk about our best ambitions. Again as we kind
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 3: of move west and as there is this brutality, and
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 3: for Harper's Bizarre, a man writes an article that's like
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: thirty pages all about this incredibly sweet, incredibly Christian, incredibly loving,
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: beloved guy who was just out there planning apples out
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: of the goodness of his heart so that people had
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: things to survive off of as they moved westward. And
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: that in like the eighteen especially, we're talking about civil
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: wars happening, So we are trying to say no, no, no, no, no,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: we're not just this brutal, terrible country that's as mad
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: at each other fighting over these really terrible issues. No,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: there's a goodness to us too. In that article is
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: the is the beginning of the basis of what becomes
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: John Chapman the man transition to Johnny Appleseed.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: Though, who coined what was the first What's the first
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: time you see Johnny apples in print?
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: It is almost certainly that, But some people did call
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 3: him that even at the time. That was like a nickname,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: John Applesyn because again he would just go to sieries
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: and the sighteries. They didn't give that like they it
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: was it was, it was.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: So it came about naturally. It wasn't coined by a writer.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, yeah, we can't give it to
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 3: like one specific guy.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: Is that Does that work with the fact check?
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: Well, I was gonna yeah, they were calling them that
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: at the time, it seems, but like I just clearing
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: up a number I said earlier, the donation track. He
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: was fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees. Those were
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: the requirements. He said, fifty yes, so I was I
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 2: was had doubled them. But like if the marketing had
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: been different around him, he could have been Johnny peach
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: Pit or Johnny Johnny Fennel peach pit like talk talk
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: about some of the other stuff.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: He was, thank you so much for bringing that up.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I space someone the things I most
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: wanted to talk about. So it's alcohol. It's all alcohol, right,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: we talked about that earlier. It's all for booze. So
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: why does that get forgotten? Well, you could easily make
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: the argument of well, we're trying to teach you to
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: elementary school and unlike the time, we don't booze up
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: children anymore the way that we used to. But it's not.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 3: It's prohibition. So apples were seen as grapes. They were
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: an alcohol making fruit back then. It wasn't.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: Oh it's that's interesting man, that that would have been
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: that you'd have viewed it that way. Yeah, you would not.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: It was making a little bevy. You guys are making
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: some pies, right exactly. It was not.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: Apples were not for they was that was their main thing.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 3: If people were eating them on the sides, that was
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 3: like the side thing. Then prohibition happens. Grandma Hatchet, she's
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: making the great fight against booze across the country. You know,
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 3: Tee Toller are coming out of the woodwork and part
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 3: of their war is a war on booze, and part
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 3: of their war is a war on bars, and part
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: of their war is a war on apples. And it
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 3: becomes clear, like we have records of federal agencies coming
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 3: to be like your uncle has an apple tree in
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 3: his backyard. He's probably using it to make some kind
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: of homebrew, and so agents are literally cutting apple trees down,
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 3: and so probition happens. Then the twenty first Amendment, God
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 3: bless happens.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: We're back. Baby booze is a part of America.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 3: But we all, I think, to be honest, I always
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 3: look at probibi as like just like a drying out
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 3: period where everybody kind of got to get their legs back.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: And then they could kind of move forward from there.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: All right, maybe we shouldn't be doing it all the time.
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 3: And genuinely, the apple industry needs new pr And that
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: is when an apple a day keeps the doctor away,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 3: I was square to God. That is when we come
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: to think of apples as a healthy treat. And what's
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: nice is they actually are. They actually are healthy. But
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: for a very long time they just the way that
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 3: the grape is linked to wine, apple was linked to
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 3: cider and that was their main true calling. And now
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 3: what's interesting is only with modern breweries, Like like the
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 3: other thing progress killed was small batch alcohol making. Then
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 3: these giant collomortions moved in took over the booze business,
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 3: and for many many decades, you only you know, you'd
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: have your five beers that you could choose at any bar.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 3: Only recently have people become reinvigorated in remaking their own
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 3: booze or remaking small batch booze to serve local communities,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 3: which I love, Like that's America at its best, is
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 3: when it's the most diverse. And so cider making is
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 3: also coming back in a real way, and I love
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 3: seeing that. So cider making is on the rise. Riverhead
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 3: cider House. I live on Long Island and there's a
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 3: sightery right by where I live, and that's where I
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 3: wrote a lot of this book. And they have just
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 3: had tremendous success bringing that kind of old school styles
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 3: and making cider and selling it to the local community
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 3: with no dreams of going national, no dreams of becoming
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: the next you know, just like this is something that
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 3: serves these towns here, This is a place to gather,
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: like a church, like a baseball stadium. You know, that's
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 3: what a bar is. It's a public house. It's a
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: place I think. You know, you guys care about conserving
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 3: land and something that's so important to me too. Like
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: in this book, I'm in so many state parks, national parks,
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 3: but there's also this this need to to protect places
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 3: where humans can just come together and gather, and places
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 3: like the Riverheadsider House do that which I really love.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: I was never able to replicate this, but at one
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: time made the perfect batch of Hardsider on accident. No,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: we were out hunting in the winter and we found
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: all these frozen apples under an apple tree. It was
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot,
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: and he had his orchard apples and then he had
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: these just stray apple trees out and about that he
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: didn't harvest. And I always thought that those are the
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: better apples. He has all these frozen apples. We put
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: them in one of his wooden crates, a wooden apple crate.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: I took him home and put it in their frozen solid.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: I put them in the basement in a five gallon bucket. Okay,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: and I don't know what they had already fermented. I
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: don't remember like all of a sudden. It was just
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: that you could like dip into that and drink it
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: and it was booze. Dude, it was good. And we
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: later tried, you know, whatever I did, it never like
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: it just never happened again. Do you know what I mean?
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: That never happened again. But it just it just made
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: this perfect. It's just somehow these apples thawed and in
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: my mom and dad's basement like made a hard sider.
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: So you just experience and never again like you got.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: I could go get apples again that are frozen with
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: film in my mom and dad's basement to just make
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: rotten apples.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: But we have but we have evidence of animals doing
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 3: this what you were talking about. There are some monkeys
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: that do it in certain places. We have evidence of
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: deer sometimes knowing during wet seasons to return to air,
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 3: like I think a lot of animals enjoy getting a
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 3: little tipsy. And you as like a human being, a
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 3: full grown you got high school but yeah, yeah, all right,
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 3: all right, sorry, maybe not fully grown. That's like twenty
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 3: six is when the brain is fully developed. But you
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 3: got to experience basically grabbing this thing, having it go bad,
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: but going so bad that it went good.
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 5: I don't know if this is the right word. Mile
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 5: Man called it applejack. Yeah, that's a good Yeah. So
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 5: apple cider is the like sipping all day stuff. But
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 5: then you can make this harder apple brandy, which is
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 5: very popular at the time, and that's what you call
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 5: it apple jack.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: That's right. Here's my last question you. And I think
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: that this is true of you because some things you've said.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: This is this is the thing I harp on all
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: the time about American culture, the narrative, if you imagine
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: your online life, your online life, the online narrative is
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: about that America is divided, the partisan fractures, right, we're
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: leading to some great civil war. And I know and
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: I understand, like my online life is like, I got it.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: It's as true as true. The country is splitting a
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: part of the seams. But my lived life, my lived life,
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: I don't get it. I don't see it. The people
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: my neighbors. I've said this before, my most immediate neighbors,
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: I do not know what their political leanings are. I
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: honestly don't know what their political leanings are. I know
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: that if my home was on fire. They would rush
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: in to check if my family is okay, and I
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: know I would rush into their home. Amen, I do
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: not know their political leanings. Amen, I don't even care,
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: Like I don't need to know their political leanings.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 3: I'll do you one better. I know my neighbor's political leanings.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 3: They are not mine. And I know that my blizzard blizzard,
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I know that a blizzard came while I
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 3: was out of town, and they were the first people
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 3: over there using their plow to plow out the driveway
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 3: with a snowblower, making sure that my wife was safe,
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 3: you know. And I know that if their house was
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 3: ever in any kind of situation, anytime, I'm able to
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: help them. Those are your neighbors. That is the point
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 3: of community. That is the point of trust.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: That you've said a couple things about your wanderings, your
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: American ran ambling. Yeah, that just I don't know you.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: You seem to express a sort of optimism about.
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 3: I have walked outside and I've seen this country at
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 3: an eye level. People are good for the most part,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 3: Don't get me wrong. You're gonna meet jerks everywhere. The hospitality,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 3: the kindness that one of my favorite things. The curiosity
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: about one another is really strong. I love going to
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 3: new places, I love meeting new people. And in no
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: way do we start the way that they would start
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 3: you on whatever Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. So
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 3: what do you think nobody said you don't sit down
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: in your yarn ass? What do you think about proposition one?
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: A like no man? Maybe maybe basket like maybe sports,
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 3: Maybe we can have some No. You walk into a
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 3: place and you have a meeting with another fellow human being.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 3: And if I can say, honestly, we've talked so much
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: about the history because I know that's what's of interest,
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 3: talked about westward expansion because I know that's what's interest.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 3: But the core of this book is it is a
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 3: non political look at where this country is right now
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: and what I saw. You know, Ron Churnou is going
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 3: to be able to write the great biography of John
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: Chapman that's like seven thousand pages long, or Howard Means
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 3: is this great writer. He came out with a book
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: about John Chapman in twenty eleven from Simon and Schuster.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 3: It's a great, straightforward biography. What I did was slept
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 3: in a parking lot that's probably near where John Chapman
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: he used to sleeping and shits. That's what I did,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 3: and I got to meet so many individuals in this country.
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 3: This country is not on the verge of civil war.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 3: This country is not this divided partisan place that you
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 3: see when you look at your screen. Don't get wrong.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: Phone's nice for a map. I can't be totally anti screen.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 3: The phone is nice for taking photos or recording a
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 3: voice memo. But the more time I spend off of
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 3: social media, the more time I spend listening to podcasts
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 3: of people that I enjoy instead of just staring at
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 3: this large media that I believe is genuinely invested in
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: making sure that we feel scared, isolated, alone, and angry
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 3: at each other. The better I feel. And the tough
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 3: thing for me is there is family history in this
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 3: book as well.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: There is.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: Things that my family have grappled with in the last
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: couple of years, and I have seen firsthand what happens
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: when you give in to isolation, when you give in
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 3: to loneliness, you cannot be scared of your fellow neighbors.
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 3: I understand that we are human beings and we have
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 3: the potential to do harm history is long and bloody,
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 3: but at the same time, there are so many stories
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: of coming together, figuring out problems, working with one another
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 3: to make a safe haven for all of us. And
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 3: I think this country, we are approaching two hundred and
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 3: fifty years, this country is an experiment. Is it perfect?
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 3: Have we done some atrocious things. Absolutely, But when you
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 3: look at our ideals, when you look at the better
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 3: of our angels, when you look at the things that
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 3: we are reaching for, when you look at the way
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 3: this country comes together and still works two hundred and
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 3: fifty years later, covering vast but Montana could be its
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 3: own country, Texas could be its own country. New England
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 3: put all those nerds in their own country like that.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 3: It could be that way. But we are one country
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 3: and it works, and I think that is a beautiful thing.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 3: And when I walked out in the world, I want
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 3: to be very clear, my father said to me, you're
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 3: gonna get shot.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: I did not walk it.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you're gonna get shot, and not to mention
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 3: what you do. We didn't even get into the lack
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 3: of preparedness. I'm almost horrified to be on this podcast.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 3: I want to be clear. I've learned more. I know
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 3: how tends work. I've gotten a little bit better at it.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 3: I want to learn more, if I'm being honest, like
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 3: hunting is something that I'm trying to get more interested in.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 3: I think that that's a really incredible part of the
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 3: human experience. But real quick, my dad was like, you're
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 3: going to get shot. I walked out into the country
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: with no preconceived notions. That was an important part of
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: this project, and what I found was so much more
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 3: life affirming, heart filling, soul booing than I expected. And
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 3: I'm so happy I did it. And I hope that
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 3: people feel that when they read this book, because this
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 3: is a book of coming together. It's a book about
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 3: walking away from loneliness and towards community.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 2: M Hm, did you go to Nova, Ohio?
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Man, okay, did I see the lab? Oh? Here
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: we go, we get the real faction.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 3: Tell Steve, Okay, So, Patti Smith the Allegro Farm.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: This is what we're talking about. Patty Smith, musician.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, oh my gosh, that'd be cool. Wait hang on,
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 3: it's not Patty Smith. Sorry, let me try that again.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 3: A woman named Patty on the Allegor farm in Novo Ohio.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 3: There's a claim that is the last apple tree planted
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 3: by John Chapman, and it still bears fruit. And I'd
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 3: go and I talked to Patty. There is some interesting science,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 3: exceptionally rich soil. People have taken seeds from this tree
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 3: and they have brought them to space.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: That is true.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 3: In the nineties, this tree was so popular that people
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 3: used to show up in buses field of dream style
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 3: just to take photos with.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: It in the nineteen nineties.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 3: In the nineteen nineties it then kind of the farm
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 3: kind of went through some different iterations. Patty, I think
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 3: is kind of bringing it back. I showed up. I'm
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 3: not joking that you want to talk about a wonderful
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 3: moment in America. I didn't call ahead, I didn't write
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 3: an email. I just rolled up, knocked on the door.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 3: Immediately was apologetic. I was like, I'm so sorry, I
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 3: can't come back later. Let me leave my number. This
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 3: is weird. And she was like, stop being weird man,
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 3: and just was like, come on in, you want iced tea,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 3: lemonade or water. And she just sat and she just
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 3: talked with me. And so the story she had about
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 3: not just the tree. She also had stories about that
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 3: that town was a stop on the underground railroad or
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 3: on the underground railroad. She had stories about her great
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 3: great grandparents and basically trying to help slaves get up
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 3: into Canada. She had stories about the ways she used
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 3: to take the apples and go. She always wanted horses,
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 3: but they only had sheeping cows on the farm, so
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 3: she'd go to the cows and pretend they were horses
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 3: when she.
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 2: Was a child.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 3: All these wonderful like Again, this book is also very
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 3: much about what's legend, what's fact, and at the end
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 3: of the day, how much does it really matter? But
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 3: it is also a rambow tree, which some people take
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 3: a little umbrage with. Could that possibly be a tree
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 3: that John Han planet? He himself did come to that area.
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 3: That's documented because there was a Swedenborgian minister who lived
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 3: in that area, so he would come through in Commune,
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 3: so he definitely visited that farm.
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: Do you think he planted that tree? Me?
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I have to believe.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fun. I have to believe. I will.
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 3: I will say in the book, I hedge it more.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 3: In the book, I hedge it more. But you to
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 3: me the person that I am, Yeah, half my father,
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 3: half my mother. I go with my father on that
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 3: one that I love.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: The idea.
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 3: There's a there's so there's three trees there now, but
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 3: one of them very very old, and basically the idea
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 3: is that the roots almost died and then regrew.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 3: You can you can I get into the science of
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 3: it in the book you can. You can make up
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 3: your own mind.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's like not uncommon. If you had a
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: plumb tree and it failed in year five, if you
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: leave it for a season or two, something else may
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 2: start growing there. And it could it could even be
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 2: a fruit that's not a plum any, so that like
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: could happen what you're saying it could. And there's now
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: multiple online sellers who will sell you a tree that
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 2: they say came from the Johnny apple seed tree. There's
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 2: a couple different places. And I see, I see my
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 2: orchard going through phases, like I have a twenty twenty
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: seven plan, a twenty twenty eight plan. Next year, I
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 2: want to put a Johnny appleseed tree.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: In the ground.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 2: But I want someone to tell me that's a good
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: idea and be like, yes, that's a Johnny apple ste.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: Let me let me do it right now, because I
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 3: will say this I do. I talk to Patty about
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 3: the person that licensed the right to sell the seeds,
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 3: and that to me almost felt a little bit like
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 3: I was like, this is going to be like a
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 3: succession style. Sorry, and I decided. I was like, I
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 3: already got a lot going on this book, so I
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 3: decided not.
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: To chase that one down.
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 3: Remember I mentioned the football all right, Sorry, I remember
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 3: I mentioned the baseball team. So they have a tree
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 3: in front of the stadium which they won't cut because
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 3: it's a Johnny apple seed tree.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: So it's actually kind of blocking sign.
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 3: It grew bigger than they expected, and I'm pretty sure
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 3: it's from that Patty tree and this guy who's kind
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 3: of licensed it and done it. But I will do
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 3: you on better, is what I'm trying to say. Please,
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 3: I have these apples. Yes, I will come back to Montana.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 3: I'm not joking. This is the kind of dumb stuff
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 3: I do. I will come back to Montana. I will
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 3: give you the seed and you don't have to figure
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 3: out whether it's real or not. You can plant the
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 3: legendary Johnny.
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: Appleseed tree on your proper Let's do it. That's the
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: old centric right there. That's a future old. Just don't
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: stick needles in your feet.
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 2: As the property value is going to go way up
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 2: once I've got a Johnny Appleseed tree there.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: That's great, man, all right, everybody. The name of the
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: book American Rambler, Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: Isaac Fitzgerald.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 3: It's brand spanking new. It's brand spanking new. It's out
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 3: May twelfth, New York Times Bestseller. A lot of nice
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 3: people have said a lot of nice things about it. Man,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 3: you got a boatloaded I then you can get into that.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 3: You got a boatload of great writers saying great things
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 3: about the book.
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: Check it out. I hope it's because they like it.
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much, man, Thanks for having me on. Gentlemen,
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate you.