Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Johnny Appleseed

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

Johnny Appleseed was real! And he was about as amazing as the legend paints him. He really did plant apple trees all over America and if the feds hadn’t chopped them down during Prohibition, they’d still be around. Learn what we mean in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, and welcome into short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

There's Jerry. Let's get to it. I thought this is an interesting pick from you, and I salute you because, well, I mean, I'm literally saluting you. I know. I see my hand. I'm pretty good at it, too.

You really are. Look at how high and tight that is. And you did the little snap where your hand reverberates. Oh, I hate a lazy salute. So yeah, I salute you because this is, people think of, they hear the words Johnny Appleseed. They hear that name, and immediately they think of the Disney version, or they think of Folktale.

But Johnny Appleseed was a real dude named John Chapman who planted apple trees. Yeah, it's one of those amazing, awesome myths that turns out to be virtually accurate. Yeah, so it's not a myth at all. No, not really. I mean, there's only some stuff about that legend that is somewhat mythical.

But really, most of it's pretty accurate. It's not like he had a giant ox or anything that followed him around that was blue. No, that was Paul Bunyan. He was basically, I think the thing, right, the thing that people usually get wrong in the retelling with Johnny Appleseed is that he was basically the world's first flower child.

And that he was just basically kind of traipsing along the frontier from the 18th to the 19th century, planting trees just because he loved nature. That is not correct necessarily. This guy did love nature. He's a businessman. He was. He did this for out of a business, a sense of business.

For profit, you can say it. Sure. But he was not like any kind of hard-nosed, hard-hitting, like come to your house and break your legs kind of business band. He would never double-cross anybody or do something in business that would make someone else suffer. He apparently was well-known for never, ever reminding someone

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

So he was that kind of businessman. And yet, even with that mentality, even with that attitude, he had everything he needed in life and more, which was not necessarily substantial because he used to sleep on a bed of leaves and little twig huts that he made of his own construction on the frontier.

Well, let's talk about Apples for a sec. Apples, as far as we know, started out in what we would call Kazakhstan today. They gained a lot of popularity in Rome because they grafted apples and a lot of fruit trees, if you want them to grow in fruit like you are accustomed to or like you want them to, you don't plant from seed. You graft them, which is when you take a stem with a bud on it

and through magic, not technique as a gardener, but through magic, you graft that onto another tree instead of planting from seed and you would get a more reliable outcome, especially in the case of apples, because apparently growing apples from seed, if you have a wonderful red delicious apple and you go spit a seed out into the ground,

it might grow into something and maybe, I mean, obviously an apple tree, but it probably will not be a red delicious apple that you can eat. No, they were called spitters. Apples growing from seed were called spitters, at least according to the Smithsonian article that we found, because they are way, way sour.

Apples did not used to be like what we think of apples today. They were very, very sour, at least the ones growing from seeds. They were sour and Henry David Thoreau said, did I mention they were sour? Henry David Thoreau said that they would put a squirrel's teeth on edge. It's pretty sour.

That's super sour and I love the way he put it. So folksy. Yeah. Now he was a proto hippie, I'll tell you that. But these were the trees that Johnny Appleseed was planting. He was planting them from seed, not from grafting and apparently one reason why he planted them from seed and not grafting was because he was a member

of the Swedenborgian church. Mork, mork, mork, which kind of held that plants could feel and therefore grafting was inherently cruel because it could conceivably create suffering in the plant. So he grew from seed. All right, let's take a break. Oh, wow. And we'll come back and we'll talk about why John Chapman

wanted to plant all these apples to begin with from seed right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Mr. Chapman was from Ohio.

And it's funny, we don't know a lot about his early years. He was born in, actually born in Massachusetts, but kind of lived his life in Ohio, I think, for the most part, and which was the West at the time, which is funny. And said, all right, here's the deal. The Ohio Company Associate said, all right, you want to go out West and settle.

If you want to form a permanent homestead beyond Ohio, then you can get 100 acres. But what you have to do, though, is you have to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years, I guess is an incentive to make the land rich with plants? Well, also to show that you plan to be there in a few years when those things started bearing fruit.

It was a way to show that you meant to settle there permanently, I guess. Well, yeah, but it's not like build a house. I mean, it had an agricultural benefit. I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess that would have been part of it then, too, yeah. So he says, all right, he sees a business opportunity. And he's like, if I can start heading West from Pennsylvania

and I can get just ahead of these settlers and plant these things, like claim this land and plant these trees and these orchards, then I can turn around and sell them at a much higher value. Yeah, because he improved the land. He was the first squatter. Kind of, in a way, I guess. But the other thing that I saw he did, too,

was he would establish nurseries in the area as well. So if you didn't buy attractive land that he'd already developed, you could also still just come and buy his trees from him. And he did this for decades, going up and down the frontier, because the frontier kept growing further and further West. And at first, I mean, when he first embarked out,

and I mean, we're talking Ohio, Ohio was the frontier. There was no United States beyond that. I don't think Ohio was even a state quite yet. So he's walking up and down these unsettled lands, growing these orchards, planting apple trees, and then also creating nurseries. But at the same time, too, he was also serving as a liaison

between these incoming settlers and the Native Americans who now suddenly had neighbors, whether they wanted them or not. And he apparently spent a lot of time learning the languages of the different tribes that he encountered, and they grew to trust him. And so he became an advocate for the settlers, but also was able to advocate for the Native Americans, too.

He was just that kind of a guy. He was, that's kind of the cloth he was cut from. I bet he put his mouth around a piece of pipe or two, speaking of one of the first hippies. Sure. All right, so he's going around, he's planting all these apple orchards, and I guess presumably peach, because he was required to.

But he's not known as Johnny Peach Tree. No, just apple seed. Or peach seed, I guess. And here's the thing, though, with these apples, like we said, because he's planting them from seed only and not grafting them, it's pretty wild, like it's like the Wild West apple-wise. You don't know what's gonna come up.

Many times, like you said, they're much too sour to eat, but what they weren't too sour for is to make booze out of them in the form of cider. And cider was a big, big part of frontier life. Right. Like they drank it, it's apparently New Englanders that transplanted out on the western edges of Ohio would drink close to 11 ounces of hard cider per day.

And it was a time when water quality was suspect and you knew you could count on that cider. Right, because I mean, it's alcoholic, so it's fermented, which means that any harmful bacteria has been killed, it can't really survive in an alcoholic drink, right? It's wonderful. So they would drink cider instead of water,

which by the way, 11 ounces, it's like a bottle of cider today. No, it's not too much. No, it's not, but everyone drank it every day instead of water. So there was a certain amount of buds going on, I'm sure. And who knows what the alcoholic content of the cider was. 30%.

Right, but that was, I mean, that was what apples were used for. I think Michael Pollan said that up until prohibition, an apple in the United States had a much greater chance of being turned into hard cider than it did of just being eaten. And again, it was because most apples in the US were grown from seed, meaning they were sour,

meaning they were much better for cider than they were for eaten, right? And that's how it was, again, up until prohibition. And one of the reasons why cider just kind of went away is because prohibition. Apparently the feds used to chop down apple trees wherever they saw them to kind of say, no, you're not gonna make any cider out of this,

you hayseed hick, you got it? I'm gonna cut down this tree right in front of your face. Exactly. You like cider? Yeah, I love it. Yeah? Yeah, it's great stuff. My initial introduction to cider was really sweet.

I guess the first wave of the resurgence. Yeah, like back in college in those days. What was the one that everyone drank? Woodchuck. Yeah, that was it. Yep, it was basically the Zima of cider, at least back then. I haven't had it in a while,

so maybe they've kind of toned it down. Is it not as sweet now? I don't know, that's what I'm saying. They may have toned it down. No, I mean just regular hard cider. Oh, yes, and it's not supposed to be. It was never supposed to be sweet. That was just a weird anomaly.

So I think the cider now is much closer to the traditional cider, which is, it's got like a tad bit of sweetness to it, but it's definitely a lot more beery than apple juicy. I'm gonna have to dip my toe in the cider pond once again. Do not do that, just drink it. What else do we have?

Do we have anything else on this guy? Johnny Appleseed? Yeah. No, I think I mentioned he was a sweet businessman. He was a friend to the Native American and the European settler. Check and check. Oh, there's supposedly a tree in Nova, Ohio on a farm.

It's a 175 year old tree, and some people believe that it is the last remaining tree that can be found that Johnny Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, actually planted, because again, the prohibition federalist chopped all his other stuff down. Amazing. So that's Johnny Appleseed, everybody. Drink it up.

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