They Lied About Johnny Appleseed

The real Johnny Appleseed wasn't this whimsical saint trying to give frontier children a healthy snack like your teacher or Disney told you. In reality, he was a shrewd real estate speculator exploiting a massive government loophole and is a big reason why the average person of this time was drunk literally 24/7. Yes, even the founding fathers who created our government. The fairy tale is that John Chapman, his real name, wandered across early America barefoot throwing apple seeds into the wind out of pure kindness. And while he did actually walk around barefoot, the reality is that he was more like a weird businessman operating on a chaotic American frontier in the late 1790s. But the thing is, the business was not actually founded on how good or sweet his apples were, because if you tried to eat one of Johnny's apples today, you'd immediately spit it out. Here's how this all worked. Apples do not grow true to seed. If you plant a seed from a sweet grocery store apple, the tree that grows will produce random, bitter, sour little fruits. To get sweet apples, you have to use a process called grafting, physically fusing a branch from an existing good tree onto a new root stock. Every sweet apple you've ever eaten is actually a genetic clone, made like this. John knew all this, but he actively refused to graft his trees, as he felt altering a plant's natural state worked against God's will and injured the plant. So he planted millions of seeds, producing an unimaginable number of apples that were completely inedible. They were called spitters because that's exactly what you did if you made the mistake of biting into one. So why did settlers buy these terrible battery acid flavored apples? Well, that's the thing. They weren't eating them. They were turning them into alcohol. Apple cider to be exact. Maybe you saw that coming. One of the good things about apples is apple cider. On the early American frontier, drinking water was gambling with your life. Without modern water treatment, sewage systems, or filtration, local rivers and shallow wells were constantly riddled with bacteria, like cholera, typhoid, dysentery, that kind of stuff, that would do to you what ice cream does to meat, or just kill you. Now people still drank water sometimes, let's not discard nuance, but the most accessible solution to water illness at the time was fermentation, making alcohol. The alcohol killed the bacteria and made it safe to drink. So from the point of Jamestown's foundation all the way up until about 1850, alcoholic apple cider, not water, was the primary beverage for early presidents and, yes, pilgrims too. It was the easiest, cheapest, and most efficient beverage to produce, And didn't require complex distilling equipment or expensive grains to make and unlike water you didn't need to boil it, it gave you ample calories didn't taste too bad and wouldn't get contaminated when you stored it you just needed to crush the sour apples squeeze out the juice put it in a wooden barrel and let the wild yeast do the rest Within a few weeks, you had a safe, sterile beverage with an alcohol content hovering around 6-10%, about as strong as a modern craft beer. Okay, this changes things, right? We're not talking about a casual drink after work here. Historians estimate that the average frontier American consumed around 10.5 gallons of pure alcohol per year. To put that into perspective, that is more than triple the amount of alcohol the average American drinks today. And this hard cider wasn't necessarily a luxury. That's what the far more deadly 50 to 80 proof apple jack was for, which would get you violently intoxicated, and the famous apple palsy illness. No, the cider was a baseline staple of the human diet. People drank it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was given to farmhands and laborers to keep them hydrated and working through long shifts in the fields. It was served at community gatherings, and yes, it was even given to young children because it was significantly safer than giving them a cup of water from the local creek. The alcohol over water habits predate Johnny Appleseed, but he surely ramped things up quite a bit. Folks have been drinking cider for I don't know how many years. But because it was often the water substitute, this high-quantity regular consumption essentially made it so that the average person was a little drunk from sunup to sundown. Which really makes you reevaluate the historical events of this time, doesn't it? That's right, drunk George Washington and his drunk troops, who had alcohol rations, mind you, crossed the Delaware on Christmas to go demolish British mercenaries in one, With zero casualties. The US Constitution was written and signed by a bunch of buzzed, if not flat out drunk fellas. Ponder on that for a moment. Think about that. John Adams started every morning with a quart of hard cider and got scared he'd get sick while traveling from not having it. Thomas Jefferson spent over $200,000 in today's money and wine during his presidency. Ben Franklin had a bad habit of drinking and telling government secrets and was once too drunk and medicated on laudanum that he couldn't stand up or even talk to give a speech and had to instead hand notes to another delegate to give the speech for him. 23 year old George Washington literally handed out 150 plus gallons of alcohol to voters at the ballot boxes when he ran for a seat in the Virginia House. It was actually considered bad practice not to do this. I swear I'm not making this up, but I hope this puts that massive bar tab you've maybe seen floating around the internet into perspective. These guys were professionals. By the way, drop me a like if you learned anything so far, I really do appreciate it. I could go on all day about historical events that were carried out under the influence. Let me know in the comments if you want to see a video about that. But, point being, Johnny Appleseed wasn't an environmentalist missionary trying to, you know, give out apples for the public good or something. He was establishing the raw industrial infrastructure for the frontier's primary beverage industry, rolling into untamed territory early, setting up production lines for the raw materials of alcohol, In waiting for a thirsty, needy population to arrive. The most surprising, or maybe unsurprising, part of this is that he funded the entire multi-state operation by exploiting a massive real estate loophole created by the US government. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the young United States government faced a massive national security and economic problem that Johnny Appleseed solved. It had acquired millions of acres of western territory through treaties and, well, force, but they had very few actual Actual citizens living on it, which meant that claims from others like British or American Indians were hard to combat, so the government had a rare great idea. They offered a deal where if you move your family out into the dangerous untamed wilderness of the old Big Ten, the government would grant you permanent ownership of a massive plot of land, usually around 100 acres, for dirt cheap, or in some cases, free. But there was a strict catch designed to weed out lazy speculators. To prevent rich investors from just buying up thousands of acres of land, sitting on it and waiting for the price to rise without actually building up the property, the law required you to prove that you were actively improving the land. The legal language stated that within a strict three-year window, a settler had to establish a permanent homestead, clear a certain percentage of the forest, and plant a functioning orchard, specifically a minimum of 15 to 50 fruit trees. If you fail to meet that agricultural quota within three years, your property rights were legally forfeited back to the government. This is where John's true genius came into play. He realized that thousands of poor, exhausted families were about to flood into the wilderness. When a homesteader arrived on the new plot of land, they had to immediately clear the trees and boulders, build a shelter, plant crops, all by hand, and defend themselves. And I promise, this is more work than you think. We often forget just how many trees this place used to have. These people didn't have the spare time, heavy tools, or botanical knowledge to locate, transport, plant, and tend to dozens of delicate fruit trees from scratch, let alone wait 3 years for them to grow high enough to satisfy a government inspector. This is pretty clever. So Chapman turned himself into a one-man frontier real estate scout. He deliberately hiked 30-50 miles ahead of the actual line of settlement, pushing deep into areas where roads didn't even exist yet. He would scout the geographic layout, find the most fertile valleys, and secure plots of land right along major rivers or near locations where he thought future towns and trading posts would be built. Once he found a prime piece of real estate, he would usually recruit a bunch of teenage boys to help clear a patch of forest, build a heavy wooden fence out of fallen logs and brush to keep out deer and wild hogs, plant thousands of apple seeds that he collected for free from cider mills back east, and then leave. And then he would hike to the next river valley and repeat the process. By the time the waves of exhausted settlers arrived in that valley years later, desperate to secure their illegal land deeds, they would find John Chapman already waiting for them. He had a fully established, functioning turnkey nursery right in their backyard, filled with thousands of 2 and 3 year old apple saplings that were ready to be transplanted onto the settlers' homesteads. Isn't that foresight kind of crazy? This Johnny Appleseed is way cooler than the fairy tale version. He sold these saplings for a few cents apiece, which was a massive bargain for a settler whose entire land claim hung in the balance. If a family was broke, which many were, Johnny Appleseed wouldn't turn them away. Instead, he would provide the trees in exchange for a legal contract, granting him ownership of a small percentage of the settler's newly secured land. Or, he would trade the saplings for basic necessities. Old clothes, shoes, food, but never, ever anything for pleasure. You'll see why in a second. He was running the smartest real estate deal of the time. By the time he died in 1845, this man, who lived like a vagabond, actually owned a vast network of nurseries and over 1,200 acres of highly valuable, developed real estate across multiple states. However, while his business model was an undisputed economic success, Johnny was not without his flaws. Now, this is usually the part where we talk about, oh, the picture books didn't mention he had slaves, or one time in a note he said this about race-mixers, something like that. But that kind of thing just doesn't really exist for Johnny Appleseed, which makes him a huge anomaly in history, especially for this time period. In fact, the American Indians messed with him tough, as the kids say, as he learned their languages, respected their cultures, and often traveled unarmed and barefoot, which they viewed as a sign of spiritual toughness. If anything, you could complain that his business of accelerating Native American displacement was controversial, though it's hard to say that his position in the chain of causation was especially malicious. The real damage that Johnny did on the world was not racial, but instead environmental. Which sounds kind of weird because he was the Apple guy, but you'll see what I mean. He seemed like a crazy man, but his actions made sense given his intense, mystical worldview. He followed the theological writings of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and lived by a strict ascetic code, abstaining from material comfort and physical pleasure. He became a vegetarian, refused to kill animals, and developed a fanatical reverence for nature. He believed God engineered the Earth with absolute perfection, and that every creation, even down to the insects and pests and weeds, served a higher spiritual purpose for mankind. This belief triggered an ecological disaster. Convinced the toxic invasive weed dog fennel cured just about any illness, Chapman methodically sowed it all across the Midwest. It had zero medicinal value. Instead, it choked out pasture grasses and poisoned livestock. Generations of farmers spent decades clearing Johnny Appleseed weed from ruined fields. These beliefs are what spawned his anti-grafting stance, which actually set American agriculture back by decades. By flooding the frontier with millions of genetically wild spitters, he filled the landscape with feral genetics that took generations of work to fix. So it's fun to think about him tossing seeds around and skipping, but it's even more fun to think of him as an insane menace poisoning land and serving hard cider to everybody. It's a real disservice to the real story of Johnny Appleseed to simplify him into this cultural nostalgia piece because the reality is just really that much cooler. If you liked this video, drop a like and watch one of these. You'll like it, I promise.