Ep. 886: Who Was the Real Johnny Appleseed?

Summary

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

Date: June 8, 2026
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Isaac Fitzgerald (author of American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed)
Additional Co-Hosts/Fact Checkers: Unnamed contributors

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Episode Overview

This in-depth and lively episode of The MeatEater Podcast explores the life and legacy of Johnny Appleseed—real name John Chapman—through the eyes of author Isaac Fitzgerald, whose new book retraces Chapman’s legendary path. The conversation busts Disney-fueled myths, digs into the true historical and cultural impact of Johnny Appleseed, and reflects on broader American themes such as land, community, faith, and the richness of oral legends. The hosts also digress into personal outdoors stories, botany, and the enduring optimism that can be found in American life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Was the Real Johnny Appleseed? (02:59–06:00)

• Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) was a real person, not a myth like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. He was born around the Revolutionary War in Leominster, Massachusetts.
• After a difficult upbringing (including a period of being unhoused), Chapman and his half-brother left home early for the frontier.
• Chapman was both a devout proselytizer (specifically of Swedenborgianism) and a savvy, if eccentric, land speculator and orchardist.

“Johnny Appleseed was a real guy named John Chapman, born around the Revolutionary War. So I wanted to kind of walk where he walked and explore the country.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (03:29)

2. Dispelling the Disney-Fied Myths (09:45–13:33)

• Common Myths Debunked: The “pot on his head” and “scatter seeds willy-nilly” were later embellishments. The pot is likely a later invention; he probably wore a simple bucket.
• Chapman was not planting sweet, edible apples for pies; most of his trees bore tart, small “spitters” suited to making cider and applejack, not eating.
• The Disney/elementary school version flattens him into a simple, peaceful legend, skipping his real complexities.

“He did probably wear a bucket, but the tin pot with a handle off of it really hadn’t been thought up yet...That’s kind of almost a few decades later.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (09:57)

“Every single apple, the seeds that he got even came from cideries. And the apples he was making were all for alcohol. And that’s really when I was like, oh, this is my guy, this is my guy.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (15:03)

3. Johnny Appleseed’s Motivations & Methods (13:33–21:46)

• Business Savvy: Chapman was ahead of settlers, establishing orchards to satisfy legal requirements for land claims (“donation tract” rules) and selling them or partnering as settlers arrived.
  • Required to plant 50 apple and 20 peach trees for land claims.
• Swedenborgian Faith: Deeply influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg’s Christian teachings, which advocated for spiritual progress and abolitionism, and pedestaled indigenous peoples’ lifestyles in some respects.
• Self-imposed Poverty: Chapman’s religion taught that suffering in this life improved prospects in the next; thus, he shunned personal wealth, even when he had acquired thousands of acres.
• Chapman also cultivated an image of humility and eccentricity, dressing in makeshift clothes and often sleeping outdoors.

“He was moving westward ahead of settlers. He was very smart...He never had a home address. He’s going to keep wandering.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (15:03)

“...he also had this religious aspect to him. And I would argue that in the 1800s, coming up with, like, a new version of Christianity was the same as starting a website today...”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (16:45)

4. Early Life and Origins of the Legend (21:53–33:32)

• Family Hardship: His father was a Revolutionary War Minuteman who fell into debt after being paid in script (IOUs) and losing out to Boston speculators. His mother died soon after John’s birth.
• Legend as Folk Hero: Despite Chapman’s real hardships, later writers, such as for Harper’s Bazaar, lionized him into a symbol of peace and generosity, smoothing away his business savvy and the gritty realities of frontier life.

5. Violence and Complexity on the Frontier (29:34–40:41)

• Frontier Hardship: The Ohio frontier in Chapman’s era was a dangerous place, with frequent violence and Indian wars—something often papered over in schoolbook myths.
• Johnny Appleseed as News Carrier and Paul Revere (War of 1812): Chapman famously ran 35 miles barefoot to warn of a rumored Native American attack during the War of 1812, gaining notoriety that contributed to his legendary status.
• Complex relations with Native Americans: He was both a friend to some local tribes (possibly due to aid given to his brother) and, when push came to shove, chose sides with settlers during hostilities.

“He became the Paul Revere of the War of 1812...He becomes known as the Paul Revere of the War of 1812. Which again is a story Disney never tells us.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (57:32)

6. Apple Trees, Cider, and American Botany (62:44–69:04)

• Apple Genetics: Planting seeds (as Chapman did) produces unpredictable, often poor-tasting apples, perfect for cider but not eating. Modern apples are typically grafted for consistency.
• Alcohol Culture: In Chapman’s time, hard cider was the safe, everyday drink—even for children. Later Prohibition efforts led to campaigns against apple trees themselves and a rebranding of apples as healthy snacks.
• Legacy in Today’s Apple Varieties: While none of Chapman’s apples are popular eating varieties, his work contributed to genetic diversity and the development of some lines, like the ancestor of Golden Delicious.

“If you graft an apple tree, you’re gonna get that same apple. But what happens if you hit it with seeds?”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (12:59)

“Apples were seen as grapes...an alcohol making fruit back then...Apples were not for [eating], that was their main thing.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (83:05)

7. Fact-Checking, Orchards, and Living Legacy (95:22–99:52)

• The “last Johnny Appleseed tree” in Nova, Ohio is discussed—local legend, but possibly legitimate, and now cloned and sold widely.
• Chapman partnered with locals to watch over orchards while he moved on, sometimes returning seasonally, echoing his circular, nomadic life.
• Discussion on current “Lost Apple Hunters” and the global journey of apples.

8. Chapman's Death and Enduring Symbolism (74:16–81:36)

• Dies in his 70s in Indiana, after years of seasonal wandering.
• At death, was both celebrated and an eccentric, known locally as both preacher and character—living out his ascetic, faith-driven ideals.
• His story was further mythologized posthumously during periods (such as the Civil War and Prohibition) when America needed peaceful, hopeful legends.

“He dies on the floor of a family’s home. They write a beautiful piece of writing. They say that he looked excited to pass to the other side...He went out exactly how he wanted to go out.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald (79:44–80:14)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Exaggerated Legends:
  “When you actually look at Mark Twain, what he used to do was just go to bars, listen to stories, usually for the price of a couple of drinks... Next thing you know, that’s how so much of his work got built. And again, it just feels so American to me the way that these stories kind of outgrow (history).”
  —Isaac Fitzgerald (41:37)

• On Cider as Survival:
  “At the time, a hard cider was more reliable than water. So we’ll give it to the kids, too.”
  —Guest, possibly fact checker (15:18, 15:27)

• On Modern Polarity vs. Real-Life Community:
  “The narrative... is about that America is divided... But my lived life. My lived life. I don’t get it.”
  —Steven Rinella (88:36)

  “People are good for the most part... The hospitality, the kindness, the curiosity about one another is really strong... This country is not on the verge of civil war.”
  —Isaac Fitzgerald (90:34)

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Key Timestamps

• 02:59: Introduction to Johnny Appleseed vs. the myth
• 09:57: Debunking the famous “pot on the head” & apple myths
• 15:03: Apples, cider, and alcohol culture in early America
• 21:53: Chapman's early life and family hardship
• 29:34: The realities of frontier violence and Chapman’s reputation
• 33:32: Meeting Daniel McQuay and early land speculation
• 57:32: The “Paul Revere of the War of 1812” feat
• 62:44: Animal-friendly eccentricities, and why Chapman didn’t graft trees
• 69:32: Modern Johnny Appleseed festivals and debate over apple varieties
• 74:16: Chapman's later years and death in Indiana
• 82:11: Prohibition, apples’ PR transformation, and the resurgence of cider
• 88:36: Steven Rinella’s reflection on American community
• 95:22: Nova, Ohio—“the last Johnny Appleseed tree” and its legend

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Tone & Style Notes

The episode is rich with humor, equal parts irreverence and insight, and filled with the spirit of storytelling that defines both the podcast and the subject matter. The panel weaves personal anecdotes with historical facts, challenging myths while celebrating the quirks that make both Johnny Appleseed and American culture enduringly interesting.

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Conclusion

Isaac Fitzgerald’s American Rambler and this MeatEater episode recast Johnny Appleseed from cartoon and classroom cliché to a complex, pioneering, faith-driven, and deeply American character. The real John Chapman emerges as a practical mystic, a capitalist vagabond, and an accidental founder of American horticultural diversity, whose story—like the story of America itself—is still being written, questioned, and mythologized.

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Recommended Book:

• American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald (Release: May 12, 2026)

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Transcript

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

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[Stephen Rinella]

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[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Foreign.

[Stephen Rinella]

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Stephen Rinella]

You can't predict anything brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. Burst Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light.com that's F I R S T L I T.com all right everybody. Today we're joined by writer Isaac Fitzgerald who has a brand new book out called American Rambler Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed. Yeah, Johnny Appleseed being one of those dudes that, that I, that I, I feel like I know about, but I don't know about.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No, you probably know the Disneyfied version. You know the, the version that they teach you in elementary school. But he is an American legend. But he's, he was a real guy. His name was John Chapman. And that's one of the things I love about him. When I first brought it up to the woman that's now my wife, I was thinking about writing a book about him as a Johnny Appleseed. He was this great walker. He was kind of into faith. I'm kind of coming back into faith a little bit in my life. Okay. And she was like, he's not a real dude.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And she's like, paul Bunyan, Peco, spill. And I was like, real guys. Yeah. I was like, those are not real dudes. You're right.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

You're right.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But Johnny Appleseed was a real guy named John Chapman, born around the Revolutionary War. So I wanted to kind of walk where he walked and explore the country.

[Stephen Rinella]

I want to start out by telling you, you might not realize who you're in the presence of, but this is Johnny. Johnny Spencer. Or you could call him Spencer Appleseed. Tell him he's in, Tell him he's

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

an aspiring, you know, I want to start an orchard. I set aside my whole spring. I didn't do any hunting this year.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Whoa.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Just so I could focus on planting, I planted 60 fruit trees, dwarf fruit trees, and fruit shrubs in my yard.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

That's amazing. I1 I want to just say I love that we have like a fact checker here on the podcast. That's helpful.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, you don't even know that.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But were you, were you planting seeds or were you grafting?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

I have not done any grafting. I, I It's a mixture of things. So there' stuff that was done by, like, bare root, you know, which just like comes out of a cellar at the nursery. And up to the biggest thing being like an eight foot tall pear tree. A variety of stuff.

[Stephen Rinella]

I didn't even know he was doing this. When I heard he was doing it. I was like, hey, we got a dude coming on and talk all about that. I said, you should, you should be in there.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Very excited.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Can I ask, like, what, what gave you the love of, like, ob, like you're a hunter, but that to take off a full season is a lot.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Well, I like foraging and now I don't have to leave to do it. I can just do it in my backyard. I also like the idea of perennials rather than annuals. I feel like the gardeners in the office here, which there are many of, they talk about it with more frustration than love.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

You disagree? Oh, no. Okay.

[Stephen Rinella]

I garden from a place of anger.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah, that's what I have witnessed. And so I'm like, I don't want to be the one who's mad that my tomatoes froze on June 4th. I would rather just like put a perennial in the ground and then it's like going to keep doing its thing and I don't have to be the one who gets mad every year when it doesn't.

[Stephen Rinella]

You'll find plenty of reasons, but you're

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

trying to start from a place of joy. You're trying to start from place. But what you said earlier too is like you like gathering, but now you want to do it from your backyard. That's why most people start little more farming, a little more harvesting, a little more seasonal, which is what Chapman did himself.

[Stephen Rinella]

Spencer's too young to call him an old eccentric, but when he's older, he will absolutely be regarded as an old eccentric.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I'm going to have that Chapman esque.

[Stephen Rinella]

He's an aspiring old.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yes. You're on your way.

[Stephen Rinella]

I love.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So all right, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

Tell people before we get into the book and everything, tell everybody where you're from and your other book.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So listen, I. I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, but then I lived out in north central Massachusetts. You know, if, you know, you go far enough west of Massachusetts, it gets real pretty. Okay, yeah, before there's this before where

[Stephen Rinella]

people go on color tours.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly. Not that part exactly. Kind of like the Rust belt of Massachusetts. And that's what my first book's about. It's called Dirtbag Massachusetts. And it's really. I really love to write about juxtapositions. I love about like kind of wrestling with the ways in which things are contradictory. And Massachusetts is a very rich state, but it still has very, very low income areas, one of which I grew up in.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, you guys grew up poor or you grew up poor?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I grew up. I grew up unhoused. Which on paper you would think those are like kind of the worst years of my childhood. But I actually loved those years because I was surrounded by other adults. I was part of this community in inner city Boston. It was Catholic worker. It was very much everyone kind of taking care of one another is really community driven and I loved it. And then when I moved out to this farm in kind of north central Massachusetts, that's when things got lonely. But a few towns over is where John Chapman was born, like I said, during the Revolutionary War.

[Stephen Rinella]

I don't want to talk about him yet.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Not yet. So I was.

[Stephen Rinella]

But I want to ask you thing about growing up though.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh yeah. No, ask me.

[Stephen Rinella]

Your dad. You're like, your. Your dad would take you guys out on. Because in. In your book, American Rambler, like, you're roaming around. Yeah, but your. Your dad was a roamer.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He was.

[Stephen Rinella]

And he would drag you on his roams, right?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Absolutely. A wanderer and a rambler. Because again, we didn't have any money for. For any kind of vacation. And so my father would take me out on these long camping trips, these long hikes. We would sleep outside. We'd go up into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I love the White Mountains. And we were part of this thing. It was. It was. You know, it wasn't anything official, but it's called the 4000 Footers Club. And you were just trying to climb all the 4,000 foot mountains, which I know out here probably sounds a little small to y', all, but for us, those are the big mountains out.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the deadliest mountains in the country is in the White Mountains, right?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

That's right. Is that George Washington? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so. Absolutely. Just growing up with him and what he would do. You know, when you're walking, and I think about this a lot in all sorts of different ways, but when you're walking with an adult and you're a child, it's actually pretty tough. They got these long strides, and you're just trying to keep up. And so my dad looking at the

[Stephen Rinella]

back of their shirt all day long.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly. And my dad would tell me these long, meandering stories to try and get me to keep up with him, trying to make sure he'd be like, oh, if we just hit this peak, or if we just hit this kind of turn in the trail, I'll tell you what happens next in the story. So he'd almost give me these, like, Cliff Cliffhanger serials to keep me going. Now, when I started consuming culture, as I got older, all of a sudden it'd be like, luke, I am your father. And I was like, this sounds familiar. Like, he was just. He was just ripping off all these things and telling them. But I loved. I adored those times with my dad.

[Stephen Rinella]

I adored, like, wait, they stole that from my dad?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, yeah, exactly. Just start reading Lord of the Rings and be like, how did this guy talk to my dad? That's nuts. But genuinely, I just. I love them so much, and I love those times spent with my f. Because it was one. It was bonding. You know how it is when you get out there? It's just. It's beautiful. It's Gorgeous. We'd sleep under the stars or in a tent. Every once in a while. The weather would be pretty rough. He had this beat up old Toyota, like, blue rusted out truck that had like that plastic covering on the bed. And so if things got real bad, we'd try to get back to that and we'd sleep in there. And I just remember kind of like curled up in my dad's chest, those. Those walks were the most spectacular times. Like, some of my best memories with him as a father. And it does come down to this kind of storytelling that he used to. And he would also be ripping off American legends as well.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Okay, intro. What's the first you ever heard of Johnny Appleseed? I thought about this when I was thinking. I was like, I think the only thing I can think about Johnny Appleseed is he had a. He wore around a pot on his head.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

That's all right. Which, by the way, sadly, I hate to dispel that rumor, but probably is not factually accurate. I'm. I'm so sorry, man. I apologize. He did probably wear a bucket. He usually had a bucket, but the tin pot with a handle off of it really hadn't been thought up yet at that point. That's kind of almost a few decades later.

[Stephen Rinella]

But yes, they gave that idea to him decades later.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, yeah. No, his whole. His whole deal is he gets lionized a few decades after his death. And we'll get to that. But no. So the first time.

[Stephen Rinella]

Are you. Are. Are you aware that Boone didn't wear a coonskin cap?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Don't break my heart.

[Stephen Rinella]

Crockett wore a coonskin cap, but he wore almost like. Like a provocation.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Like it was a goof as a troll, basically. He was like, oh, you think I'm such an outdoor.

[Stephen Rinella]

He'll be like, oh, my God, here he comes in his coonskin hat.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He was. He was like being audacious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Yeah. Again, these things get put back on these legends, right. As we learn about them and as we try to basically flatten them and make them less complex so that they can be consumed by young children. But the first time I heard about Johnny Appleseed was very much my dad, because he would tell these kind of giant, elaborate stories. And my Johnny Appleseed of my father, he walked all the way to California. He. He brought apples here over the Atlantic Ocean on his shoulders. My dad was such a storyteller. He went so big. And so my mother's job was kind of to bring me back to Earth. She'd be the one that would take the encyclopedia out and be like, hey, he was actually a real guy. His name was John Chapman. He was bor. Right down the road in Leominster, Massachusetts. Maybe not the tin pot hat, definitely not the getting to California, but he was a proselytizer. He was a wanderer. He planted orchards. He did not throw seeds willy nilly. He actually was pretty committed to an almost haphazard style of land speculation. And so my mom kind of taught me all about that. But it wasn't until later in my life when walking came into into my life again in a really big way, the same way my father loved walking and faith came back into my life the same way. My mom has always been interested in prayer. I was approaching 40, and I was realizing these things were returning into my life after a lifetime of kind of trying to be different than my parents. I all of a sudden realized I was coming to their traditions again. And that's when I started thinking about who's one of the walkers in history that I would love to explore? And that's like I said. I was like, to my wife, I said, johnny Appleseed. She said, not a real guy. And I said, no, well, actually, I got to push up my little nerd glasses and go, well, actually. And that's how this book was born.

[Stephen Rinella]

Tell them. What you were telling me the other day about that wasn't like eating apples.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

He didn't make tasty apples.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, no.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Made spitters.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Spitters.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Walt Whitman would describe it as tart enough to make a blue jay scream. Spitters.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

That's tart.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And that's. And it's coming from seeds, right?

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

That's what happens if you graft an apple tree. If you graft an apple tree, let's say you have a honeycrisp, you graft that apple tree, you're gonna get that same apple you're cloning at that point. Exactly. But what happens if you hit it with seeds?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Well, if you do a seed, it's sort of. You don't know what product you're going to get. And I feel like what Johnny Appleseed was doing was sort of a survival of the fittest almost. He was allowing the seeds to become their own apples that then, like, evolved and diversified what the apple crop was on the continent.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

That's exactly right. And it was this version of basically because of cross pollination, you had no idea. Whatever seeds you put in the ground, you had no idea what kind of apple you'd get. But they were usually Small, and they were usually tart. And despite what Disney teaches you in melody time, which I won't sing the song because we don't have the rights to it. But if you. If you ever a kid that grew up, especially around church, you'll remember. The Lord's been good to me and so I thank the Lord for giving me the things I need. The birds and the bees and the apple seeds. The Lord's been good to me. It is very much all about apple tarts for the settlers. It's all about apple pies. It's all about this wholesome American story of westward expansion. Which, again, after his death, he kind of becomes the Mickey Mouse of westward expansion. So we can kind of ignore the brutality and the bloodshed that went into that, but it's not true. Every single apple, the seeds that he got even came from cideries. And the apples he was making were all for alcohol. And that's really when I was like, oh, this is my guy, this is my guy. He was moving westward ahead of settlers. He was very smart. Thinking about the fur trade business is something you guys talk on here all the time. He was doing a kind of land speculation business, but also an orchard business where he was getting ahead of settlers. And as they were arriving, he would be like, oh, look, do you want to just pay me a little bit of money? All these apple trees are here. Or we could partner. Because he's going to keep moving on. He never had a home address. He's going to keep wandering. But he would partner with these people to kind of basically lay claim to the land. And at the same time, they would be so excited. Cause there was potable water was kind of hard to get their hands on. There was something that they consumed so much of which was alcoholic cider and applejack.

[Stephen Rinella]

Huh?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah. At the time, like a hard cider was more reliable than water.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

If you were drinking it, like, I'm not gonna get sick from this hard cider. But water, there's a decent chance.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So we'll give it to the kids, too.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I read this book long ago. It was called. I think the book was about an author named Andrew Barr, and it was just called Drink. And it was like a history of alcohol consumption in the country. And he pointed out a thing that hadn't encountered this elsewhere. But he pointed out a thing. I believe it was going back to the Plymouth Rock, the Plymouth colonies. They had an idea that the water wasn't good to drink. Water wasn't good to consume. And they would consume as a thirst quencher, mildly alcoholic beverages, as a sort of. That. It was just more pure than water.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, and you're right about the mildly. I will say that. Sorry. To the IPA drinkers of the world, nobody was doing like a heavy 9%. It was, it was often something that you could just like consume to kind of get you through the day, keep yourself somewhat hydrated. But yeah, it kind of meant that the alcohol, the alcohol consumption of that time period was, was so much more. I don't have the stats on hand, but they are in the book. It was so much more high than it is now. And. And it was just part of the culture.

[Stephen Rinella]

So explain that a little bit better when you say the land speculating aspect of it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So land was. Land was. Land was money, land was power. Land was everything back then. Right. And so I can talk about it real quick and bringing it into his. Into what John Chapman was trying to achieve. But it's interesting because he also had this religious aspect to him. And I would argue that in the 1800s, coming up with like a new version of Christianity was the same as starting a website today. Like, genuinely like, you were like, this is my new startup. And at the time, the Shakers were around, which shout out to the Shakers. I don't know if you're familiar with them. They basically dance as a form of praise. They were not really into sex, though. So their numbers have dwindled over the years to the point where there are now two practicing Shakers. They weren't procreating because they were not pro. It's a. That's a tough. Catholics figured it out. A lot of other religions figured it out. Shakers didn't really didn't go with the procreation. So they only have two practicing shakers. They are in their 70s, maybe 80s. They live in Maine. But I'm happy to report that's. That's in the book. But since the book has been published, you could make the argument that Shakers are the fastest growing religion in America because they doubled. They have a 50% increase. Third member has recently joined. Isn't that fantastic?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

I was just gonna say in the animal kingdom that's called functionally extinct. If there's like one of this kind of rhino left and it can't reproduce, that's labeled as functionally extinct. So I thought you were gonna tell us that they were functionally extinct.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No, they're fighting back, beating the eyes. They're clawing on Swedenborgianism. Swedenborgism. It's A tough one. But it's the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. And around the time that Chapman was like in his teens, early 20s. It comes over from Europe, it comes from Sweden. Swedenborg himself was a philosopher who in his 50s, kind of got into like, I can see ghosts. I'm talking to God. I'm figuring out this right way to live. It's all in the book. We don't have to really get like into the weeds on that right now. But what you need to know is that Chapman was a strong believer in Swedenborgism.

[Stephen Rinella]

But is it a. Is it of The Judeo Christian?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100%. 100% it's Christian. Got 100%, it's Christian. And they have. They have actually somewhat progressive views for the time. They really didn't believe in slavery.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. They were early abolitionists, one might say.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

They almost pedestaled what you might say, like Native Americans and other kind of, like around the world, people that were not living in the European style. And almost, maybe to a way where that feels weird too. But they. They had really eccentric viewpoints on a lot of different issues of the day. But one thing was the harder your life was in this realm, the easier your life would be in the next, which is a very classic religious thing right now. There are still practicing Swedenborgians here in the United States. I go, really? Yes. Yeah. They have a giant, beautiful cathedral in Brynath in Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. I celebrated Easter with them in this book. It's a fascinating religion. It's a fascinating culture. In all these different ways. They've actually amassed a lot of wealth. But at the time, Chapman was accumulating land to get back to your question, which is a way of accumulating wealth. But he also didn't want to partake in it because he felt like it would actually mess with his chances in the afterlife.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And so he would walk around again, no house, no address. Partnering with these folks, with these settlers to have the orchards running, but never sticking around to kind of reap their bounty. There's a joke that at one point he lost some paperwork and he lost like half of Ohio. But when he dies at the ripe old age of his 70s, not to get ahead of ourselves, but when he dies, he has 1,200 acres to his name, and he had no progeny, he had no family, but he had. It got dispersed to like brothers, siblings, half siblings. So the Chapman family did keep it, but he actually had amassed quite a bit of wealth, despite the fact that he would often either sleep on strangers floors or Proselytize in a town and hope somebody befriended him and took him in or sleep in the woods. So he lived this kind of pauper's life. So the tin pot on the hat, not so much. But he often dressed in, like a coffee sack, like kind of almost a scratchy. Yeah. So there is this, like, interesting. And there's all these different theories about him. Was he this way because he got kicked in the head by a horse? Was he this way because he got brokenhearted? There's all these different stories about him. But what really threads through it is here's a man that accumulated land, loved to move west, loved to do business. There's a real capitalist theme through Chapman, yet at the same time, he never enjoyed the benefits of it.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Can we back up? I feel like the Johnny Appleseed story kind of starts when he's an adult. But what do we know about his childhood?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Fantastic. Absolutely. Okay, so he's born in Leominster, Massachusetts. And shout out to Florence E. Wheeler, who is a woman in the 60s. You know those historical societies you find in every town, they're maybe not focused on the big hits, but they are focused on what happens in their community. So she is the one. There was so many rumors about Chapman, nobody knew where he was born. Some people said that his mother was Native American. Some people say that his father was a Harvard preacher. None of that was true. Florence E. Wheeler, one of these historical society women, really dug into the ledgers, basically because that's how we find so much of history, is who owed who money.

[Stephen Rinella]

Like, oh, yeah, yeah, right.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

You guys talk about this on the pod. This is how people were keeping track of things. And so what we found was he's born of a minute man. Oh. So his dad was partook in the Revolutionary War. His father eventually became a guard of an armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Not long after Chapman is born, his mother dies, his father remarries, and they relocate to Long Meadow, Massachusetts.

[Stephen Rinella]

Did his mom die from complications of childbirth?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, I believe it was a sibling. I believe that's correct. Again, as always with history. Somebody else says it might have been a disease. I can't remember which one, but I do. I think the overwhelming idea is that it was a competition of child because he has a lot of siblings, a lot of half siblings. His father, after the war, like so many people that worked in the Revolutionary War. And this is. This is the story of my area, which is, again, this low income part of Massachusetts. A lot of those soldiers were not paid the money that they were supposed to be Paid. They were paid in scripts. Then people from Boston came and bought the scripts for pennies on the dollar.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's the script?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Basically, if you were Revolutionary War, if you were a soldier, they would. The government that was very new, wrote you an iou.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And then you needed seeds. As you. As, you know, you needed seeds for your farm, for the coming harvest. So you just needed anything that would get you seeds. So a bunch of people from Boston came out, bought all the scripts for very, very cheap.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, no kidding.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Gave them enough money to buy seeds so they could survive, and then passed a law in Boston. You have to make good on the scripts. And so they became. It's just another way of the wealthy elite, basically amassed more wealth and ripped off all these guys that had fought in the Revolutionary War. And so Chapman's father is dealing with that kind of stuff. He falls into debt, he falls into drinking. So at a very young age, Chapman and his half brother Nathaniel, I think, kind of sensing that things are rough around the house, set out and they go west. More and more people are moving onto the East Coast. It's becoming what would feel like, especially to somebody like Chapman, I think had a little bit of itchy feet and like to spend people alone again. Remember I said I love juxtaposition.

[Stephen Rinella]

You said he had a little bit of a what?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Itchy feet.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He was a wanderer. He was a rambler. But you know how I like juxtaposition.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Like again, he liked to be alone, but he clearly also enjoyed the company of others. But I do think he wanted to set out and so he set off. We don't know much about him and how he gets to western Pennsylvania, but he and his half brother get to western Pennsylvania. They get over the Alleghenies. They get to western Pennsylvania where Broken Straw Creek meets the Allegheny around the area of what is now Warren, Pennsylvania. There's a story again, allegedly.

[Stephen Rinella]

But that's a bloody ground at that time. Right.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Well, this is what. This is a story that is kind of impressive. He. Don't get me wrong, he runs into a lot of trouble the further, especially in Ohio. But there's a story again. Can't really fact check these. Right. We're talking about stories that kind of get passed down. This is not a written down. That's. That's one thing that's difficult about Chapman. Think about other stories from the time. Right. We're talking about like early 1800s. Lewis and Clark kept journals. Right. You have. There's many people from that time in history that write and they write so, so much. So we have so much to draw from. Chapman could read, and Chapman could talk. He was a proselytizer. He could really preach. There's all these, this documentation of people being interviewed after his passing, talking about what a great preacher and speaker. He was good. But he did not write anything down. He did not write anything down. He didn't. So we have no letters, we have no journals. We all have sources from around him. But this one story is that Nathaniel fell ill. Chapman went looking for help. And supposedly Native Americans in the area, probably the Seneca, taught his little brother how to hunt, how to fish, and how to sustain himself while his brother was off looking for help. And there's a story, a theory that, that begins part of Chapman's legend, which is that he was a friend to Native Americans because he always kind of felt a debt to the way that they helped out his brother.

[Stephen Rinella]

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[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I'm sorry you asked and I'm really running with it. I'm monologuing. Let me know if you want to get a word in here sideways. No, we're coming up on a favorite part of mine.

[Stephen Rinella]

It was the only. I just want to set what. When he embarks out to the frontier.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Of the time.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Which again, we think of the Wild west as the west, but we are. We are talking before the Ohio state border.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. I mean there are still in. In the post American Revolutionary War and even Post War of 1812, there are often. There are open hostilities up and down the Ohio and full fledged Indian wars happening up and down the Ohio. So when you go to those places, it is at that time to go into those areas. It would. It was reasonable that you would wind up tomahawked 100% in the head in your sleep.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100%.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And it was violence like. That's. That's one of the parts of this book that I want to make so clear is not to jump quick to the philosophies behind it. But I understand that this country, we have our issues and that we have our arguments and we have our political differences, but we must acknowledge how brutal things used to be. And that's something that I love a lot of this. This book is about the history of Chapman. A lot of it is also me just looking at the country at an eye level and the hospitality I meet along the way, the wonderful people that open up their homes to me along the way because I traveled where he traveled and I kind of did what he did. I had a rule which was I either sleep outside or I get invited to somebody's home. And how much of this country works. When you think about how much of this country functions, this is a vast land. This is a huge place. And when you look at it in the modern day, versus yeah. There was a time when this was a hugely dangerous situation that he was putting himself and Nathaniel in. But to get back to it real quick, he gets out to Warren, Pennsylvania. It's him and his brother. And they meet one guy, Daniel McQuay.

[Stephen Rinella]

Good.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Daniel McQuay, I think should almost have his own book written about him. You've written Books before you know what it is to hit a character. And all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. Am I barking up the wrong. Maybe I should be writing about this.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Daniel McQuay was hired by the Holland Land Company to do land speculation. And we've all been young men before. Right. You know when you meet another guy and you kind of look up to him? I swear, I don't have any facts to back this up, but I just. The philosophy of it, the theory behind it, is that John Chapman met Daniel McQuay and really looked up to him. He was described by a historian from the 1800s, a true son of Aaron. He drank, he fought, he was a bit of a maniac. He lived in a log. Like, remind me that. It's like the house is. It's like wider on the top. And then it's this. I'm not gonna remember. Anyways. He basically lives in a log cabin.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's the son of Aaron son of like?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He's just from Scotland. Ireland.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He's just. He's just like a big, massive, boozy adventurer.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And Holland is paying him just to try and claim as much land as they can.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He's also in wood trade. So he'll cut all these trees down, put them on rafts, takes them down the Allegheny, feeds into the Ohio, feeds into the Mississippi, all the way down to New Orleans. What sells it. Rivers only run one way.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Walks a thousand two hundred miles up, does it all over again. There's on paper.

[Stephen Rinella]

What kind of trees is he cutting?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I mean, he's kind of all. He's cutting everything that's down there, and he's going out and genuinely, another Pete that I quote, like 1800s historian, basically says on the walk back, wild animals thicket. There's small. Small settlements are starting to appear. Like small European settlements are starting to appear along these rivers, but not many. And also there's Native Americans, of course, and highwaymen.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And he braved all of that. And it's hard not to think that John Chapman wasn't a little bit influenced by this guy. Got it in that same way. You know when you're a young guy and you're looking and you're like, oh, maybe I could do some version of that. Which gets back to that, this land speculation where I'm gonna. If you put fruit trees in the ground under the expanding colonial and eventually US American government meant that you were laying claim to that ground, yet at the same time, he had no interest in actually settling. And so that begins his story of. He gets past western Pennsylvania. His half brother says, love you. I'm out. He and the rest of the family.

[Stephen Rinella]

At some point, he splits.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

The dad comes from Long Meadow. They settle somewhere around Dexter, Ohio. They settle in southern Ohio, close to West Virginia. But Chapman then starts this life of wandering, rambling, planting apple seeds and running into very much what you just talked about, a huge, multiple. Multiple conflicts. And he becomes the Paul Revere of the war of 1820. Off.

[Stephen Rinella]

He did. I didn't know that part of him.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Nobody does.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

They kind of. Later on, I feel like it was assigned to Chapman that he was sort of a walking newspaper. Right. Because he was going around to so many different places and, like, he would get information from Pennsylvania that he would deliver to West Virginia and.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Correct.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Hear something. West Virginia that then travels to Ohio with him.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Correct.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Is that. That's sort of what you're saying?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yes. There's. There's a little bit of debate whether he made it to West Virginia or not. I kind of like to think that he did. No, there weren't borders that they, you know, and. And they. They touch up. And I did drive through West Virginia at one point in the book, so it helps me if I think that he did. But genuinely, that's exactly right. He would carry the good news, which were the. The teachings of Swedenborgianism, which, again, which. This very interesting view of looking at Christianity. But it's still. I mean, Swedenborgianism influences. I mean, we're talking numbers.

[Stephen Rinella]

You say that word real slow.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Sorry. Swedenborgianism.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay, I've read it.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

New Jerusalem Church.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Or. Yes, New Jerusalem Church is what it's called now, or Swedenborgian is another. Like, that's what you would call a practitioner. But yes, they now refer to themselves as the New Jerusalem church. They have 10,000 practitioners around the world. I believe it's 5000 in and around Bryn Athen. They have their own town, they have their own fire department. They have their own police. It's a really interesting area. But if we're talking numbers, they're doing better than the shakers, but not as good as somebody that was influenced by watching that religion take off, which was John Smith and Mormonism. So Mormonism was heavily influenced by watching how Swedenborg's teachings took off.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Did, did, did. When Chapman took out, like, let's say you'd caught Chapman out and you would have said real quick, what are you doing? What are you doing?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Would he have said, I'm carrying my religion forth 100. Or would he have said, I'm carrying my apple seeds forth?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I listen again, you don't know the answer ever. But I would argue he a hundred percent believed that the teachings of Swedenborg were his. Emanuel Swedenborg. Those were his passion. Those were his reasons. But, I mean, this is why I love this story. It's such an American story. You can have your passions, but you gotta be able to pay the bills. Granted, his were very, very low. But you have to have a little bit of a business, you have to have a little bit of an underpinning of capitalism to get you out there, to make sure you've got it. You can grab some food when you need it or whatever's happening. And so for him, those were the orchards. The preachings, I believe, were the ideals. And then the land speculation, the laying claim to this land was the aspect of it that he knew meant he had something to fall back on, even if, again, he never really even tapped into it. I think he sensed some type of security from it. If. I mean, real quick, do you have a favorite, like, American legend? Yeah. Who's your favorite American legend?

[Stephen Rinella]

Boone.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It's a boon all the way.

[Stephen Rinella]

And on that point, you just said a thing that reminded me, you know, the guy who said that, that you could picture Chapman talking to that Scottish

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

wild man, Daniel McQuay. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. There's like a. There's a similar.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Tell me, tell me, tell me.

[Stephen Rinella]

When. When Boone was in. When Boone was wrapped up in Lord Dunmore's war. Okay. There's a similar story where he was. He was a wagon driver, a mule. Like a mule driver. He runs into a real wanderer who. And some people kind of have it pinned down to the campfire they were sitting around where he said, you know, this might interest you. There's this path I found through the mountains, the Cumberland Gap. Young fellow, like you might. Right. And that's. And some people attribute that. That was the beginning of. That was the beginning of Daniel Boone.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And isn't that the wanderer? Right.

[Stephen Rinella]

A guy. Threw him a tip.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, threw him a tip. And that's such a great way to put it. Threw him a tip that then he took such advantage of, and it actually led to a person who became larger than life. And that's what I love about Chapman, too. And it does. I mean, we have this today. We talk about a writer's writer, right? Everybody knows Stephen King, but who's the guy Stephen King admires, who's maybe not as well known or comedian's comedian? And we all know the big names, but who are those littler guys who maybe never got out of the honky tonks, but they influenced our great outlaw country singers or our great comedians? And I love finding those moments of history. Do you know who the guy guys?

[Stephen Rinella]

I do and I've written it and said it a thousand times. Randall was here. He'd remember. What's the guy's name?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I don't know. It's all right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, it's all right. No, not John Finley. Was John Finley. John Finley.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Well, I listen while I was working

[Stephen Rinella]

on this, I'm almost certain it was John.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It's John Finley. All right. Shout out John Finley. We can come back. Yeah, but there I found a bunch of these guys and I, I'm. I'm going to blank on the name. But we, I think we should talk about him becoming the. The Paul Revere of the War of 1812.

[Stephen Rinella]

I got a more detail oriented question.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It was John Finley.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

All right.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Hey, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

John Finley was like, he, he in his grave is like, come on, dude. I told him about Cumberland. Like, why is he and all. Like, why is he in all the paintings going through Cumberland Gap? It's like I was there way before his ass. I told him about it. He goes through there and it's like, good Lord.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But again, I'm sorry. There's something so American about that. It's what I love. It is oftentimes the loudest or the person who maybe in Chapman's. I don't think he really even sought out fame.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It really happened to him after his death. And that's a whole other part of this. He, I genuinely believe, was trying to be a humble person. But you have no control over what parts of history get kind of scooped up and then lionized and then put on a pedestal. And then you do you have the person who's right. Your character, John. He's right. He's like, I should be more famous than Boone. But for some reason, whether they pushed it themselves or it's just the way history worked out, Boone's the one that gets put in the paintings in that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Why him? I could get into it. Cause I got my Johnny at was in his story. Why him? It also comes down to why him. Because of a guy he met. Yeah, a guy he met. And it started the thing. I mean, the guy he met wrote like, oh, I met this crazy, you know, guy. And he like built him up and made him crazy and. And changed his. You know, took aspects of his biography and. And birthed a legend Exactly. He just happened to run into a guy that put him into a book and birthed the legend. And it probably. And it winds up being similar. White, but similar to this story where I'm sitting here. Yeah. He had a pot on his head.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah. But it is so often a writer who comes across the story is maybe getting paid at the time by some magazine or. And. And they're the ones that. Absolutely. I'm. I'm also drawn thinking of writers. Mark Twain, a great example of somebody. Chat Chapman is this way too. Every state he enters and some that he didn't, they like to lay claim to him.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

They like to build a statue to him, often carved out of wood. Lemonsur has a wooden statue. They usually carve it out of a tree. Mark Twain the same way. Right. Here's this man who gets so many statues built about him. They all across the country, all these different states lay claim to. Oh, home of Mark Twain. Well, he lived here once. I mean, George Washington too. Right. Like we have this, like George Washington slept here. Or like hotels that have more of a sense of humor. Like George Washington took a shit here. Like all these different ways of doing it. Right. But what I love about that kind of. That aspect of it is that it makes the person first and foremost larger than life. But when you actually look at Mark Twain, what he used to do was just go to bars, listen to stories, usually for the price of a couple of drinks. Sometimes he would give them a little extra cash. He would then just say to the person, can I use your story? And he would pay them just a little bit of money. And next thing you know, that's how so much of his work got built. And again, that is that. It just feels so American to me the way that these stories kind of start to outgrow. I mean, I want to say outgrow history, but the fact of the matter is sometimes the stories become history even though they aren't factually accurate. Like the Tim Pot Hat.

[Stephen Rinella]

I want to return to a more detailed kind of like practical matter.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you explain real quick? You've touched on it, but can you explain real quick the. The land. The. The land speculator Orchard.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yes.

[Stephen Rinella]

Connection.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yes. I'm. You've asked me this twice. Yeah. Apparently I've not done a good enough job.

[Stephen Rinella]

How. How does that work? Like, walk me through that.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Okay. I mean, I am probably not fully educated in the history of how this country was taken over to speak about it. Super accurate.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, I just mean from his perspective.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But yes, from our from our perspective, I can easily say you basically have European settlers coming over and wanting to lay claim to land. You have Native American countries, you have Native American peoples, you have Native American tribes that already exist here. So there is, as we know. Right. And again, how historically accurate is this? But there's a lot of trading. There's Manhattan sold for beads, which, again, maybe not exactly accurate, but you get the idea.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Europeans start coming in and basically making trades for different parts of the country as they continue to move westward, all the while, of course, signing treaties where they say, we swear we're not going west of the Alleghenies. We swear we're not going west of the Ohio. We swear. And of course, those then become violent confrontations. As makes sense, as has been true of all history. Like, that's the other part that I think is so important. We can look at these moments in American history and be like, oh, this is brutal and, oh, this is difficult. Which, don't get me wrong, it is. But this is how land has been taken and fought over in the old world and everywhere else. Yeah, but part of what happened with land speculation is you had giant European corporations like the Dutch Holland Land Company, they would pay somebody like Dan McQuay to just go west, build a log cabin, lay claim, put down markers basically to the rights for that forest so that he could log it if there were native peoples there. See if you can figure out a way to say, hey, can we cut down some of these trees? Is that cool? Sometimes that works out. Sometimes it turns into a confrontation. So that's like the. That's like the massive scale. That's like. I'm sorry to use like modern terms, but like, that's like the Facebook. That's like the Google. That's like the big scale stuff was you literally had European governments, East Indian trading companies, something like. That's like the big. On the much smaller scale, you had this desire, Right. For westward expansion and settlers. And so the idea was if you were to plant the land, and I can't remember the exact number, but there was like X number of trees.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

It was called the donation tract.

[Stephen Rinella]

Right.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

And. And I think it was like 100 apple and 50 peach.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yep.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Or something like that. It was.

[Stephen Rinella]

It was.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

It was those two specifically. And then I think you had to have a structure on the property, and those were like your three requirements. And. And their thought when they were making those requirements, like, if you are dedicated enough to put a fruit tree in, then you're married to that property, kind of. You're Gonna see it through to where you can harvest that fruit. If you're putting 150 fruit trees in the ground, that's gonna make you wanna stay there and just, like, keep improving that zone.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Okay, first off, I'm so glad you're here. So that was perfect. Cause that's correct. Second, that's what makes Chapman such an interesting person. So he wanted to do that. He wanted his name down as somebody who owned that land, but he did not want to stick around to see it through. So that was his type of land. Spec, like Dan McQuay builds the hut, stays there, is getting paid by the Holland Company. It's taking the wood down the rivers, coming back. That's his place. Chapman just starts bouncing around now. He'll. He'll walk back seasonally. He comes back. That's. It's something that's very beautiful in his movements that I found that I actually try and do a little bit of in the book, too. There's almost a seasonal circular nature to it that I absolutely love. But he basically will partner with somebody, say, hey, will you stick around? Will you look over this land? It's now our land. Which, again, he lost so much of it, especially when he passes away. Like a bunch of. I'm sure not everyone went looking for his siblings to be like, by the way, I was in a 50, 50 split. I think they were like, well, look at that. Now this is mine. But that was the way that you got to lay claim. And I mean, to think about it in modern terms, imagine if we could just. I mean, this country is so vast. Don't get me wrong, it is so big. It's so beautiful. But the idea that you could just go and plant a few trees and be like, this now is mine. Of course, especially to young people, that was such a drawer and so such a draw. And so that. That kept people moving westward.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

And one of the goals of the donation tract was to, like, put a buffer zone between the east and the native tribes that were further west. And so Johnny is sort of encountering some of these tribes along the way. Can you talk about his relationship with them?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yes, absolutely. So, again, I mentioned. I mean, this is a part of the book that fascinates me. I grew up in this area where the Wapanoag, led by this guy who the Europeans called King Philip. His name was Metacom. And his father, and basically a colonialist father, were the ones that made peace around Thanksgiving. And then a generation later, you can just see the way the younger generation was, like, neither of us like how this is working out in a very interesting fact. Just real quick. This not so much linked to Chapman, but one of the issues was gun control because settlers brought guns and very quickly through trade. Native Americans then had guns and then all of a sudden the colonists started making rules around guns and the Native Americans were like, what are you talking about?

[Stephen Rinella]

The tendency to want to be the guy with the gun and the other guys don't have the guns has not gone away.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It never has, never will. It's a joke. I'm sorry, but it is a joke. I couldn't not make in the book was like and then the second amendment was ratified and there's never been any gun issues since. Which of course has not been the case.

[Stephen Rinella]

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[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But so that started what was called King Philip's War. Metacom's Rebellion. As, as with everything back then, there's a bunch of different names. 3,000 Native Americans perish. A thousand colonists perish. In a. Very interesting. Again, oftentimes, especially in elementary school and earlier histories, this is seen as like civilization versus the wild, which of course it's not. It's so much more complex than that. The colonists do eventually kill Metacom. They then get his head and they put it on a pike outside of Plymouth for decades. Which is amazing because that's such a European like that's, you know, that's William Wallace type stuff right there is this like history of that and there's a play somebody made kind of making fun of bureaucracy much more modern. That was. Metacom's head is still rotting on a pike down the road. Like basically it's this big. They basically make it a play about what the town hall meeting was to be like. At what point should we like the 90 year old guys still really like it, but at what point should we actually take this head down? Maybe. But yeah, so there was this brutality. Chapman himself runs into the Seneca. He runs into the Shawnee in Ohio. 100%. You have to remember a lot of the tribes that we think of as westward and Plains Indians actually were pushed out that way. So they kind of started around here. The one that I in my head really link him to though is the. Like you don't know for sure but you really think the Seneca are probably the ones in the area of Warren, Pennsylvania that helped him with the, with his brother. But The War of 1812 is. Oh, you might have to fact check me on this because the war of 18 again, like, like with all these. Right, like, like with the French Indian War and the. Which was part of the Seven Year War. You have natives on both sides, right. So like the Mohawk and the Mohegan actually side with the settlers in King Philip's War. It's the Narragansett and the Wampanoag and many other smaller tribes that are kind of at that are fighting. And Metacom's father made peace with the earliest colonists because he was in a fight with the Narragansett. So. Right. So there's all this, there's this ever shifting generational divide.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. The War of 1812 is kind of like the American Revolution Part 2.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly.

[Stephen Rinella]

And the English still had certain holdings, they had certain tribal affiliations and they. And there was A lot of. There were some issues that had been sort of punted around borders and things at the end of the American Revolution. And The War of 1812 brought all those hostilities forward and led to a further diminishment of English influence. I wanted defeated a lot of tribes because there was a lot of tribes in the Ohio Valley that threw in with the English during the War of 1812 and it led to their defeat.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Well, and also because they were. They were basically saying, we will make sure the colonists stop expanding west. That was part of the way the British, I want to say the Delaware. The Delaware is what's popping into my mind. But again, probably a fact check. But basically during that time, Chapman has made it far enough west to Mansfield. And if you'll allow me just real quick, Ohio is a incredible thing to look at. It is the heart of the country. It's shaped that way. There's nobody thinks of it as the west, but at one point, especially for land speculators, Ohio was like the land of milk and honey. That's where they really. We had all these kind of deals that we'd made that were holding us back from it. And basically settlers just said, screw those deals, and they started moving inland. Then The War of 1812 breaks out. Chapman is in and around Mansfield, Ohio again. He never has a home address, but it's probably as close to a home base as he has because he's walking in these seasonal circles. He's coming back to Mansfield a lot. And there is rumor a shopkeeper gets murdered. To this day, we're not actually sure what happened, but a shopkeeper is murdered very quickly. News travels. Native Americans killed the shopkeeper and they're coming and they're backed by the British.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Which was just to be clear, a very understandable fear at the time that was not delusional to think that that might be happening. Town gathers, a call goes out. There are soldiers in Mount Vernon, Ohio, which is about 35 miles west. Again, can't remember the tribe. I believe it might be Delaware, but Native Americans might be coming to attack. We need those reinforcements. Sun is setting. Who will go? Who will go 35 miles, basically the length of a marathon. Then some to go, get some soldiers down in Mount Vernon, alert them to our plight and bring them back. And the way the story is told is that a shiny eyed, long haired, uncanned, skinny, probably mid to late 30s at this point in his life has already gotten a reputation, as you said, as like almost a news carrier, as a man who was a little bit of an eccentric in the area seasonally would come around preaching about Swedenborg raises his hand and says, I'll go no gun. Depending on legend. No shoes, but no horse. No horse for real. That's. That's legit. And he on foot goes on a newly cut, newly cut road down to Mount Vernon. A lot of the facts that we have about Chapman come from children of the time because he gets lionized after his death, like I mentioned. So those children eventually grow into adults and then they're the ones that are recorded, which again, of course there's legend,

[Stephen Rinella]

but recording oral history version of firsthand

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

experience from an 8 year old. Yeah. So take it all with a grain of salt.

[Stephen Rinella]

Of course he's like the way I remember it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Right. But they. He apparently was running by basically saying, the Native Americans are attacking Mansfield. The Native Americans are attacking Mansfield. I run to Mount Vernon to get. To get help. And again, this is one of those interesting things which I love. This is what I love about this project that I got to do. I think this country is more interesting when you look at it in its three dimensional complexities. I think my family, which is also a tie through this story, starting with my father and those lovely walks that I had back in the day, is more complex when you look at it through this three dimensional complexity. My first book was very much like the worst moments of my family story. This is more about. What about the camping? What about the canoeing trips? Yes, we grew up really broke. But what were those nice moments that happened as well? And then John Chapman's story is so much more interesting when you think about it with this complexity. So was he a friend of Native Americans? There's a lot of proof that he was. But again, when war showed up right in front of him, he chose a side and he went and he got those soldiers, brought the soldiers back, came back with them, mind you. So he went the 30 miles down and did the 30 miles back, which that's the last walk that I do in this book is I also walked from Mansfield to Mount Vernon, Ohio and then turned around the next day and did it back. Wasn't fun. Wasn't fun. But he did it. Turned out the attack doesn't come, but that gives him notoriety and fame in his lifetime. That is what almost gets him. That's what levels him up and he becomes known as the Paul Revere of the War of 1812. Which again is a story Disney never tells us. They never tell you you're near elementary school. Cause it makes it more complex and Therefore, it's easier to just brush it to the side.

[Stephen Rinella]

What is the Disney version? You've mentioned it a couple times, but I don't even. That's probably the one I have in my head. But what is the Disney Store?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So the Disney version, there's this. It's 1947, maybe 48, 1947, late 40s. There is a melody time. They make all these different kind of musicals. I mean, basically what Disney's looking for, if we can get into the capitalism aspect of that real quick, is what's a story we can tell without having to pay anybody money? American Legends. Nobody's going to come knocking on our door looking for the life rights. Pocahontas. Cartoons. What?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Pocahontas.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Beauty and the Beat, all the producers,

[Stephen Rinella]

where he says, next time, no writers.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, right. No, that's. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so one of their. They. They came out with a bunch of these different melody times. One of them was the story of John Chapman. And it starts with him. He looks super skinny and he's meek because it's true. He is the gentlest of our American legends. He is this country at its most peaceful ideals. It's one of the things that I really love about him. It's one of the things I really respect about him. They give him a Bible. Do they get into Swedenborgianism?

[Stephen Rinella]

No.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, they put a little.

[Stephen Rinella]

He just got a straight up Bible.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, yeah, he just gets the Bible. He gets the. Right down the middle of the lane and the. The whole. The whole video opens up. And they showed this in elementary schools across the country. They showed this after churches. If this isn't ringing any bells for you, that means you might have had an interesting upbringing.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, And I also picture the character played by him. He's got like a. Like a canvas sack with his seeds.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100%.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, that's like a shoulder bag full of his seeds.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly right. He's got a man purse full of seeds.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And I'm ringing. I'm ringing back.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And it opens with like all these very hardy men walking west. And he's kind of like, oh, I can't go west. Like an angel comes to him and is like, yeah, you can. They need apples. And then he walks west and he throws his apple seeds willy nilly. No orchards, no capitalism, just out of the goodness of his heart. And then they grow. And then people have apple pies and they have apple tarts. And even I will say it gives it Gives Swedenborg, like, a little bit of a nod because they do believe in angels and they do believe in ghosts. And so then he gets older, and everyone loves him. The animals love him. The Native Americans love him. The settlers love him. He's got no shoes on. And we can get into those facts real quick. Like, this is the. This is the same John Chapman that, like, befriended a wolf and had a pet wolf for many years. This is the same John Chapman who, like, once came across some bears living in a stump that he called his home, and he decided, oh, I should let the bears have the stump because he's a good man. No, because the. It's bears. Because it's bears. You don't go mess with bears, I think, is the easier part of that story.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

He purchased a horse that was about to be slaughtered because he didn't want to see it killed.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And supposedly, that one might be real. Okay, tell me more.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

And then he wouldn't even ride it. Right. Because that was wrong to him, was to, like, put the horse, you know, make it do his labor.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah. He really. There was some part of Swedenborgianism that really made him respect animals. So he didn't hunt, supposedly. Which isn't. That's a. We also have ledgers where he got jerky. Like, you know, like. But, like, maybe.

[Stephen Rinella]

But he wasn't armed.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Might have been eccentric later. Right. He wasn't armed. The horse thing was. There is paperwork that he bought a horse.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

That's great.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And then partnered with one of his orchard guys and was like, will you just make sure this horse lives out the rest of its days? So, like, he had. He was apparently really good with children. He would often. Because he did have big, thick, calloused feet from how much walking he did. So he would, like, walk on embers or stick his feet with needles to much. To, like. Like the horrification of children.

[Stephen Rinella]

To, like, wow little kids.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, to, like, wow little kids. Exactly.

[Stephen Rinella]

So if you wind up being an eccentric old man.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Don't do the wow and little kids.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Okay.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, That's. That's. You got to stay away from that one a little bit.

[Stephen Rinella]

We had one of those in our town.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

They get a bad.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. We had never run. That's a bad joke. That's a bad joke. We had a lot, but no genuine, like. Another one is he didn't use a campfire because he thought it would kill mosquitoes because they were drawn to the light. Another one was he thought he stepped on a warm ones. And that's why he didn't wear shoes. So there's all these eccentric eccentricities.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

And it's why he wouldn't graft trees, because you're like causing some pain by cutting into a tree.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Right.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

And so that's why he goes straight to seed.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Well, so this, this is a two. This is a two parter. I think it's both.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Some people argue it's one or the other. He either didn't graft trees because like you just said, he did not believe in hurting other living creatures. And a tree in his, like, this is like the prototype hippie. In a way. He is the American legend for our first Jesus driven hippie.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Because by grafting, you're cutting into live trees.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly. You're cutting a hunk of the live tree. You're replanting it. That's how you can ensure that you are getting the clone. As you so beautifully put it earlier. Other people say he just loved God so much that to do that would be to mess with God's plan.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Which is I'm just gonna put the seed in. If the best apple happens to grow from it, it'll be great. Of course, that never happened, but I would argue it's probably both.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

My cynical wife has a third theory. When I told her about Johnny Appleseed, the real version, a few years ago, she's like, well, no, he was clearly a businessman and so he was saving money by just like using seed. He wasn't. He wasn't following his rel. He was. He didn't have other motives.

[Stephen Rinella]

If you could interview him.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Now, this is the cheapest way.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know what I get these seats for.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, yeah. $0. No, that's exactly. To be honest, your wife is probably, if not 100% right, a big part of the pie. But anyways, to get back to that is the Disney. The Disney version of him was the sweet person. And the Disney film ends with Angel Michael coming down from heaven, taking his old hobo looking soul up and putting him in like the wall, like he's our first American saint.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

This has some very Mormon like tones.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

It's. I'm glad to hear you say that. Some of that was influenced.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100. 100.

[Stephen Rinella]

I need to. I think it's important here that I betray that I. That I admit to a level of ignorance about apples.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, that's. This is. You're gonna come. You're gonna come in here.

[Stephen Rinella]

That I thought for some reason that when you do buy seed, like in America, when you do Buy seed. It doesn't work out. And that you. That they always graft onto American crab apple. No, the root. I bet someone's going to write in maybe that the root that all. If you go to any apple orchard.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah. In America.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yep. That it is. That it is grafted onto the American crab apple root stock.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

I true. Well, I think our apples have become so corrupted. At one point, I think they say there were 17,000 species of apple on the continent. Now we're down to only a few thousand. And there's like these dudes and women who their whole life goal, after they retire, they like, you know, have a. Have a job that allows them to retire at 52, they become lost apple hunters and they're going out and looking for these varieties. So I'm sure I got a hot tip. I'm sure we have many species that I know.

[Stephen Rinella]

The nastiest apple tree in the world.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

But where I grew up, somebody would like to know about that, I'm sure. But the version you're saying that they're all grafted onto crab apples. Some certainly are, but not all.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

All right.

[Stephen Rinella]

And I thought somehow when you planted a seed, it just like it sound. I sound like an idiot now. I thought it somehow just didn't work.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No, it works.

[Stephen Rinella]

You just get a bad.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

You just get a really bad apple. Unless you want to make alcohol, in which case it's a great apple.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Because you just need to be able to grind. Grind them up. What I will say real quick, shout out to Michael Pollen.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Who wrote a great book, Botany of Desire.

[Stephen Rinella]

One of those was. Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Which gets into some of the different aspects. And very much was informative for this book as well. Because apple. The other thing is everyone thinks American as apple pie. So we think of apples as Americans. They are patriotic. They're from like Kazakhstan.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

They were brought over here. And I have like, I have a few different apple theories which are just like more barroom talk than like science. What you're talking, which is I think delicious apples have the best PR on the planet. They look good.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Red Delicious.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah. But they're not delicious.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

I agree.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

They're terrible.

[Stephen Rinella]

Kicking all their asses.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Honey crispies and doing great.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

And the great.

[Stephen Rinella]

A real apple is the Macintosh.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, here we go.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

I like Macintosh.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, it's a junk apple.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

What do you think of Golden Honey

[Stephen Rinella]

Crisp has taken over the apple world.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

What do you think of golden delicious

[Stephen Rinella]

Macintosh? That's a mealy, thick skinned apple, Johnny. Apologies to any Macintosh producers out there.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No, no. I'm with. I'm with you 100%. Sorry, what were you about to say?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Johnny Appleseed gets some credit for the Golden Delicious, which is a modern apple that's, you know, survived to make it to grocery store shelves. He didn't make that, but he made its like parents in the apple lineage, which was like a West Virginia delicious or a West Virginia golden, something like that. So, like, of all this Johnny Appleseed talk, you'd still see a little bit of them in the grocery store.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Listen, when you take that many at bats, eventually you gotta have a couple

[Stephen Rinella]

of good ones, is what he's saying, is that. Check out.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I will say, I think this man knows apples better than me when it comes to the botany aspect of this. This is where I get. This is where I get the loosest. In my research, the one thing you bring up, McIntosh, one thing that's fun, is that in the book, I go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is where his story ends. It's where he dies. But they now have this incredibly huge, beautiful, wonderful Johnny Appleseed festival. It happens every year.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, they do.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

If you have a chance, you should get. It was so much bigger and more spectacular than I thought it could be. I had some of the best food I've ever had. Granted, some of it was like chicken dumplings by Amish people. And when you have that much workforce for free, of course you're gonna make some really, really good stuff. But one of the other aspects of it is that Fort Wayne has a farm league team that their players go to San Diego, which is interesting. It's very far away. But they are called the Fort Wayne Tin Caps. Oh. And it is a gorgeous stadium to this day. To this day. But the reason Usain McIntosh brought it up for me was I was like, so how did you come up with the name? And they had all these different aspects and they had some voting and there are other parts that were linked to Fort Wayne. And one of their aspects was, well, we know we want to do something with Apple. And immediately they were like, oh, there's a little company in Cupertino, California that might start writing us some cease and desist letters because it's Apple. Like, when you think about. When you think about how American app like Apple's one of the biggest companies on the planet and that is their logo. It's just an apple with a little bite taken out of it. It's this universal symbol that has really taken over. Like every culture, in a way, has this draw to apples. But the tin caps, they eventually went with tin caps. And I'll never forget, I interviewed this guy, Michael Limmer. It's in the book. I call. It's like the moneyball aspect of the book. It's like when I get into sports a little bit and I just took him for a big walk and we, we did a big interview and he was just like, yeah, people got real mad at the tin cap because it's not historically accurate.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And I was like, it's a cartoon. Like, the apple also has a face on it. Is anyone mad? Like you're a farm league team, like you're having some fun. And he was like, you're writing a book about Johnny Appleseed. You'll see. And he was like. He was all these armchair historians. Like, just really. He was like, I thought we were making a team for like, the local area and community. Just for the record, they sell the most merchandise of any farm league team. They've won the division. Like, they're really good. It's right downtown if you. The tickets are inexpensive. If you're ever in Fort Wayne, go to a Fort Wayne Tin caps game. It's so, so fun. That said, he genuinely was like, we became a national story. Like, people were calling into CNN being like, there weren't handles on tin at that. This is historically inaccurate. And this is all that. And they got dragged. They got dragged. Really? Yeah. People feel so sure. Like, this is part. I mean, it's Daniel Boone, like, right. People find their little slice of American history and they feel so impassioned about it. And I think that's a good thing in the end. But like, eventually you do run into like, hey, guys, it's okay. It's just the. It's just the baseball team. You can calm down.

[Stephen Rinella]

Here's what I want to do next.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

How does he die?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Great question. Like, bad. No, no. War of 1812 happens. He becomes the Paul Revere of the War of 1812. He becomes the Paul Revere of what at the time was the West. And again, it's so easy to forget that Ohio used to be as far as. As we were when it came to that kind of, of American destiny that like, march west eventually. And I love this fact about him. When he enters Ohio, it is so unpopulated by white colonists. His life and the population of white settlers is like a never ending grab. Like, like the, the years that he was there is just. What's the word I'm looking for in math? Exponential. It's an exponential graph of how many settlers move into that land of Milk and honey. So he's one of the earliest, not earliest people, you know, there were some, some, some land purveyors and stuff, surveyors and stuff. But he is definitely one of the earliest settlers to really make Ohio his home. And by the time he's hitting his 40s and 50s, it's gotten in his mind, overpopulated by white people. And so he keeps pushing west. Now, again, this gets back to almost your wife's view of him as a perfect capitalist, which again, some people view him as a religious person. Some people view him as almost our first American saint. Some people view him as the first pacifist hippie. Some people view him as just like a really shrewd, albeit eccentric businessman. And so there's something to be said for, well, these people all have orchards and all I do is I know how to get free appleseed. So I have to keep moving west to keep up with my market. So he moves westward as things expand into Indiana. Now, my thing, which is not true, this is me just adding to the legends. This is the part of me that's my father I like to think of. He's trying to relive his glory days.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He's trying to recap, you know, he's

[Stephen Rinella]

got the old magic.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, man. They don't talk about me in Ohio the way that they used to. I need to get back.

[Stephen Rinella]

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[Stephen Rinella]

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[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He makes his way to Indiana. Indiana starts as a fort settlement. This is where, I'm sorry I forget his name, but there's this incredible character that I discover and I write about briefly in the book, which is this guy who was basically, he had red hair and he was born of settlers. Then Native Americans captured him and took him as a child. He was raised by Native Americans. He fought on the side of the Native Americans during again, something we've touched on but haven't given nearly enough. Like when you're taught in education in elementary school and public school, it's like Revolutionary War, Westward Expansion, Civil War complex. Anyways, moving on. World War I. Sorry about some of that slavery stuff. Moving on. But we win World War II. Huzzah. And then it kind of, we, we. We gloss over so much of the brutality and fighting that happened to win. Basically the middle of the country. We kind of jumped straight to that kind of wild, wild West. This character, his name, I'm sorry that I cannot remember it, but it translates to Carrot Top. I'm not joking.

[Stephen Rinella]

Really?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's where that came from.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No, it's not where it comes from at all. But he had red hair. He fought on the side of the Native Americans. He eventually then gets won over back by the US Government. He becomes a spy. He comes back and fights for the Union, basically the federal. Then marries and moves back. He basically is a spy. He's a like again, just like Daniel Mcquay Somebody should write a book about this guy. I will look up his name. We can put it up later. Anyways, John Chapman is moving into Indiana, into Fort Wayne during that time, and he's redoing orchards. But he's in his 60s. He lives into his mid-70s, which is really good for that time period, especially sleeping outside that much. But it's this walking. But he dies on the floor. They're not strangers. This is part of. Yes, he slept on a lot of strangers floors. But because he walked in these seasonal circles, he eventually strangers became friends. There's a story of somebody building him a room off their house just for him.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Right. Just. They construct an extra room just for him so he's not sleeping in the barn or outside. But they do not build a door that goes from that room to inside their house.

[Stephen Rinella]

Huh.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Because he is covered in. And this is a direct quote, we beasties. Because at this point in his life, he has been living outside so long, he is accumulating bugs.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Wow. He is somebody. You do not.

[Stephen Rinella]

He's all full of fleas.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He smells pretty bad, and you probably don't want him in your house. So they, like, basically build him a glorified human dog house that is attached to the house.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's not what.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He dies, but does not have a door. No, I'm sorry. Outside of Fort Wayne.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Doghouse man.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He dies on the floor of a family's home. They write a beautiful piece of writing. They say that he looked excited to pass to the other side. Huh. Which he'd spent his whole life proselytizing. He gave a great sermon before he died. Warm by their hearth. And they say that he walked 15 miles earlier that day.

[Stephen Rinella]

Really?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So he went out exactly how he wanted to go out.

[Stephen Rinella]

And they recognized him as a person

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

of notoriety 100% at that point. Again, that War of 1812 thing kind of pushed him over where, like, he became a known entity in the areas. But again, it's not until 20 years later. So he dies in his 70s, but it's the 1800s, when we are really trying to figure out how to coalesce as a country. We are looking for stories that talk about our best ambitions again as we kind of move west and as there is this brutality. And for Harper's Bazaar, a man writes an article that's like 30 pages, all about this incredibly sweet, incredibly Christian, incredibly loving, beloved guy who was just out there planting apples out of the goodness of his heart so that people had things to survive off of as they Moved westward and that in like the 18 especially, we're talking about civil wars happening. So we are trying to say. No, no, no, no, no. We're not just this brutal, terrible country that's mad at each other fighting over these really terrible issues. No, there's, there's a goodness to us too. And that article is the, is the beginning of the basis of what becomes John Chapman, the man transitioning to Johnny Appleseed, who coined.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's the first, what's the first time you see Johnny Apples in print?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It is almost certainly that, but some people did call him that even at the time. That was like a nickname, John Appleseed. Because again, he would just go to cider ease and the ciders, they didn't give. Like they, it was, it was, it was.

[Stephen Rinella]

So it came about naturally. It wasn't coined by a writer.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No, no, no, no. Yeah. We can't give it to like one specific guy. Is that, does that work with the fact check?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Well, I was gonna, yeah, they were calling them that at the time, it seems. But like I, I, I just clearing up a number. I said earlier the donation tracked, it was 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees. Those were the requirements.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He said 150.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yes. So I was, I was just had doubled them. But like if the marketing had been different around him, he could have been Johnny Peach Pit or Johnny Johnny Fennell. Like talk, talk about some of the other stuff.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

He was. Thank you so much for bringing that up. Oh my gosh. I spaced on one of the things I most wanted to talk about. So it's alcohol. It's all alcohol. Right? We talked about that earlier. It's all for booze. So why does that get forgotten? Well, you could easily make the argument of, well, we're trying to teach it to elementary school and unlike the time we don't booze up children anymore the way that we used to. Yeah. But it's not, it's prohibition. So apples were seen as grapes. They were an alcohol making fruit back then. It wasn't.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, that's interesting, man. That, that would have been. You'd have viewed it that way.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah. You would not. It was.

[Stephen Rinella]

You've been like, oh, you guys making a little bevy.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, you were the.

[Stephen Rinella]

You guys are making some pies, Right?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Exactly. It was not. Apples were not for. It was, that was their main thing. And people were eating them on the sides. That was like the side thing. Then prohibition happens. Grandma Hatchet, she's making the great fight against booze across the country, you know, teetotalers are coming out of the woodwork. And part of their war is a war on booze, and part of their war is a war on bars, and part of their war is a war on apples. And it becomes clear, like, we have records of federal agencies coming to be like, your uncle has an apple tree in his backyard. He's probably using it to make some kind of homebrew. And so agents are literally cutting apple trees down. And so prohibition happens. Then the 21st Amendment, God bless, happens. We're back, baby. Booze is a part of America, but we all. I think, to be honest, I always look at Prohibition as like just like a drying out period where everybody kind of got to get their legs back and then they could kind of move forward from there. All right, maybe we shouldn't be doing it all the time. And genuinely, the apple industry needs new pr. And that is when an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, no kidding?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Really? I swear to God, that is when we come to think of apples as a healthy treat. And what's nice is they actually are. They actually are healthy. But for a very long time, they just. The way that the grape is linked to wine, apple was linked to cider. And that was their main true calling. And now what's interesting is only with modern breweries, like, like the other thing Prohibition killed was small batch alcohol making. Then these giant conglomerations moved in, took over the booze business, and for many, many decades, you only, you know, you'd have your five beers that you could choose at any bar. Only recently have people become reinvigorated in remaking their own booze or remaking small batch booze to serve local communities, which I love. Like, that's America at its best, is when it's the most diverse. And so cider making is also coming back in a real way, and I love seeing that. So cider making is on the rise. Riverhead Cider House. I live on Long island, and there's a cidery right by where I live. And that's where I wrote a lot of this book. And they have just had tremendous success bringing back kind of old school styles of making cider and selling it to the local community with no dreams of going national, no dreams of becoming the next. You know, just like this is something that serves these towns here. This is a place to gather, like a church, like a baseball stadium. You know, that's what a bar is. It's a public house. It's a place, I think, you know, you guys care about conserving land and it's something that's so important to me too. Like in this book. I'm in so many state parks, national parks. But there's also this need to protect places where humans can just come together and gather. And places like the Riverhead Cider House. Do that. Which I really love.

[Stephen Rinella]

I won. I was never able to replicate this, but I one time made the perfect batch of hard cider. On accident?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

We were out hunting in the winter.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Oh, my gosh.

[Stephen Rinella]

And we found all these frozen apples under an apple tree. It was on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zurlot. And he had his orchard apples. Then he had these just stray apple trees out and about he didn't harvest. And I always thought that those are the better apples.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Apples.

[Stephen Rinella]

He has all these frozen apples. We put them in one of his wooden crates, a wooden apple crate. I took them home and put it. And they're frozen solid. I put them in the basement in a five gallon bucket. Okay. And I don't know what they had already fermented or I don't remember. But like all of a sudden it was just that you could like dip into that and drink it. And it was booze, dude. It was good. And we later tried, you know, whatever I did, it never like, it just never happened again.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Do you know?

[Stephen Rinella]

I mean, it never happened again.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

So just.

[Stephen Rinella]

It just made this perfect. It's just somehow these apples thawed and in my mom and dad's basement, like made a hard cider. So what you.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

What you just experienced and never again

[Stephen Rinella]

like you got like. I could go get apples again that are frozen and throw them in my mom and dad's basement. It would just make rotten apples.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But we have evidence of animals doing this. What you are talking about. There are some monkeys that do it in certain places. We have evidence of deer sometimes knowing during wet seasons to return to area. I think a lot of animals enjoy getting a little tipsy. And you as a human being, a full grown.

[Stephen Rinella]

You got a high schooler.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

But yeah, yeah, all right, all right. Sorry. Maybe not fully grown. That's like 26 is when the brain is fully developed. But you got to experience basically grabbing this thing, having it go bad, but going so bad that it went good.

[Stephen Rinella]

My old man, I don't know if this is the right word. My old man called it applejack.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, that's exactly. So apple cider is the like sipping all day stuff. But then you can make this harder apple brandy, which was very popular at the time. And that's what you call it. Apple Jack. That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Here's my last question. And I think that this is true of you, because some things you've said.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Okay, this is.

[Stephen Rinella]

This is a thing I harp on all the time about American culture. The narrative. If you imagine your online life. Your online life. The online narrative is about that America is divided, that partisan fractures.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Right?

[Stephen Rinella]

We're leading to some great civil war.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Okay, girl.

[Stephen Rinella]

And I know and I understand. Like, my online life is like, I got it. It's as true. As true. The country is splitting apart at the seams. But my lived life. My lived life. I don't get it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100.

[Stephen Rinella]

I don't see it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

100.

[Stephen Rinella]

The people, my neighbors. I've said this before. My most immediate neighbors. I do not know what their political leanings are. I honestly don't know what their political leanings are. I know that if my home was on fire, they would rush in to check if my family is okay. And I know I would rush into their home.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Amen.

[Stephen Rinella]

I do not know their political leanings.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Amen.

[Stephen Rinella]

I don't even care. Like, I don't need to know their political leanings.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I'll do you one better. I know my neighbor's political leanings. They are not mine.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And I know that my blizzard. I'm sorry. I know that a blizzard came while I was out of town and they were the first people over there using their plow to plow out the driveway with a snowblower. Making sure that my wife was safe. And I know that if their house was ever in any kind of situation, anytime I'm able to help them. Them. Those are your neighbors.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

That is the point of community. That is the point of trust.

[Stephen Rinella]

You've said a couple things about your wanderings, your rant, your. Your American ramblings.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

That just. I don't know. You. You. You seem to express a sort of optimism about America.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

A hundred percent. I have walked outside and I've seen this country at an eye level. People are good for the most part. Don't get me wrong. You're gonna meet jerks everywhere. The hospitality, the kindness, the. One of my favorite things, the curiosity about one another is really strong. I love going to new places. I love meeting new people. And in no way do we start the way that they would start you on whatever. Fox News or CNN or msnbc. Oh. So what do you think? You don't sit down in your yarn and ask, what do you think about Proposition 1A? Like, no man. Maybe baseball, maybe basket. Like, maybe sports. Maybe we can have some fun. No, you walk into a place and you have a meeting with another fellow human being. And if I can say honestly, we've talked so much about the history. Cause I know that's what what's of interest. Talked about westward expansion. Cause I know that's what's of interest. But the core of this book is it is a non political look at where this country is right now and what I saw. Ron Chernow is gonna be able to write the great biography of John chapman that's like 7,000 pages long. Or Howard Means is this great writer. He came out with a book about John Chapman in 2011 from Simon Schuster. It's a great straightforward biography. What I did was slept in a parking lot. That's probably near where John Chapman used to sleep at the woods. That's what I did. And I got to meet so many individuals in this. This country is not on the verge of civil war. This country is not this divided, partisan place that you see when you look at your screen. Don't get me wrong, phone's nice for a map. I can't be totally anti screen. The phone is nice for taking photos or recording a voice memo. But the more time I spend off of social media, the more time I spend listening to podcasts of people that I enjoy instead of just staring at the same this large media that I believe is genuinely invested in making sure that we feel scared, isolated, alone and angry at each other, the better I feel. And the tough thing for me is there is family history in this book as well. There is things that my family have grappled with in the last couple years. And I have seen firsthand what happens when you give in to isolation, when you give in to loneliness. You cannot be scared of your fellow neighbors. I understand that. We are human beings and we have the potential to do harm. History is long and bloody. But at the same time, there are so many stories of coming together, figuring out problems, working with one another to make a safe haven for all of us. And I think this country, we are approaching 250 years. This country is an experiment. Is it perfect? No. Have we done some atrocious things? Absolutely. But when you look at our ideals, when you look at the better of our angels, when you look at the things that we are reaching for, when you look at the way this country comes together and still works 250 years later, covering vast. Montana could be its own country. Texas could be its own country. New England put all those nerds in their own country like that. It could be that way, but we are one country and it works. And I think that is a beautiful thing. And when I walked out into the world, I want to be very clear, my father said to me, you're going to get shot. I did not walk. Everybody's dad says that, right? You're going to get shot. And not to mention if you go

[Stephen Rinella]

doing what you do.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

We didn't even get get into the lack of preparedness. I'm almost horrified to be on this podcast. I want to be clear. I've learned more. I know how tense work. I've. I've gotten a little bit better at it. I want to learn more. If I'm being honest, like hunting is something I'm trying to get more interested in. I think that that's a really incredible part of the human experience. But real quick, my dad was like, you're going to get shot. I walked out into the country with no preconceived notions. That was an important part of this project. And what I found was so much more life affirming, heart filling, soul booing than I expected. And I'm so happy I did it. And I hope that people feel that when they read this book because this is a book of coming together. It's a book about walking away from loneliness and towards community.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got any more you want to ask Mo?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Did you go to Nova Ohio?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Yeah, man.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Did I see the last. Oh, here we go. We gonna get the real fact check.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Tell Steve.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Okay, so Patti Smith, the Allegro Farm. This is what we're talking about. PATTI SMITH MUSICIAN no, no, no. Oh my gosh. That'd be cool. Wait, hang on. It's not Patti Smith. Sorry, Let me try that again. A woman named Patty on the Allegra farm in Nova Ohio, there's a claim that is the last apple tree planted by John Chapman and it still bears fruit. And I go and I talk to Patty. There is some interesting science, exceptionally rich soil. People have taken seeds from this tree and they have brought them to space. That is true. In the 90s, this tree was so popular that people used to show up in buses, field of dream style, just to take photos with it. In the 1990s, in the 1990s, it then kind of the. The farm kind of went through some different iterations. Patty, I think, is kind of bringing it back. I showed up, I'm not joking. You want to talk about a wonderful moment in America? I didn't call ahead, I didn't write an email. I just rolled up, knocked on the door, immediately, was apologetic. I was Like, I'm so sorry I didn't come back later. Let me leave my number. This is weird. Yeah. And she was like, stop being weird, man. And just was like, come on in. You want iced tea, lemonade or water? And she just sat and she just talked with me. And so the story she had about not just the tree, she also had stories about that that town was a stop on the Underground Railroad or on the Underground Railroad. She had stories about her great, great grandparents and basically trying to help slaves get up into Canada. She had stories about the ways she used to take the apples and go. She always wanted horses, but they only had sheep and cows on the farm. So she'd go to the cows and pretend they were horses when she was a child. All these wonderful. Like, again, this. This book is also very much about what's legend, what's fact, and at the end of the day, how much does it really matter? But it is also a rainbow tree, which some people take a little umbrage with. Could that possibly be a tree that John Chapman planted? He himself did come to that area. That's documented, because there was a Swedenborgian minister who lived in that area. So he would come through and commune. So he definitely visited that farm.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Do you think he planted that tree?

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Me?

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I have to believe.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah, that's fun.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I have to believe. I will say in the book, I hedge it more.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Okay.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

In the book, I hedge it more. But you, to me, the person that I am.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Half my father, half my mother. I go with my father on that one. I love the idea. There's a. There's so. There's three trees there now, but one of them very, very old. And basically the idea is that, like, the roots almost died and then regrew.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

You can. I get into the science of it in the book. You can. You can make up your own mind.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah, that's. It's like, not uncommon. If you had a plum tree and it failed in year five, if you leave it for a season or two, something else may start growing there. And it could. It could even be a fruit that's not a plum anymore. So that, like, could happen.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

What.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

What you're saying it could. And there's now multiple online sellers who will sell you a tree that they say came from the Johnny Appleseed tree. There's. There's a couple different places. And I see my. I see my orchard going through phases. Like, I have a 2027 plan, a 2028 plan. Next year, I want to put a Johnny Appleseed Tree in the ground. But I want someone to tell me that's a good idea and be like, yes, that's a Johnny Appleseed treat.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Let me do it for you right now. Because I will say this. I do. I talked to Patty about the person that's licensed the right to sell the seeds. And that to me, almost felt a little bit like I was like, this is gonna be like a succession style story. And I decided. I felt. I was like, I already got a lot going on in this book, so I decided not to chase that one down. Remember I mentioned the football or. Sorry. Remember I mentioned the baseball team?

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Yeah.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

So they have a tree in front of. Of the stadium which they won't cut because it's a Johnny Appleseed tree. So it's actually kind of blocking the sign. It grew bigger than they expected. And I'm pretty sure it's from that Patty tree and this guy who's kind of licensed it and done it. But I will do you on better is what I'm trying to say. Please, I have these apples. Yes, I will come back to Montana. I'm not joking. This is the kind of dumb stuff I do. I will come back to Montana. I will give you the seeds.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

Please.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

And you. You don't have to figure out whether real or not. You can plant the legendary Johnny Appleseed tree on your property.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

I would love it.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Let's do it.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's old eccentric right there. That's a future. That's a future. Old.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Don't stick needles in your feet when you're in your.

[Guest or Co-host (possibly a podcast fact-checker or contributor)]

The property value is going to go way up once I've got a Johnny Appleseed tree there.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's great, man. All right, everybody. The name of the book, American Rambler Walking the trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald. It's brand spanking new.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

It's brand spanking new. It's out May 12th. New York Times bestseller. A lot of nice people have said a lot of nice things about it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Man. You got a boatload. I don't think you get into that. You got a boatload of great writers saying great things about the book. Check it out.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

I hope it's because they like it. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thank you very much, man.

[Isaac Fitzgerald]

Thanks for having me on, gentlemen. I really appreciate you, Sam.

[Stephen Rinella]

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