Pequot Orchards

Pequot Hill from my kayak.

In the summer of 2012 I had the opportunity to participate in a five week summer seminar for scholars on American Maritime History, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at the Mystic Seaport Museum.  In the mornings and evenings I often paddled my kayak along the Mystic River. Rising from the west bank of the river, just across from Mystic Seaport is Pequot Hill, the site where an English force led by John Mason surrounded the Pequot fort atop the hill, set it on fire, and shot anyone who tried to escape. Six to seven hundred Pequots died that day—some warriors, but mostly women, children,

Depiction of the slaughter of Pequots on Pequot hill, May 26, 1637.

and old men. When the surviving Pequot surrendered more than a year later, most were enslaved to English-allied tribes or sent to Bermuda. In an attempt to erase the Pequot from memory, the English declared that the word “Pequot” should never be uttered again.

But the Pequot’s story is not just a story of massacre and extermination. It is a story of a determined people who survived an invasion of their lands through both resistance and adaptation. The small nucleus of independent Pequot who survived the Pequot War eventually secured rights to about 3000 acres of land in their ancestral homelands north of Mystic. Some of that land today is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, who have since built a remarkable museum retelling the Pequot story.  During my summer at Mystic, I was able to get to know Jason Mancini, Senior Researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, who is working on a fascinating project mapping the journeys of Indian Mariners.

Depiction of a Pequot Village in the Pequot Museum

Among the things I learned from Jason (and at the fine Pequot agriculture exhibit in the museum) was that the Pequot were very early adopters of old world apple and peach orchards. In my article, “Apples on the Border: Orchards and the Contest for the Great Lakes,” and also in my book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard, I argued that orchards were a critical part of the European mixed husbandry regime which was in essence a three-legged stool: annual crops (grains), perennial crops (orchard fruit) and domesticated livestock. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Pequots and most other peoples occupying eastern North America practiced a mixed subsistence regime, combining annual crops with hunting and gathering to sustain themselves.

The European mixed-husbandry regime established new rules of property on the

The English brought Red Devon cattle to New England early in the colonization process.

landscape, and privileged the idea of fixity (staying in one place and claiming near-absolute rights to a fixed piece of land) over mobility (seasonal movement to the best sources of food, understanding property as specific land-use rights). In other words, the arrival of the European mixed husbandry regime in the Americas was a classic instance of what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony—when a dominant culture establishes the rules of the game, which all other subordinate peoples must follow. The English mixed-husbandry regime would ultimately establish both a cultural and environmental hegemony over New England; to survive, the Pequot were required to fight for their rights within these new rules.  Jason Mancini recently sent me transcripts of some documents on Pequot orchards which appear to support my view of the important role orchards played in arguments between Native and European peoples about property rights. I need to do additional research to help me contextualize them, but I am offering readers a taste today, and welcome feedback.

Robin Cassacinamon, early Pequot leader, as depicted in the Pequot Museum.

The documents are dated between the 1720s and 1760s, and chronicle the persistent efforts of Pequot Indians to protect their lands against English encroachment. A document from 1721 was an appeal by “the Pequot Indians Living at Mashuntuxitt (in Groaton)” made by a Pequot leader using the name of the long deceased but revered Pequot leader Robin Cassacinamon.  By the 1720s, the Pequot confronted illegal intrusions onto their land by a rapidly growing English population, most of whom were unwilling to recognize the Pequot’s legal or moral claims to the land.  The appeal chronicled the efforts of Pequot to adopt the European mixed-husbandry regime, and asserted the Mashantucket Pequots’ rights to the land they occupied by both historic claim (“where our Predicessors anciently dwelt”) and by the English doctrine of improvement, which was a central principle of the mixed husbandry regime. For the English, those who did not “improve” the land by adapting it for mixed husbandry forfeited the right to it. The Pequot petitioners noted that they had “improved” the land  by planting both corn and orchards, and “our orchards are of great worth & Value to us. by Reason our Grandfathers & fathers Planted them & the Apples are a great relief to us.” Despite these efforts, it appeared that by 1721 Englishmen from Groton were eager to claim some of this land improved by the Pequot, dividing it in lots and fencing it. The Pequot protested that the English once “Called us brethren: & Esteemed us to be Rational Creatures: but behold now they make us as Goats by moving us from place to place, to Clear rough land: & make it profitable for ‘em.”

In Creatures of Empire, Virginia DeJohn Anderson examines the role European livestock played in the conquest of North America.

Additional records Jason sent along suggest that the conflict between acquisitive Groton English and the Mashantucket Pequot continued for decades, with the Groton men cutting wood and allowing their hogs and cattle to forage freely on lands claimed by the Pequot. In fact, it appears that the Groton English were soon using their livestock as “creatures of empire,” allowing their hogs and cattle to invade and destroy Pequot orchards.  The English response to Pequot complaints about the destruction wrought by their wandering livestock was to argue that the Pequot needed to build better fences. English law at this time did not require farmers to fence in livestock.  Instead, those growing crops were expected to fence them in; owners of marauding livestock were not liable for the damage they did to other people’s crops and orchards.

I am eager to do more research on Pequot orchards and their role in the Pequots’ efforts to defend their rights to their lands.  I hope to write additional blog posts on the subject over the course of the summer.

The May Apple

A not quite ready may apple at the New Concord Reservoir woods.

At this time of year, in the woods where I walk my dogs every day, the forest floor is covered with may apples. They were even the first green shoot to rise up out of the blackened soil after a fire recently burned a section of these woods.  The may apple is one of the many wild fruits indigenous to North America, harvested and enjoyed by native peoples before the arrival of Europeans on these shores.  My friend Jason Mancini, senior researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, calls the may-apple “the sweetest fruit.” I have never been able to taste it myself, for as soon as the green fruit ripens to yellow in midsummer, the animals of my forest gobble them up. (If you decide to experiment on your own, know that the plant itself is poisonous, and the unripe fruit can have a laxative effect.) One early European explorer who tasted the fruit, considered a delicacy by Native Americans, declared that it “taste like apricocks.”

Many early engravings of North America depicted a land of extraordinary abundance.

Early European explorers of North America paid close attention to the fruits of the land, and most did not hesitate to try the strange fruits they encountered, offering up descriptions of both their taste and their abundance. These early chroniclers sought to assess the suitability of these lands for European settlement, and they devoted much space to describing the soils, climate, and “air,” but also the abundance or scarcity of wild game, fish, birds, and wild fruits. By describing a landscape as “fruitful” colonial promoters were declaring that it promised abundance, health, and prosperity to those willing to colonize it. In contrast, any lands lacking in edible, delectable fruits were to be avoided. On a more practical level, an abundance of edible wild fruits, nuts, and berries (as well as fish and game) could be an important source of sustenance in the first years of any colony.

Colony promoters often tried to paint a picture of a New World Eden, where ripe fruits could be simply plucked from bushes and trees without labor. “This Countrey is a fruitfull soile, bearing many goodly and fruitfull Trees” declared George Percy, an early promoter of the Virginia colony. Percy described encountering “a little plat of ground full of fine and beautifull Strawberries, foure times bigger and better than ours in England” and an American wilderness as “all flowing over with faire flowers of sundry colours and kindes, as though it had beene in any Garden or Orchard in England.”

Thomas Harriot, holding an apple.

Thomas Harriot, another early English promoter of colonization visited Virginia in 1590 and found “the soils to be fatter” and “more plenty of their fruits, more abundance of their beastes.” Harriot wrongly identified persimmons as a type of Medlar, and described the prickly pear as “a kind of pleasant fruit.” New world grapes he deemed “a merchantable commodity” and declared the native wild strawberries “as good and as great as those we have in our English gardens.” Other fruits he identified as familiar were “mulberries, apple-crabs . . . and hurtleberries.” Almost two centuries later, William Bartram noted that North American strawberries were “a finer, [more] delicate fruit” than any grown in Europe, and another traveler described them as covering the ground “as with a red cloth.” The abundance of fruit suggested a life beyond mere survival, and one in which the promise of comfort, even luxury was possible.  Who could not read a description of abundant fields of strawberries and trees bending downward under the weight of fruit and not taste the sweet juice on their tongue, or feel it dripping over their lip and down their chin?

Roman politician Lucullus, gastronome of the first order.

Reactions to the first tastes of New World fruits were mixed. Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano described the native crab apples of the Americas to be “apples worthy of Lucullus.” As Native Americans generally roasted them in the fire or marinated them in maple syrup to counter the crab apple’s bitterness, perhaps Verrazano’s first impression was the result of taste buds conditioned during a long sea journey by the consumption of dried up limes. In contrast, one Englishman warned others to be careful with the persimmon, for “if it be not ripe it will draw a man’s mouth awry with much torment.”

While adventurous explorers and promoters often provided positive reports of native fruits, other European observers were less enthusiastic about New World varieties. Historian Alfred Crosby has pointed out that “Europeans would come to the New World in great numbers only if a dependable supply [of] familiar European food was available.” Cultural prejudices which Europeans brought with them to the Americas made many at first reluctant to adopt Native American foods, and typically did so only out of necessity. English settlers put aside their initial prejudice against Indian maize, for example, only after confronting the reality that it was much easier to plant and tend in unbroken soils than English wheat and barley.

Father Paul Le Jeune

Upon his arrival in Quebec in 1634, Jesuit Father Paul LeJeune declared that “all the fruits they have (except strawberries and raspberries, which they have in abundance) are not worth one single species of the most ordinary fruits of Europe,” and promptly set out several rows of Old World apples and peaches to remedy the perceived deficiency. As waves of Europeans migrated to North America and established permanent colonies, they brought the fruits of their home with them.  Some, like the Old World apple and peach thrived in the new environment, and some Native American tribes began to cultivate them and incorporate them into their diet. At the same time, Europeans grew to value many of North America’s indigenous fruit, including the pumpkin, blueberries and indigenous strawberries.  But the fruits of the wild may apple, which still fill the forest floors of much of eastern North America, has mostly been left for other animals to enjoy.

May Apples were the first plants to sprout from the forest floor after a recent fire.

Understanding the Past: Reading, Re-enacting, Performing

William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard, and Hank Fincken, living history performer. cambridge, Ohio, April 2013.

Last week I had a unique opportunity as a scholar to share a double-bill with a professional actor. With the generous support of the Ohio Humanities Council, the public library in Cambridge, Ohio invited me to deliver a lecture on John “Appleseed” Chapman and to sign and sell copies of my recent book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard. After a brief intermission Hank Fincken took the stage in the character of Johnny Appleseed. For act three, Hank and I jointly answered questions from the audience. When the library first broached the idea of a Johnny Appleseed double-bill, I was both enchanted with the idea and a little bit intimidated. How would a lecture by an academic historian stand up when placed in conjunction with a compelling, dramatic, comic and lively first person performance delivered by an experienced actor who has mastered the skill of engaging diverse audiences across decades of experience? But I was also excited about the possibility of opening up a conversation about the ways we understand the past.

French and Indian War Re-enactor. Photo by Eric Gaston.

A lifetime ago in grad school, I spent warm summer days in a windowless, climate controlled concrete bunker called the library annex, poring over 19^th century periodicals, researching my dissertation. About mid-July I needed to escape, and hopped in my car and drove north to Fort Michilimackinac in northern Michigan. There I stumbled across an encampment of French and Indian War re-enactors, and found myself in conversation with one. When I asked him how he came to be involved in re-enacting, he told me that he used to participate in history roundtables, where people got together to discuss books. But he finally concluded that “you don’t learn history in books, you learn it in your bones,” dropped out of the roundtable and took up re-enacting. When I asked him to explain this heresy he replied, “Well, when you sleep on the ground, you learn the ground is hard.”

The Battle of New Market re-enactment.

In subsequent years I began taking undergraduate students on biennial Civil War study tours, and we always tried to include a Civil War encampment and battle re-enactment in those trips. The Civil War re-enactor subculture is quite distinctive, and compellingly examined in Tony Horwitz’ Confederates in the Attic. In my many interactions with re-enactors I have learned to appreciate that through these rituals they learn something meaningful about the sensory experience of the Civil War soldier, but I have encountered many whose understandings of the bigger picture—like the causes of the war—were highly dubious. Bones alone will not impart wisdom.

Hank Fincken as Johnny Appleseed

While re-enactors seek a connection with the past for their own use, living history performers like Hank Fincken and academic historians like myself interpret the past, seeking to convey knowledge to an audience. In conveying the story of John Chapman, Hank and I are each engaged in an act of interpretation, struggling to find the truth. Our interpretations of the man and the meaning of his life are not perfectly aligned, but I have found Hank’s Johnny Appleseed compelling and persuasive. Over the many years I spent researching the life of John Chapman, I saw many amateur actors, and a few professional ones, perform in the role of Johnny Appleseed. Most were pretty forgettable. The problem, it seemed to me, was the desire to portray John Chapman as a saint—a physical representation of pure goodness and a role model for children—one so perfect that they could not hope to emulate him. Not only did these Johnny Appleseeds not resemble any real person I had ever met, their performances put me to sleep. Hank’s Johnny Appleseed was quite different from the saintly ones. His Johnny was irascible, rascally, comic, mostly endearing but a bit off-putting—in other words thoroughly human.

The difference in our approaches is never more stark in the way we each answer this commonly asked question:

Did Johnny Appleseed really wear a tin pot on his head?

Mansfield, Ohio boys wear tin pots on their head to honor Johnny Appleseed in 1953.

As an academic, my answer begins with written sources, and tends toward the verbose. I explain that while there are some accounts that mention a tin pot hat, others describe a vast array of interesting head-gear; that he may have worn a pot on his head once, or even occasionally, but it wasn’t his everyday head gear. For Hank (whose Johnny Appleseed does not don a pot), the answer is more direct, and something like this:

“if you believe Chapman wore a pot on his head, I encourage you to go home today and put a pot on your own. Wear it for a few days, and let me know if you still believe a pot can perform as practical headwear.”

Despite our different ways of answering that question, our approaches are not completely different. What makes Hank Fincken a credible living history performer is that he understands that essential knowledge comes not just from your bones, but also from texts. He has read all of the biographies of John Chapman, as well as the most important primary sources on his life. He has spent endless hours mulling over these materials and crafting them into scripts. Likewise, I also occasionally took a “bones” approach to the

John Daniels Dry Good Store Ledger, Warren County Historical Society

life of John Chapman. On Northwestern Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Plateau, I stood barefoot on the smooth gray stones in the Brokenstraw Creek, knee-deep in its chilly spring waters, near the location of Chapman’s first creekside apple-tree nursery. I cannot articulate in any scholarly way how doing this helped me understand John Chapman, but I certainly felt as if it did. Hours later, in the reading room of the Warren County Historical Society, holding in cotton-gloved hands a crumbling dry goods store ledger where John Chapman bought an assortment of items, I felt that once again. Even an archive can yield some “bone-knowledge,” and scholars would be wise to consider its value.

The Brokenstraw Creek, near the location of John Chapman’s first apple tree nursery.

Battlefield Orchards

The peach orchard at Gettysburg.

In a few weeks I will be taking students on an eleven day biennial Civil War tour of eastern theater battlefields and sites.  We visit Gettysburg, Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, and a whole host of sites in Virginia.  While orchards have been the focus of my research for the last decade or so, I have been teaching courses on the Civil War and leading tours to eastern battlefields for the last fifteen.  I have decided to use this trip as an opportunity to gather information on a subject at the intersection of these interests–orchards on Civil War battlefields.  Of course, most students of the Civil War are familiar with the infamous peach orchards of Gettysburg and Shiloh, but orchards were ubiquitous on the mid 19th century American landscape, soldiers waged war in the midst of them, and filled their bellies with their fruit in season.  I have a few resources to get me started.  Bradley Gottfried’s excellent Maps of Gettysburg, Maps of Antietam, and Maps of First Bull Run mark the locations of orchards on those battlefields.  Susan Dolan’s Fruitful Legacy: A Historic Context of Orchards in the United States contains information on orchards on many national parks.  But this seems like a perfect subject to crowd source.  Have you stumbled across restored orchards on visits to Civil War battlefields? Do you have any information to share about battlefield orchards that are now gone?  Even references to soldiers’ memoirs, letters, and diaries which discuss orchards on the battlefield, or those they may have raided during marches across the countryside are encouraged.  I will share anything I find during my upcoming tour on this blog.

This map from Gottfried’s Maps of Gettysburg indicates locations of woods, fields, and orchards.

The Carolina Parakeet and the American Orchard

William Byrd II

Virginia planter William Byrd was not impressed with his North Carolina neighbors.  Traveling through North Carolina in the early 1720s on a mission to survey the boundary between the two colonies, Byrd griped about the irregular supply of alcoholic beverages in the colony. Byrd believed the shortage of alcohol in North Carolina was not the result of any moral qualms about drinking but rather a consequence of the improvidence of its early settlers. When it was available, North Carolinians drank imported rum in great quantities, and generously shared it, but these periods of plenty were frequently interrupted by periods of scarcity, when it was hard to find a drop. Apple and peach orchards might have obviated these irregularities in the alcohol supply, providing the ingredients needed to make cider and cider brandy, but it appeared to Byrd that few North Carolinians had bothered to plant them.  He attributed this oversight to lack of industry and foresight, particularly among the common planters, whom he called “Improvident People, who take no thought for the Morrow.” But Byrd did acknowledge that their might have been one other hindrance to the development of orchards in North Carolina.  It appears that massive flocks of the once abundant but now extinct Carolina Parakeet descended upon the colony’s orchards in the summer.  The birds “bite all the Fruit to Pieces in a moment, for the sake of the Kernels.  The Havock they make is so great, that whole Orchards are laid waste in spite of all the Noises that can be made, or Mawkins that can be dresst up to fright ‘em away.”

The Carolina Parakeet was not a parakeet at all, but North America’s only indigenous parrot.  Despite Byrd’s belief that they were only a threat to North Carolina’s orchards, the Carolina Parakeet was climate hardy, had a quite diverse diet, and a wide geographical  range. It could be found in forest lands as far north as New York, and as far west as the Mississippi valley.  A gregarious creature, Carolina Parakeets traveled in flocks often containing five hundred or more birds, fed itself on the seeds and nuts of the forest, and nested in the cavities of hollow trees.

In the first two centuries of English colonization in North America, Carolina Parakeets and were abundant, but populations began to plummet in the second third of the nineteenth century.  Sometime in the early twentieth century, the Carolina Parakeet became extinct. Byrd was not the only observer to comment on the Carolina Parakeet’s habit of destroying an orchard full of fruit in short order. In 1831, John James Audubon noted that it:

eats or destroys almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately, and on this account is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener. . . They assail the Pear and the Apple-trees when the fruit is yet very small and far from being ripe, and this merely for the sake of the seeds . . . they alight on the Apple-trees of our orchards, or the Pear-trees in the gardens, in great numbers; and as if through their mischief, pluck off the fruits, open them up to the core, and, disappointed at the sight of the seeds, which are yet soft and of a milky consistence, drop the apple or pear, and pluck another, passing from branch to branch, until the trees, which were before so promising, are left completely stripped, like the ship water-logged and abandoned by its crew, floating on the yet agitated waves, after the tempest has ceased.

Do not imagine, dear readers, that all these outrages are borne without severe retaliation on the part of the planters.  So far from this, the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from stacks, the husbandmen approaches them with perfect ease and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly around for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The guns kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty  are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours . . .

Other observers also noted that the close bonds Carolina Parakeets formed with others in their flock made them easy prey for an angry farmer. The ease with which farmers slaughtered the grieving birds was no doubt one factor in their extinction, but does not completely explain their disappearance.  While stories of their dramatic and rapid destruction of orchard fruit were frequently repeated, they were not so common that they constituted the orchard’s greatest natural threat. And many farmers recognized the Parakeets value in helping rid his land of another pest. The poisonous cockle-bur, which invaded farm fields and sometimes killed livestock was among the Parakeet’s favorite foods, and no farmer minded when the Parakeets rid his field of them.

Habitat destruction may have played as great a role as the farmer’s gun, as fields and orchard replaced the forests in which the birds nested. The Carolina Parakeet may have also suffered from new competition for nesting sites with the arrival of an insect colonizer, the European honeybee, which filled the hollows of many potential trees with honey and honeycomb. Other factors which also contributed to its demise include the demand for hats decorated with dead birds which became all the rage near the end of the 19th century, and the last of the birds may have been felled by disease they picked up from domesticated poultry. In the end, Euro-American husbandry practices appeared to be a greater threat to the Carolina Parakeet than it was to the farmer’s orchards.

Disney’s Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed’s Bible features prominently in the Disney version of the story, from the 1948 animated feature Melody Time.

John Chapman earned the nickname “Johnny Appleseed” during his lifetime, and people started sharing stories about the eccentric apple tree planter in the Ohio and Indiana communities where he spent much of his life long before he died in 1845.  But Johnny Appleseed did not emerge as a figure in the American national origin story until the 1870s.  In the late 19th century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, most of the promoters of the Johnny Appleseed legend were social reformers, some of a socialist bent, who celebrated Johnny Appleseed’s efforts to promote a common social good by providing apple trees available to all.   After World War II, the range of acceptable national myth narratives narrowed considerably. As the United States increasingly defined itself against Soviet communism, interpretations of Johnny Appleseed

Disney made Appleseed part of its team of early American superheroes, alongside Paul Bunyan, John Henry and others.

reflected this change. When Disney released an animated version of the Johnny Appleseed story in 1948, John’s faith in God was front and center. The narrator stated that three other great nation builders had their distinctive tools in their mission— Paul Bunyan had his axe, John Henry his hammer, and Davy Crockett his rifle— but Johnny Appleseed’s tools were his bag of apple seeds and his Holy Bible. The cartoon opens with a young Johnny singing a Disney-created song that has come to be known as “The Johnny Appleseed Grace,” and many believe it was actually written by Chapman.

The Lord’s been good to me

And so I thank the Lord

For giving me the things I need

The sun and rain and the apple seed

Yes He’s been good to me

The Johnny Appleseed story told by Disney is a near perfect sermon on postwar American values. Faith in God and the ability of the individual to make a difference in history are the central themes. Johnny celebrates American freedom, singing, “Here I am ’neath the blue blue sky, doing as I please,” thanking God for that freedom. Soon his attention is drawn to a long train of Conestoga wagons pushing west, each containing a pioneer family. The wagon train has its own song celebrating American individualism:

Get on a wagon, rolling west

Out to the great unknown

Get on a wagon rolling west

Where you’ll be left alone.

The rivers may be wide

The mountains may be tall

But nothing stops the pioneer

we’re trailblazers all.

While John longs to join them, he believes he cannot— that he is too weak and too small,

The diminutive Johnny goes west without a gun, but in the Disney version, this is a result of his poverty and small size. No pacifist, he dreams of emulated the gun-toting frontiersman.

and does not own the gear he needs. Johnny’s “private guardian angel,” sent down from heaven, convinces him that all he needs is his faith, his Bible, and his apple seeds. Johnny sets out through a rugged wilderness, “a little man all alone, without no knife, without no gun,” but to avoid the impression that Johnny is a pacifist, Disney included a scene where he imagines he is shouldering a rifle like the ones he saw the men on the Conestoga wagons hold, and another where he picks up a stick from the woods, and pretends to aim and shoot with it.

The creatures of the wild forest Johnny Appleseed will transform into an ordered orchard embrace him as a friend.

Notably, the Indian makes only a minor appearance in Disney’s Johnny Appleseed. Instead, Johnny Appleseed works to win over the trust of the forests animals, convincing them, by his kindness, of the benign nature of his mission to transform the wilderness. The Disney story ends with an image of an aged Johnny Appleseed atop a ridge, his shadow stretching across a transformed landscape of fields and orchards:

This little man, he throwed his shadow clear across the land, across a hundred thousand miles square and in that shadow everywhere you’ll find he left his blessings three love and faith and the apple tree.

Despite the story’s celebration of individualism, Disney’s Johnny Appleseed stopped short of praising difference in favor of conformity. Johnny Appleseed was a generic Christian in the story, not an apostle of unconventional Swedenborgianism. Johnny Appleseed could be an eccentric in postwar America, but the boundaries of that difference were increasingly constrained in a culture that valued conformity even as it professed to celebrate the power of the free individual.

You can view the entire Johnny Appleseed animated short here:

The best, or worst, Johnny Appleseed analogies.

What is required to earn the title, “The Johnny Appleseed of” something?  Well, there appears to be more than one way to earn the honorific.  You could be the first person to introduce an object or idea, but if you are not the first, you still might earn the title by becoming the most important or most evangelical promoter of that object or  idea.  A recent article in the New York Times  declared Conquistador Hernando de Soto to be “the Johnny Appleseed of pigs” because during his reign of terror through the American southeast he released Old World swine into the region, which proliferated rapidly, wreaked much environmental destruction, but ultimately helped to cement pork as “the other white meat.”  He clearly earned the title, but I would prefer to put a more positive spin on it by calling him “The Johnny Appleseed of Bacon.”

Many other notable figures of recent history had “the Johnny Appleseed of” honorific bestowed upon them.  Here are a few of my favorites:

“Freeway” Ricky Ross, “the Johnny Appleseed of Crack Cocaine.”

In the early 1980s, Ross oversaw a crack cocaine empire from a few properties along Los Angeles’ Harbor freeway. the empire was so vast that he claimed to have sold $3 million worth of the drug in a single day.  Ross seems worthy of the Johnny Appleseed title because at its height, his empire appeared to be responsible not just for most of the crack in southern California, but most of it distributed in the Midwest, Texas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas.  Perhaps fittingly, Ross once claimed that the original Johnny Appleseed’s old haunt of Ohio was his most lucrative market.  Convicted in 1996 after trying to purchase 100 kilos of crack from a Federal agent, Ross eventually had his sentenced reduced to twenty years, and was released after fifteen for being a model prisoner.

Alfred Matthew Hubbard, “The Johnny Appleseed of LSD.”

Ross was not the first evangelizer of drug use to earn the Johnny Appleseed moniker.  
Alfred Matthew Hubbard, once a “barefoot boy from Kentucky,” moved west, became a small time inventor with an entrepreneurial spirit, and found his calling distributing hallucinogenic drugs.  He was said to have turned more than six thousand people on to the acid trip.  He also distributed magic mushrooms and mescaline, all of which he carried around with him Johnny Appleseed style–in  a leather satchel strung over his shoulder.  One Beverly Hills psychiatrist recalled that “we waited for him like a little old lady waits for the Sears-Roebuck catalog.”  Also known as Captain Trips, in his appearance the crewcut-wearing Hubbard didn’t quite fit the stereotype of the beatnik or hippy. Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary were two of his customers and champions, though the latter once commented that he had the appearance of a “carpetbagger con man.”

Thomas Bendelow, “The Johnny Appleseed of Golf”

It isn’t just drug dealers who develop an evangelical zeal for their favored mode of recreation.  Scottish-American Thomas Bendelow’s passion for golf certainly matched that of Ross’s and Hubbard’s for illicit substances.  Bendelow was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to a family of pie makers. Which was an appropriate occupation for the Bendelow family, because they were also well known for their religious pie-ty. Thomas migrated to America, where he first taught golf, and eventually began to design golf courses. Soon Bendelow was designing golf courses across the nation, and his courses became known for both their “naturalistic” and “sporty” designs.  By the time he died in 1936, Bendelow had designed over 600 golf courses.

Michael Roizen, the Johnny Appleseed of the Male Orgasm

Ohio might be called “the Johnny Appleseed of Johnny Appleseeds,” as it has played a central role in the careers of so many Johnny Appleseeds. It might also be called “the Johnny Appleseed of Presidential birthplaces” because it appears that all of the nation’s most obscure Presidents were born there.  But I digress.  Michael Roizen, the chief  wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic has accomplished many things in his life, so perhaps it isn’t really fair to saddle him with the title “the Johnny Appleseed of the Male Orgasm.”  But that is what Men’s Health Magazine has called him, because of his efforts to promote the idea that men should have more of them–at least three a week–if they want to live long, happy, healthy lives.

The United States of America, The Johnny Appleseed of Nuclear Weapons

This last one is so important, it could not belong to a single person, but only to a whole nation.  According to the Christian Science Monitor, the title belongs not to one President, but to every one from Harry S Truman to Barack Obama, and to all the people who voted for them. I chose to illustrate this last one with an image of the Statue of Liberty, because, frankly, there is clear gender bias going on in the bestowal of Johnny Appleseed honorifics.

So, what are you the Johnny Appleseed of?