The Missionary Life Of Johnny Appleseed
And the history of extraterrestrials in American religion
Walt Disney’s 1948 The Legend of Johnny Appleseed presents John Chapman as a devout Christian, but the film does not say what kind of Christian he was. Popularizing the mythic Appleseed, poet Vachel Lindsay called Chapman “a New England kind of saint,” yet as I recently wrote in a long essay on the long influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, Chapman was a missionary of the “New Church” inspired by that European theosophist and polymath. Thus a figure of early American folklore became a personal node of transmission for Swedenborg’s ideas on the Ohio frontier, spreading those beliefs into the new country along with his apple trees. Chapman became famous for working character, ascetic frugality, and planting trees from seed. Along with apples, however, he planted the seeds of belief in extraterrestrial contact in the emerging United States, where it eventually grew into the weird fruit of flying saucers.
Since I wrote that essay, which is currently unlocked until Wednesday 1 May, and mentioned the Appleseed connection, I have read William Kerrigan’s excellent 2012 work, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History. Per the title, Kerrigan includes the spiritual biography of Chapman to help fill out my previous sketchy reference. The essay you are reading now will be available for premium subscribers only for the next three weeks and then unlock for ten days before archiving.
After walking across the Allegheny Mountains to western Pennsylvania in 1797, an economic refugee from Massachusetts, Chapman stopped at a land company store in Brokenstraw, where the surviving ledger shows that he purchased “two small histories” that were “the only books, save a few Bibles, sold to any customer at this primitive outpost in the last five years of the eighteenth century,” Kerrigan writes. Thus Chapman was no simpleton or rube at all. On the contrary, to become a “rigid Swedenborgian,” as he was known to be, required intellectual endeavor, for “true conviction emerged gradually through careful reading” and contemplation. A spiritual seeker had to do the work reading Swedenborg, and Chapman seems to have earned his reputation for hard work.
Not all of the Appleseed legend survives scrutiny. “Most of the entries” in the ledger “suggest John Chapman was not so different from his frontier neighbors and undermine the static myth of ‘Johnny Appleseed’ as a barefoot, clean-living vegetarian who never carried a gun,” Kerrigan writes. “Among the items he purchased” upon arriving at Brokenstraw were “brandy, whiskey, tobacco, pork, chocolate, sugar, gunpowder, and several pairs of moccasins.” Chapman dabbled in land speculation, paid his with bills, and bartered with, apple tree seedlings, and died in debt. He was no monk. He was an all-American man on the make, eccentric but earnest. Chapman carried Swedenborg’s writings with him as he traveled between his hidden nurseries, unthreading the volumes of collected translations printed in Philadelphia by a friend of Benjamin Franklin, and left portions of these collected works with his many hosts along the road, swapping them for new selections as he came around again. Thus Chapman would have passed out copies of Other Worlds, the book which taught Americans to believe that people live on alien planets.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Osborne Ink to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.