The Legend of Johnny Appleseed
Johnny Appleseed Plants Apple Seed. |
Appleseed
Johnny was a highly educated and cultured gentleman, but he dressed in coffee sacking
and a pasteboard cap. He did this not to be queer, but because when he had any
clothes that were fit to wear, he gave them to some poor immigrant. Often he
had shoes, but just as often he took them from his feet and gave them to some
shoeless pioneer settler whom he met on the trail. It was clear that Johnny had
money, because he always had a bunch of new ribbons for the little tow-headed
girls who ran out to meet him from the log cabins in the dark forests.
Coming to a log house he would enter, throw himself on the floor by
the fire, and pulling out some fragments of the works of his great religious
teacher, would exclaim, “Listen to the last message from God!” and robber and
honest settler alike listened to the pioneer teacher.
From
the cider press in Pennsylvania or at Fort Pitt, where Pittsburg now stands, he
secured bags of apple seed, with witch he loaded his dugout canoe, and with
this strange cargo he paddled his lonely way down the Ohio, planting orchards
wherever an opportunity offered, ministering to the sick, giving to the needy
and living his life only for the good he could do.
The natives looked upon him with awe, because when his bare feet would
be cut and torn with the brush and frozen mud, he would calmly seat himself by
their campfire, heat an iron white hot and burn out the cuts and wounds, which
then readily healed.
Quaint and weird as this young man of twenty-six must have appeared, in
his ragged garments, bare feet and pasteboard cap, on one, not even the small boys,
ever laughed or jeered at him; but he was universally treated with respect by
bandit, native, ignorant squatter and refined, cultured officers of the
revolutionary army who settled in the wilderness. He lived to be an old, old
man, beloved by young and old, and passed over the great divide telling about
the glory he saw beyond. Original text by Dan Beard (1907), edited by
Grimm
More Related Content:
- "Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero" from Harper's Magazine, November 1871.
- Johnny Appleseed Festival in Sheffield, PA
- Searching for Johnny film documentary by director Miroslav Mandic
- Searching for Johnny Official movie site
- "Johnny Appleseed Trail in North Central MA"
- Donald Greyfield (Jan 01, 2001). "John 'Johnny Appleseed' Chapman". Folk Hero and Patriot. Find a Grave. Retrieved Aug 18, 2011.
- The Swedenborgian Church of North America
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