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Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth

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EXCERPT

A TRAIL FROM NEW ENGLAND

Whatever else John Chapman may have been in fact or fancy, there is no doubt that he was as thoroughgoing an example of good old-fashioned American individualism as ever chopped out a clearing. There isn't much a biographer can do, accordingly, but let him bow into his own story in his own vigorously independent way. A host of other colorful tales to the contrary, it is a fact that there is just one account, approaching reliable record, of the famous pioneer nurseryman's entry into the Middle West. According to it, Johnny Appleseed walked into the American story one mid-autumn day in 1797, not visioneyed among the orchards of the Potomac or riding triumphantly into Pittsburgh on the front seat of a conestoga wagon, but plodding along somewhere atop the Allegheny plateau in northern Pennsylvania and just about to be bogged down in a November snowfall.

The setting is spectacular enough for the stage entrance of any American folk hero. About halfway across Pennsylvania, just below the New York line, the Allegheny plateau rears up into a cap of high, broad ridges that send the general eleva- tion to over 2,500 feet. An eagle soaring high on a clear day can look down on headwaters that rise within only short distances of each other and then rush out of the tangle of gorges and valleys north to the Genesee and the Great. Lakes, east to the Susquehanna and the Atlantic, and west to the Allegheny and the Gulf of Mexico. It is a spot geographically dramatic even today, and in 1797 it was a primeval wilderness completely unspoiled by settlement and scarcely touched even by a surveyor's chain.

In late October or early November of that year, says this first of the Johnny Appleseed stories, twenty-three-year-old John Chapman was making a long journey alone and afoot across this plateau. His course can be plotted easily on a map by inscribing a shallow curve from the Wilkes-Barre mining country on the Susquehanna River in eastern Pennsylvania northward up the watercourse, then west across the whole Appalachian highland, to a spot on the upper Allegheny River about twelve miles below the New York line, where the little city of Warren now lies.

The east end of this curve in 1797 rested in the Wyoming Valley, a busy farming community, that was still fresh in fame because of the most gruesome Indian massacre committed during the recent Revolutionary war years. In this particular autumn it was enjoying a vigorous economic boom after a long series of shameful land feuds and had been attracting considerable attention from Easterners, particularly settlers from the Connecticut Valley.

The middle of this curve, after it left the old trail up the Susquehanna, extended westerly through leagues of mountain wilderness. And the west tip on the other side of the plateau rested in the vast forests of the upper Allegheny in northwestern Pennsylvania. The precise spot of termination seems to have been the single log structure that was the blockhouse headquarters of the Holland Land Company. Having heard favorable reports of the Allegheny country, says the tale, young John Chapman, who had been sojourning in the Wyoming Valley, started making the trip over the mountains sometime in November of 1797. The weather was pleasant during the first few days up the broad Susquehanna and continued so as he pushed on west into the heavy forests that covered the mountains of what is now the counties of Bradford, Tioga, and Potter.

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