Johnny Appleseed: A Voice in the Wilderness The Story of the Pioneer John Chapman A Tribute Book

Every autumn all over the country, students and teachers turn to the legend of Johnny Appleseed, an American folk hero popularized by Walt Disney Studios and hundreds of local events. As the republication of the classic anthology, Johnny Appleseed: A Voice in the Wilderness shows, the real man is even more fascinating than his popular persona. Born in Leominster, Massachnusetts, in 1774, John Chapman became famous in mid-western America as a conservationist, horticulturist, hero of the War of 1812, and spiritual visionary. What most Americans do not know about this folk legend is that his inner life was the source of his remarkable personal characteristics. John Chapman lived a simple life, in harmony with nature and at peace with local Native American tribes. By his own account, Chapman was influenced by the 18th-century Enlightenment scientist and spiritual visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, and he became a one-man wilderness lending library of Swedenborg's writings, passing out unbound signatures and treatises to pioneer families whom he met in his journeys through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. He would enter settlements like a town crier, proclaiming enthusiastically, "Good news fresh from heaven!" Known as the "St. Francis of the frontier," John Chapman loved animals and provided for horses whose age and infirmities would otherwise have marked them for death. And, according to a report in his own day, he himself "seems to be almost independent of corfporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere. . . and lives upon the coarsest and most scanty fare. He has actually thawed the ice with his bare feet."