Retracing The Steps of Frontier Missionary Johnny Appleseed
This fall, countless early-elementary American schoolchildren will hear the tale of Johnny Appleseed. Often portrayed as a lanky young man who wore a tin pot on his head as a cap, Appleseed got his name from planting apple trees across the Northeast and Midwest. Legend has it that his love for nature expanded to animals and that, once, he freed a wolf from a trap, befriended it and the two were inseparable forever after.
Coming into manhood just after the American Revolution, he is seen as a frontier hero, a mythic representation of cultivating the land as a celebration of the indomitable American spirit and the vast freedoms it had won.
But many writers have criticized this portrayal as a whitewashed spin on a less child-friendly character. The claim is that Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, was actually a businessman intent on growing apples in order to brew alcoholic cider. No longer the cheery, baby-faced naturalist found in children’s books, this understanding of Chapman reveals an opportunistic, booze-fueled entrepreneur.
To complicate things further, along with a tin hat and a bag of seeds, Chapman is often portrayed holding a Bible. Among all that is debated, it is well agreed upon that Chapman followed the teachings of a new sect of Christianity called Swedenborgianism, which among other beliefs, deviates from historical Christianity in its denial of the trinity. Chapman is often seen as having been a missionary for the cause, spreading his faith as wide as his appleseeds.
But even this is complicated by skeptics who wonder if, perhaps it was not Appleseed’s Swedenborgian love for nature that drove him, but his desire to build his business, using the missionary identity as more of a means to getting his foot in the door with potential buyers.
In any case, the roving wildness of the man’s legend has inspired Americans for generations — perhaps none so radically as writer Isaac Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald decided to retrace the steps of Chapman’s journey, 200 years after it took place. He wrote about his year-long experience in his new book, “American Rambler.”
On this week’s show, Religion Unplugged spoke with Fitzgerald in order to separate fact from fiction in the tale of Johnny Appleseed and to understand how Fitzgerald’s path, like Chapman’s, led to a connection with nature, an openness towards faith and a few legends of his own.
Listen to this episode of the Religion Unplugged podcast on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
Matthew Peterson is Religion Unplugged’s podcast editor and audience development coordinator. He took part in the 2025 European Journalism Institute held in Prague, an annual program co-sponsored by The Media Project.