Why is johnny appleseed a hero

He was looking for the frontier. Johnny quickly adapted to life on the road, walking, canoeing, and hitching a ride when he could. Besides planting numerous nurseries, Johnny Appleseed lived quite a life as a missionary as well. As he traveled, he spread The New Church gospel to children, adults, and even converted many Indians! Indians thought of him as someone who had been touched by the Great Spirit.

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Despite his sharp business acumen, Chapman was an eccentric character. He wandered over , square miles of land in his lifetime, mostly on foot, per America's Library. This was made even more impressive by the fact that he frequently refused to wear shoes, so his feet were tough, gnarled and calloused. According to American Heritage , Chapman usually wore just a simple cloth coffee sack.

If he wore clothing at all, they were discarded garments, or used, oversized smocks and ill-fitting coats that he received via bartering in exchange for some of his apple seeds. His only accessory was a leather sack, which was filled with apple seeds he gathered from his orchards in Allegheny county every fall, per Straight Dope. Personal quirks aside, perhaps the main reason he remained nomadic his whole life is simply because his business depended on it.

The source of his success was his ability to predict where pioneers were likely to settle, and then beat them there, establishing his nurseries before they arrived. That kind of lifestyle does not easily lend itself to settled domesticity. In March of , Indiana's Fort Wayne Sentinel printed an obituary for a "nurseryman" who "was well known through this region by his eccentricity and the strange garb he usually wore Well before his death, Chapman was already a well-known local legend.

He had begun referring to himself as "Johnny Appleseed" by Settlers welcomed him not only because of his generosity or kind spirit, but because he had become something of a local celebrity. The legend went national with the publication of a Harper's magazine profile on "Johnny Appleseed" in Even 26 years after his death, interest in Chapman's story had not waned.

According to one story recounted in Harper's , "A settler who happened to possess a pair of shoes that were too small for his own use forced their acceptance on Johnny A few days afterwards the donor With some degree of anger, he inquired for the cause of such foolish conduct and received for a reply that Johnny had overtaken a poor, barefooted family moving westward, and as they appeared to be in much greater need of clothing than he was, he had given them the shoes.

By the s, American's love affair with fermented beverages had soured. The connection to alcohol was slowly being scrubbed from Chapman's legacy, and replaced with the sanitized image of a folk hero who carried, instead of seeds, a sack of sweet red snacking apples. And when Prohibition reached its full height, any traces of alcohol were erased from Chapman's former land plots. According to Smithsonian Magazine , the FBI was tasked with destroying trees that were used primarily for the production of alcohol.

Unfortunately, that meant chopping down most of the trees Chapman had planted, which produced the small, bitter apples that were ideal only for fermenting into cider. With Prohibition, the images of apples as the primary ingredient in alcoholic beverages, disappeared, along with most of Chapman's apple orchards. Instead, apples began to be marketed as a healthy snack. The fruit, and Johnny Appleseed along with them, took on the more wholesome image they still have today.

One chilly March day in , John Chapman received news that cattle had destroyed some of the fencing around one of his nurseries some 20 miles away from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he was staying with a friend, William Worth, according to the Indiana state website. He made the long trek to repair the fence, and arrived safely back to the Worth home.

However, along the way, he had contracted what was then known as "the winter plague," but was most likely pneumonia. On the evening of March 18th, , Chapman ate a simple dinner of bread and milk, read his Bible, went to sleep on the floor of the Worth home, and was dead by morning. He was years-old.

Chapman never married, nor had any children. Accepting Ongoing Submissions! From the spoken words of influential leaders, to emotionally powerful lyrics in a song, heroic audio is all around us. Have you ever imagined walking through four states barefoot? One person did and his name was Johnny Appleseed, my hero.

John traveled for forty years, and died at age 72, by Fort Wayne, Indiana. Johnny did good deeds for people and was considered a hero. The theme of the story is Give generously and without discriminating, even if the gift is simple. Help your children realize that Johnny Appleseed was an important figure because he helped spread apple trees around the country. He often talked to people and encouraged them to respect all living things.

He warned against excess and encouraged people to live close to nature. We can all take a lesson from his life. Johnny faced a lot of hard times. He had to travel in terrible weather. He also had to sleep in the woods. He had to face different illnesses. There really was a Johnny Appleseed and his real name was John Chapman.