Who is Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed is the nickname of a man whose real name has been almost forgotten. He was John or Jonathan Chapman and he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, nearly two hundred years ago, in 1775. Nothing is known of him, after that, until he was 26 years old. Then he began to do the thing that gave him his famous name, Johnny Appleseed. He began to plant apple trees. For almost fifty years, Johnny Appleseed walked and rode horseback through western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.

Everywhere he went he carried bags of apple seeds and planted them. Thousands of settlers came to know this strange, lonely man. Johnny Appleseed was a religious man, and he loved nature. He believed it was his duty to go up and down the land planting apple seeds. He looked like a scarecrow in his ragged clothing, but the children all learned to love him. Some nights he spent at farmhouses, and told stories for his supper. Other times he camped out alone in the fields and woods. He did nearly all his traveling on foot. His precious leather sacks full of apple seeds were piled on the back of a horse. Johnny Appleseed got a fresh batch of seeds every year at the cider mills in western Pennsylvania. He would load his sacks with thousands of them.

No harm ever came to Johnny Appleseed in his lonely travels through the wilderness. The Indians knew him and treated him as a friend, and even the wild animals left him alone. Johnny Appleseed loved all living creatures, and could not bear to hurt any of them. Once, a hornet got caught in Johnny's ragged clothing, and stung him several times. When asked why he didn't kill the hornet, Johnny Appleseed replied, "It would not be right to kill the poor thing, for it did not intend to hurt me."