Pod Insights The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 886: Who Was the Real Johnny Appleseed? About this episode Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with author Isaac Fitzgerald.
Topics discussed: Isaac's new book, American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736787/american-rambler-by-isaac-fitzgerald/; the true story of Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) versus the mythologized version; land speculation, westward expansion, and environmental impact; Appleseed's religious influence; the role of storytelling in shaping national legends; the role of apples and cider in American history; John's role in the War of 1812; and more.
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Transcript 19,096 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:47 Steven Rinella? All right, everybody. Today, we're joined by writer Isaac Fitzgerald, who has a brand new book out called American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed being one of those dudes that I feel like I know about, but I don't know about. Now, you probably
2:05 Speaker 03 Know the Disneyfied version, you know, the, the version that they teach you in elementary school. But he is an American legend, but he's, he was a real guy. His name was John Chapman. That's one of the things I love about him. When I first brought it up to the woman that's now my wife, I was thinking about writing a book about him. I said, Johnny Appleseed, he was this great walker. He was kind of into faith. I'm kind of coming back into faith a little bit in my life. And she was like, he's not a real dude. And she's like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill. And I was like,
2:31 Steven Rinella? Those are real guys.
2:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, I was like, those are not real dudes. You're right. You're right. But Johnny Appleseed was a real guy named John Chapman, born around the Revolutionary War. So I wanted to kind of walk where he walked and explore the country.
2:42 Steven Rinella? Um, I want to start out by telling you, you might not realize who you're in the presence of, but this is, um, Johnny, Johnny Spencer. Or you could call him Spencer Appleseed. Tell him, he's in, tell him, he's an aspiring, you know.
2:56 Speaker 05 I, I want to start an orchard. Uh, I set aside my whole spring. I didn't do any hunting this year. Just so I could focus on planting, I planted 60 fruit trees, dwarf fruit trees and fruit shrubs in my yard.
3:10 Speaker 03 That's amazing. I want, I want to just say, I love that we have like a fact checker here on the podcast. That's helpful.
3:16 Steven Rinella? Oh, you don't even know that.
3:17 Speaker 03 But two, were you, were you planting seeds or were you grafting?
3:21 Speaker 05 Um, I have not done any grafting. I, I, it's a mixture of things. So there's stuff that was done by, uh, like bare root, you know, which is like, comes out of a cellar at the nursery, uh, and up to the biggest thing being like an eight foot tall pear tree. Uh, so it's just a variety of stuff.
3:38 Steven Rinella? I didn't even know he was doing this. When I heard he was doing it, I was like, hey, we got a dude coming out and talk all about that. And I said, you should, you should be in there.
3:45 Speaker 05 Very excited.
3:45 Speaker 03 Can I ask like, what, what gave you the love of like, like you're a hunter, but that to take off a full season is a lot.
3:51 Speaker 05 Um, well, I like foraging and, and now I don't have to leave to do it. I can just do it in my backyard. I also like the idea of perennials rather than annuals. Um, I feel like the gardeners in the office here, which there are many of, they talk about it with more frustration than love.
4:09 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
4:09 Speaker 05 You disagree? Oh, no. Okay.
4:10 Steven Rinella? I garden from a place of anger.
4:12 Speaker 05 That's what I have witnessed. And so I'm like, I don't want to be the one who's mad that my tomatoes froze on June 4th. Um, I, I would rather just like, put a perennial on the ground and, and then it's like, gonna keep doing its thing. And I don't have to be the one, uh, who gets mad every year, and it doesn't.
4:30 Steven Rinella? You'll find plenty of reasons to get mad.
4:32 Speaker 05 I will get mad.
4:33 Speaker 03 But you're trying to start from a place of joy. You're trying to start from a place, but what you said earlier too, is like, you like gathering, but now you want to do it from your backyard. That's why most people start a little more farming, a little more harvesting, a little more seasonal, which is what Chapman did himself.
4:48 Steven Rinella? Spencer's too young to call him an oldie centric, but when he's older, he will absolutely be regarded as an oldie centric.
4:57 Speaker 05 I'm gonna have a little bit of Chapman-esque.
4:59 Steven Rinella? He's an aspiring oldie centric.
5:02 Speaker 03 You're on your way. I love that.
5:05 Steven Rinella? All right, man. Tell people, um, before we get into the book and everything, tell, tell everybody where you're from and your other book.
5:10 Speaker 03 So listen, I, uh, I grew up in, uh, Boston, Massachusetts, but then I lived, uh, out in, uh, north, central Massachusetts. You know, if you know, you go far enough west of Massachusetts, it gets real pretty.
5:21 Steven Rinella? Okay.
5:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, before there. Uh, this, this, this.
5:24 Steven Rinella? Before where people go on color tours?
5:26 Speaker 03 Exactly. Exactly. Kind of like the Rust Belt of Massachusetts. And that's what my first book's about. It's called Dirtbag Massachusetts. And it's really, I really love to write about juxtapositions. I love about like, kind of wrestling with the ways in which things are contradictory. And Massachusetts is a very rich state, but it still has very, very low income areas, one of which I grew up in.
5:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah. You, you guys grew up poor. You grew up poor.
5:49 Speaker 03 I grew up, I grew up unhoused, which on paper, you would think those are like, kind of the worst years of my childhood, but I actually loved those years because I was surrounded by other adults. I was part of this community in inner city Boston. It was Catholic worker. It was very much everyone kind of taking care of one another. It's really community driven and I loved it. And then when I moved out to this farm in kind of north, central Massachusetts, that's when things got lonely. But a few towns over is where John Chapman was born, like I said, during the Revolutionary War.
6:15 Steven Rinella? I don't want to talk about him yet.
6:16 Speaker 03 Not yet. So I was, but I, I became.
6:18 Steven Rinella? I want to ask you, think about growing up though.
6:20 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. No, ask me.
6:23 Steven Rinella? Your dad, you're like, your dad would take you guys out on.
6:26 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
6:26 Steven Rinella? In, in, in your book, American Rambler, you're roaming around.
6:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:30 Steven Rinella? But your, your dad was a roamer.
6:32 Speaker 03 He was.
6:32 Steven Rinella? And he would drag you on his roams, right?
6:35 Speaker 03 Absolutely, a wander and a rambler, because again, we didn't have any money for, for any kind of vacation. And so my father would take me out on these long camping trips, these long hikes. We would sleep outside, we'd go up into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I love the White Mountains and we were part of this thing, it was, it was, you know, it wasn't anything official, but it's called the 4,000 footers club. And you were just trying to climb all the 4,000 foot mountains, which I know out here probably sounds a little small to y'all, but for us, those are the big mountains out.
7:02 Steven Rinella? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the deadliest mountains in the countries in the White Mountains, right?
7:05 Speaker 03 That's right, is that George Washington, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so absolutely, just growing up with him and what he would do, you know, when you're walking, and I think about this a lot in all sorts of different ways, but when you're walking with an adult and you're a child, it's actually pretty tough. They got these long strides and you're just trying to keep up. And so my dad.
7:25 Steven Rinella? Looking at the back of their shirt all day long.
7:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And my dad would tell me these long meandering stories to try and get me to keep up with him. Trying to make sure, he'd be like, oh, if we just hit this peak, or if we just hit this kind of turn in the trail, I'll tell you what happens next in the story. So he'd almost give me these like cliff, cliffhanger cereals to keep me going. Now, when I started consuming culture as I got older, all of a sudden it'd be like, Luke, I am your father. And I was like, this sounds familiar. Like, he was just, he was just ripping off all these things and telling them. But I loved, I adored those times with my dad, I adore.
8:00 Steven Rinella? You're like, wait, they stole that from my dad?
8:02 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, exactly. Just start reading Lord of the Rings and be like, how did this guy talk to my dad? That's nuts. But genuinely, I just, I loved them so much and I loved those times spent with my father. Because it was, one, it was bonding, you know how it is when you get out there, it's just, it's beautiful, it's gorgeous. We'd sleep under the stars or in a tent. Every once in a while, the weather would be pretty rough. He had this beat up old Toyota, like blue rusted out truck that had like that plastic covering.
8:31 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
8:32 Speaker 03 On, on the bed. And so if things got real bad, we'd try to get back to that and we'd sleep in there. And I just remember kind of like curled up in my dad's chest. Those, those walks were the most spectacular times, like some of my best memories with him as a father. And it does come down to this kind of storytelling that he used to do. And he would also be ripping off American legends as well.
8:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Okay, intro, um.
8:55 Steven Rinella? What's the first you ever heard of Johnny Appleseed? I thought about this when I was thinking about, I was like, I think the only thing I can think about Johnny Appleseed is he had a, he wore around a pot on his head.
9:03 Speaker 03 That's all right. Which, by the way, sadly, I hate to dispel that rumor, but probably is not factually accurate. I'm, I'm so sorry, man. I, I apologize. He did probably wear a bucket. He usually had a bucket, but the, the tin pot with a handle off of it really hadn't been thought up yet at that point. That's kind of almost a few decades later, but yes.
9:24 Steven Rinella? Hum, they gave that idea to him decades later.
9:26 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. No, his whole, his whole deal is he gets lionized a few decades after his death and we'll get to that. But no, so the first time.
9:34 Steven Rinella? Are you, are, uh, are you aware that, um, Boone didn't wear a coon skin cap?
9:40 Speaker 03 Don't break my heart.
9:41 Steven Rinella? Crockett wore a coon skin cap, but he wore almost like, um, like a provocation, like as a goof.
9:48 Speaker 03 As a troll. Basically, he was like, oh, you think I'm such an outdoorsman?
9:52 Steven Rinella? Oh, my God, here he comes in his coon skin hat.
9:55 Speaker 03 He was, he was, he was like being audacious.
9:57 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, yeah. Again, these things get put back on these legends, right? As we learn about them and as we try to basically flatten them and make them less complex so that they can be consumed by young children. But the first time I heard about Johnny Appleseed was very much my dad. Cause he would tell these kind of giant elaborate stories. And my Johnny Appleseed of my father, he walked all the way to California. He, he brought apples here over the Atlantic Ocean on his shoulders. My dad was such a storyteller. He went so big. And so my mother's job was kind of to bring me back to earth. She'd be the one that would take the encyclopedia out and be like, hey, he was actually a real guy. His name was John Chapman. He was born right down the road in Lemonster, Massachusetts.
10:40 Speaker 03 Maybe not the tin pot hat, definitely not the getting to California. But he was a proselytizer. He was a wanderer. He planted orchards. He did not throw seeds willy nilly. He actually was pretty committed to an almost haphazard style of land speculation. And so my mom kind of taught me all about that, but it wasn't until later in my. Life when walking came into into my life again in a really big way. The same way my father loved walking. And and faith came back in my into my life. The same way my mom has always been interested in prayer. I was I was approaching forty and I was realizing these things were returning into my life. After a lifetime of kind of trying to be different than my parents. I all of a sudden realized I was coming to their traditions again.
11:25 Speaker 03 And that's when I started thinking about who's one of the walkers in history that I would love to explore. And that's like I said, I was like to my wife, I said, Johnny Appleseed. She said, not a real guy. And I said, no, well, actually, I got to push up my little nerd glasses and go, well, actually. And that's that's how this book was born.
11:44 Steven Rinella? Tell them what you were telling me the other day about.
11:48 Steven Rinella? That wasn't like eating apple.
11:49 Speaker 05 He didn't make tasty apples.
11:51 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
11:51 Speaker 05 Made spitters.
11:53 Steven Rinella? Spitters?
11:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:54 Speaker 03 Walt Whitman would describe it as tart enough to make a blue jay scream. Spitters.
12:01 Speaker 05 That's tart.
12:02 Speaker 03 And that's and it's coming from seeds, right?
12:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:04 Speaker 03 That's what happens if you graft an apple tree, if you graft an apple tree, you let's say you have a Honeycrisp. You graft that apple tree, you're gonna get that same apple.
12:13 Speaker 05 You're cloning at that point.
12:14 Speaker 03 Exactly. But what happens if you hit it with seeds?
12:18 Speaker 05 Well, if you do a seed, it's sort of, you don't know what product you're going to get. And I feel like what Johnny Appleseed was doing was sort of. A a survival of the fittest almost. He was allowing the seeds to become their own apples that then like evolved and diversified what the apple crop was on the continent.
12:38 Speaker 03 That's exactly right. And and it was this version of basically because of cross pollination. You had no idea whatever seed you put in the ground, you had no idea what kind of apple you'd get. But they were usually small and they were usually tart. And despite what Disney teaches you in melody time, which I won't sing the song because we don't have the rights to it. But if you if you are a kid that grew up especially around church, you'll remember the Lord's been good to me. And so I think the Lord forgiving me the things I need, the birds and the bees and the apple seeds, the Lord's been good to me.
13:08 Speaker 03 It is very much. All about apple tarts for the settlers. It's all about apple pies. It's all about this wholesome American story of westward expansion, which then, after his death, he kind of becomes the Mickey Mouse of westward expansion. So we can kind of ignore the brutality and the bloodshed that went into that. But it's, it's not true. Every single apple, the seeds that he got even, came from cideries. And the apples he was making were all for alcohol. And that's really when I was like, oh, this is my guy.
13:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:41 Speaker 03 This is my guy. He was moving westward ahead of settlers. He was very smart, thinking about the fur trade business is something you guys talk on here all the time.
13:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:50 Speaker 03 He was doing a kind of land speculation business, but also an orchard business where he was getting ahead of settlers. And as they were arriving, he would be like, oh, look, you want to just pay me a little bit of money? All these apple trees are here, or we could partner, because he's going to keep moving on. He never had a home address. He's going to keep wandering. But he would partner with these people to kind of basically lay claim to the land. And at the same time, they would be so excited because there was potable water was kind of hard to get their hands on. There was something that they consumed so much of, which was alcoholic cider and applejack.
14:23 Speaker 05 Huh.
14:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, at the, at the time, like a hard cider was more reliable than water.
14:27 Speaker 03 Exactly.
14:28 Speaker 05 If you were drinking it, like, I'm, I'm not going to get sick from this hard cider, but water, there's a decent chance.
14:33 Speaker 03 So we'll give it to the kids, too.
14:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
14:35 Steven Rinella? Yeah. You know, I read this book long ago. It was called, I think the book was by an author named Andrew Barr. It was just called Drink.
14:45 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
14:45 Steven Rinella? And it was like a history of alcohol consumption in the country.
14:49 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
14:49 Steven Rinella? And he pointed out a thing, and I hadn't encountered this elsewhere, but he pointed out a thing. I believe it was going back to the Plymouth Rock, the Plymouth colonies. They had an idea that, um. The, the, the, the water wasn't good to drink. Like, water wasn't good to consume.
15:07 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
15:08 Steven Rinella? And they would consume, as a thirst quencher, mildly alcoholic beverages. As a sort of, um, that it was just more peer than water.
15:18 Speaker 03 Yeah. And you're right about the mildly, I will say that. Sorry to the IPA drinkers of the world. Nobody was doing like a heavy nine percent.
15:24 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
15:25 Speaker 03 It was, it was often something that you could just like consume to kind of get you through the day.
15:29 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
15:29 Speaker 03 Keep yourself somewhat hydrated. Um, but yeah, it kind of meant that the alcohol, the alcohol consumption of that time period was so much more. Um, I, I don't have the stats on hand, but they are in the book. It was so much more high than it is now. And, um, and it was just part of the culture.
15:46 Steven Rinella? So, to, explain that a little bit better when you say the land speculating aspect of it.
15:51 Speaker 03 So, uh, land was, land was, uh, land was money. Land was power. Land was everything back then, right? And so, I, I can talk about it real quick in, in, in, in bringing it into his, in, into what John Chapman was trying to achieve.
16:07 Steven Rinella? Good.
16:08 Speaker 03 But it's interesting because he also had this religious aspect to him. And I would argue that in the eighteen hundreds, coming up with like a new version of Christianity was the same as starting a website today.
16:18 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
16:19 Speaker 03 Like genuinely, like you were like, this is my new startup. And at the time, the Shakers were around, which shout out to the Shakers. I don't know if you're familiar with them.
16:27 Steven Rinella? No, are you?
16:28 Speaker 03 They, they basically danced as a form of praise.
16:31 Steven Rinella? Ah.
16:31 Speaker 03 Uh, they were not really into sex though. So their numbers have dwindled over the years to the point where there are now two practicing Shakers.
16:39 Steven Rinella? Wow. Because they weren't procreating.
16:41 Speaker 03 Because they were not pro, it's a, that's a tough, Catholics figured it out.
16:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
16:44 Speaker 03 Lot of other religions figured it out. Shakers didn't really, didn't go with the procreation. So they only have two practicing Shakers. They are in their seventies, maybe eighties. They live in Maine, but I'm happy to report, that's, that's in the book.
16:57 Steven Rinella? Huh.
16:58 Speaker 03 But, since the book has been published. You could make the argument that Shakers are fastest growing religion in America.
17:06 Steven Rinella? Cause they doubled.
17:07 Speaker 03 They have a 50% increase.
17:10 Steven Rinella? Wow.
17:10 Speaker 03 A third member has recently joined. Isn't that fantastic?
17:14 Speaker 05 I was just gonna say in the animal kingdom, that's called functionally extinct. If there's like, if there's like one of this kind of rhino left and it can't reproduce, that's labeled as functionally extinct. So I thought you were gonna tell us that they were functionally extinct.
17:25 Speaker 03 No, they're fighting back.
17:26 Speaker 05 They're beating the odds.
17:27 Speaker 03 They're clawing on. Swedenborgianism. Swedenborgianism. It's a tough one, but it's, it's the teachings of Immanuel Swedenborg. And around the time that Chapman was like, in his teens, early twenties, it comes over from Europe. It comes from Sweden. Swedenborg himself was a philosopher.
17:46 Steven Rinella? Okay.
17:47 Speaker 03 Who in his 50s kind of got into like, I can see ghosts. I'm talking to God. I'm figuring out this right way to live. It's all in the book. We don't have to really get like into the weeds on that right now. But what you need to know is that Chapman was a strong believer in Swedenborgianism.
18:05 Steven Rinella? But is it, is it of the Judeo-Christian?
18:10 Speaker 03 A hundred percent. A hundred percent it's Christian.
18:12 Steven Rinella? Got it.
18:12 Speaker 03 A hundred percent it's Christian. And they have, they have actually somewhat progressive views for the time. They really didn't believe in slavery.
18:18 Steven Rinella? Okay. They were early abolitionists.
18:21 Speaker 03 One might say they almost pedestaled, uh, what you might say like Native Americans and other kind of like, around the world, people that were not living in the European style and almost maybe to a way where that feels weird too. Uh, but they, they had really eccentric viewpoints on a lot of different issues of the day. But one thing was the harder your life was in this realm, the easier your life would be in the next, which is a very classic religious thing, right? Now there are still practicing Swedenborgians here in the United States. Uh, I go.
18:54 Steven Rinella? Really?
18:55 Speaker 03 Yes. Yeah. They have a giant, beautiful cathedral in Brynabbend, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. I celebrated Easter with them in this book. It's a fascinating religion. It's a fascinating culture. In all these different ways, they've actually amassed a lot of wealth. Uh, but at the time. Chapman was accumulating land, to get back to your question, which is a way of accumulating wealth, but he also didn't want to partake in it because he felt like it would actually mess with his chances in the afterlife.
19:26 Speaker 05 Got it.
19:27 Speaker 03 And so he would walk around, again, no house, no address, partnering with these folks, with these settlers, to have the orchards running, but never sticking around to kind of reap their bounty. There's a joke that at one point he lost some paperwork and he lost like half of Ohio. But when he dies, at the ripe old age of his seventies, not to get ahead of ourselves, but when he dies, he has a thousand and two hundred acres to his name. And he had no progeny, he had no family, but he had, it got dispersed to like brothers, siblings, half siblings. So the Chapman family did keep it, but he actually had amassed quite a bit of wealth despite the fact that he would often either sleep on strangers' floors or proselytize
20:11 Speaker 03 in a town and hope somebody befriended him and took him in, or sleep in the woods. So he lived this kind of pauper's life. So the tin pot on the hat, not so much, but he often dressed in like a coffee sack, like kind of almost a scratchy issue. Yeah, so there is this like interesting, and there's all these different theories about him. Was he this way because he got kicked in the head by a horse? Was he this way because he got brokenhearted? There's all these different stories about him, but what really threads through it is here's a man that accumulated land, loved to move west, loved to do business. There's a real capitalist theme through Chapman, yet at the same time, he never enjoyed the benefits of it.
20:50 Speaker 05 Hmm. Can we back up? I feel like the Johnny Appleseed story kind of starts when he's an adult, but what do we know about his childhood?
20:58 Speaker 03 Fantastic, absolutely. Okay, so he's born in Lemonster, Massachusetts, and shout out to Florence E. Wheeler, who is a woman in the sixties. You know those historical societies you find in every town? They're maybe not focused on the big hits, but they are focused in what happens in their community. So she is the one. There were so many rumors about Chapman, nobody knew where he was born. Some people said that his mother was Native American, some people say that his father Was a Harvard preacher. None of that was true. Florence E. Wheeler, one of these historical society women, really dug into the the ledgers, basically, because that's how we find so much of history is who owed who money?
21:36 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah, yeah.
21:37 Speaker 03 Right? You guys talk about this on the pod. Like, this is how people were keeping track of things. And so what we found was he's born of a Minuteman.
21:47 Steven Rinella? Oh.
21:48 Speaker 03 So his dad was partook in the Revolutionary War.
21:50 Steven Rinella? Okay.
21:51 Speaker 03 His father eventually became a guard of an armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Not long after Chapman is born, his mother dies. His father remarries and they relocate to Long Meadow, Massachusetts.
22:02 Steven Rinella? Did his mom die from complications of childbirth?
22:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, I believe it was a sibling. I believe that's correct. And again, as always with history, somebody else says it might have been a disease. I can't remember which one. But I do, I think the overwhelming idea is that it was complications of child. Because he has a lot of siblings, a lot of half siblings. His father, after the war, like so many people that worked in the Revolutionary War, and this is, this is the story of my area, which is, again, this low-income part of Massachusetts. A lot of those soldiers were not paid the money that they were supposed to be paid. They were paid in scripts. Then people from Boston came and bought the scripts for pennies on the dollar.
22:39 Steven Rinella? What's the script?
22:40 Speaker 03 Uh, basically, if you were Revolutionary War, if you were a soldier, they would, the government that was very new, wrote you an IOU.
22:46 Steven Rinella? Okay, yeah.
22:47 Speaker 03 And then you needed seeds, as you, as you know, you needed seeds for your farm for the coming harvest. So you just needed anything that would get you seeds. So a bunch of people from Boston came out, bought all the scripts for very, very cheap.
22:59 Steven Rinella? Oh, no kidding.
23:00 Speaker 03 Gave them enough money to buy seeds so they could survive. And then passed a law in Boston, you have to make good on the scripts. And so they became, it's just another way of, the wealthy elite basically amassed more wealth and ripped off all of these guys that had fought in the Revolutionary War. And so Chapman's father is dealing with that kind of stuff. He falls into into debt. He falls into drinking. So at a very young age, Chapman and his half-brother Nathaniel, I think, kind of sensing that things are rough around the house, set out and they go west. More and more people are moving onto the East Coast. It's becoming what would feel like, especially to somebody like Chapman, who I think had a little bit of itchy feet and liked to spend people alone. Again, remember I said I love juxtaposition?
23:44 Steven Rinella? You said he had a little bit of a what?
23:45 Speaker 03 Itchy feet.
23:46 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:47 Speaker 03 He was a wanderer. He was a rambler. But you know how I like juxtaposition?
23:50 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
23:50 Speaker 03 Like, again, he liked to be alone, but he clearly also enjoyed the company of others. But I do think he wanted to set out. And so he set off. We don't know much about him and how he gets to Western Pennsylvania. But he and his half-brother get to Western Penns... They get over the Alleghanies, get to Western Pennsylvania where Broken Straw Creek meets the Allegheny around the area of what is now Warren, Pennsylvania. There's a story, again, alleged.
24:17 Steven Rinella? But that's a bloody ground at that time, right?
24:20 Speaker 03 Well, this is what... This is... This is a story that is kind of impressive. He... Don't get me wrong. He runs into a lot of trouble the further west he gets, especially in Ohio. But there's a story, again. Can't really fact-check these, right? We're talking about stories that kind of get passed down. This is not a written down. That's one thing that's difficult about Chapman. Think about other stories from the time, right? We're talking about like early 1800s. Lewis and Clark kept journals, right? You have... There's many people from that time in history that write, and they write so, so much. So we have so much to draw from. Chapman could read, and Chapman could talk. He was a proselytizer. He could really preach. There's all these... This documentation of people being interviewed after his passing, talking about what a great
25:05 Speaker 03 preacher and speaker he was.
25:07 Steven Rinella? Good.
25:07 Speaker 03 But he did not write anything down. He did not write anything down. He didn't... So we have no letters. We have no journals.
25:14 Steven Rinella? Good.
25:14 Speaker 03 We all have sources from around him. But this one story is that Nathaniel fell ill. Chapman went looking for help. And supposedly, Native Americans in the area, probably the Seneca, taught his little brother how to hunt, how to fish, and how to sustain himself while his brother was off looking for help. And there's a... There's a story, a theory, that that begins part of Chapman's legend, which is that he was a friend to Native Americans. Because he always kind of felt a debt to the way that they helped out his brother.
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26:22 Speaker 01 This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features and tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places. Hello?
27:05 Speaker 02 Hey, it's me, your wallet.
27:07 Speaker 01 Oh, hey.
27:08 Speaker 02 I was just wondering if we could maybe take it easy this week?
27:11 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
27:12 Speaker 02 Really?
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27:14 Speaker 02 Wait, you mean low prices?
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27:20 Speaker 01 Obviously.
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27:41 Speaker 03 I'm sorry, you asked and I'm really running with it. I'm monologuing. Let me know if you want to get a word in here sideways.
27:45 Steven Rinella? No.
27:46 Speaker 03 But we're coming up on a favorite part of mine.
27:47 Steven Rinella? It was the only, I just want to set what, when he embarks out to...
27:57 Steven Rinella? The frontier of the time.
27:59 Speaker 03 Which again, we think of the Wild West as the West, but we are talking before the Ohio State border.
28:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I mean, there are still in the post American Revolutionary War.
28:10 Steven Rinella? And even post war of 1812, there are often, there are open hostilities up and down the Ohio and full fledged Indian wars happening up and down the Ohio. So when you go to those places, it is at that time to go into those areas, it was reasonable that you would wind up tomahawked
28:31 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
28:32 Steven Rinella? In the head in your sleep.
28:33 Speaker 03 A hundred percent. And it was violence. Like that's, that's one of the parts of this book that I want to make so clear is not to jump quick to the philosophies behind it, but I understand that this country, we have our issues and that we have our arguments and we have our political differences, but we must acknowledge how brutal things used to be. And that's something that I love. A lot of this, this book is about the history of Chapman. A lot of it is also me just looking at the country at an eye level and the hospitality I meet along the way, the wonderful people that open up their homes to me along the way, because I traveled where he traveled and I kind of did what he did. I had a rule, which is I either sleep outside or I get invited to somebody's home. And how much of this country works?
29:19 Speaker 03 When you think about how much of this country functions, this is a vast land. This is a huge place. And when you look at it in the modern day versus, yeah, there was a time when this was a hugely dangerous situation that he was putting himself and Nathaniel in. But to get back to it real quick, he gets out to Warren, Pennsylvania. It's him and his brother and they meet one guy, Daniel McQuaid.
29:43 Steven Rinella? Good.
29:44 Speaker 03 Daniel McQuaid, I think should almost have his own book written about him. I, you've written books before. You know what it is to hit a character and all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, am I barking up the wrong, maybe I should be writing about this.
29:55 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
29:56 Speaker 03 Daniel McQuaid was hired by the Holland Land Company to do land speculation and we've all been young men before, right? You know, when you meet another guy and you kind of look up to him, I swear, I don't have any facts to back this up, but I just, just the, the philosophy of it, the theory behind it is that John Chapman met Daniel McQuaid and really looked up to him. He was. Described by a historian from the 1800s, a true son of Aaron. He drank, he fought, he was a bit of a maniac. He lived in a log, like, yeah. Remind me that, it's like the houses, it's like wider on the top and then it's this.
30:36 Speaker 03 I'm not gonna, anyways, he basically lives in a log cabin.
30:39 Steven Rinella? What's a son of Aaron?
30:40 Speaker 03 Son of, like, he's just from Scotland, Ireland.
30:42 Steven Rinella? Okay.
30:42 Speaker 03 He's just, he's just like a big, massive, boozy adventurer.
30:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
30:47 Speaker 03 And Holland is paying him just to try and claim as much land as they can.
30:51 Steven Rinella? Got it.
30:52 Speaker 03 He's also in wood trade, so he'll cut all these trees down, put them on rafts.
30:57 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
30:58 Speaker 03 Takes them down the Allegheny, feeds into the Ohio, feeds into the Mississippi, all the way down to New Orleans.
31:06 Steven Rinella? What?
31:07 Speaker 03 Sells it. Rivers only run one way.
31:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
31:11 Speaker 03 Walks a thousand two hundred miles up, does it all over again.
31:16 Steven Rinella? Wow, you're kidding.
31:17 Speaker 03 On paper.
31:18 Steven Rinella? Tell me what kind of trees is he cutting?
31:19 Speaker 03 I mean, he's kind of all, he's kind of everything that's down there. He's, and he's going out and genuinely, another Pete that I quote, like 1800s historian, basically says, on the walk back, wild animals, thicket, there's small, small settlements are starting to appear, like small European settlements are starting to appear along these rivers, but not many. And also there's Native Americans, of course, and highwaymen.
31:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
31:44 Speaker 03 And he braved all of that. And it's hard not to think that John Chapman wasn't a little bit influenced by this guy.
31:50 Steven Rinella? Got it.
31:51 Speaker 03 In that same way, you know, when you're a young guy and you're looking and you're like, oh, maybe I could do some version of that, which gets back to that, this land speculation where I'm gonna, if you put fruit trees in the ground, under the expanding colonial and eventually US American government, meant that you were laying claim to that ground. Yet at the same time, he had no interest in actually settling. And so that begins his story of he gets past western Pennsylvania.
32:18 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
32:19 Speaker 03 His half brother says, love you, I'm out. He's he he moved he and his the rest of the family.
32:24 Steven Rinella? At some point, he splits.
32:25 Speaker 03 The dad comes from Long Meadow. They settle somewhere around Dexter, Ohio. They settle in like southern Ohio, close to West Virginia. But Chapman then starts this this life of wandering, rambling, planting apple seeds, and running into very much what you just talked about, a huge, huge, multiple, multiple conflicts. And he becomes the Paul Revere of the War of 1812.
32:50 Steven Rinella? He did.
32:50 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
32:51 Steven Rinella? I didn't know that part of him.
32:52 Speaker 03 Nobody does.
32:53 Speaker 05 They they kind of later on, I feel like he was assigned to Chapman that he was sort of a walking newspaper, right? Because he was going around to so many different places and like he'd get information from Pennsylvania that he would deliver to West Virginia.
33:05 Speaker 03 Correct.
33:05 Speaker 05 He'd hear something in West Virginia that then travels to Ohio with him.
33:08 Speaker 03 Correct.
33:09 Speaker 05 Is that's that's sort of what you're saying?
33:10 Speaker 03 Yes, there's there's a little bit of debate whether he made it to West Virginia or not. I kind of like to think that he did. No, there weren't borders of that. And and they they touch up. And I did drive through West Virginia at one point in the book, so it helps me that if I think that he did. But genuinely, that's exactly right. He would carry the good news, which were the the teachings of Swedenborgianism.
33:30 Steven Rinella? Okay.
33:30 Speaker 03 Which again, which this very interesting view of looking at Christianity. But it's still, I mean, Swedenborgianism influences, I mean, we're talking numbers.
33:39 Steven Rinella? Can you say that word real slow?
33:40 Speaker 03 Sorry.
33:42 Speaker 03 Swedenborgianism.
33:44 Steven Rinella? Okay, I've read it. New Jerusalem Church, right?
33:47 Speaker 03 Yes, New Jerusalem Church is what it's called now, or Swedenborgian is another like that's what you would call a practitioner.
33:54 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
33:55 Speaker 03 But yes, they now refer to themselves as the New Jerusalem Church. They have 10,000 practitioners around the world. I believe it's 5,000 in and around Brennathen. They have their own town. They have their own fire department. They have their own police. It's a really interesting area. But if we're talking numbers, they're doing better than the Shakers.
34:18 Steven Rinella? Sure, yeah.
34:19 Speaker 03 But not as good as somebody that was influenced by watching that religion take off.
34:27 Steven Rinella? Ah.
34:27 Speaker 03 Which was John Smith and Mormonism.
34:29 Steven Rinella? Okay.
34:30 Speaker 03 So Mormonism was heavily influenced by watching how Swedenborg's teachings took off.
34:36 Steven Rinella? Got it.
34:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
34:38 Steven Rinella? Did did did? When Chapman took out, like, let's say you'd caught Chapman out. And you would have said, real quick, what are you doing? What are you doing? Would he have said, I'm carrying my religion forth?
34:54 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
34:54 Steven Rinella? Or would he have said, I'm carrying my apple seeds forth?
34:59 Speaker 03 I, listen, again, you don't know the answer ever. But I would argue he a hundred percent believed that the teachings of Swedenborg were his Emmanuel Swedenborg. Those were his passion. Those were his reason. But I mean, this is, this is why I love this story. It's such an American story. You can have your passions, but you gotta be able to pay the bills. Granted, his were very, very low. But you have to have a little bit of a business. You have to have a little bit of an underpinning of capitalism to get you out there to make sure you've got it. You can grab some food when you need it or whatever's happening. And so for him, that, those were the orchards. Those, the, the, the, the preachings, I believe, were the ideals.
35:44 Speaker 03 And then the land speculation, the laying claim to this land was the aspect of it that he knew meant he had something to fall back on, even if, again, he never really even tapped into it. I think he sensed some type of security from it. If, I mean, real quick, do you have a favorite, like, American legend?
36:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
36:07 Speaker 03 Who's your favorite American legend?
36:08 Steven Rinella? Boone.
36:09 Speaker 03 It's Boone all the way.
36:10 Steven Rinella? And on that point, you just said a thing that reminded me, you know, the guy who said that, that you could picture Chapman talking to that Scottish wild man?
36:20 Speaker 03 Daniel McQuaid.
36:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Okay. There's like a, there's a similar.
36:24 Speaker 03 Tell me, tell me, tell me.
36:26 Steven Rinella? When, when Boone was in, when Boone was wrapped up in Lord Dunmore's war?
36:31 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
36:31 Steven Rinella? Okay.
36:33 Steven Rinella? There's a similar story where he was, he was a wagon driver, a mule, like a mule driver. He runs into a real wanderer who, and some people kind of have it pinned down to the campfire they were sitting around where he said, you know, this might interest you. There's this path I found through the mountains, Cumberland Gap. Young fellow like you might, right? And that's, and, and some people attribute that that was the, the, the beginning of, that was the beginning of Daniel Boone.
37:03 Speaker 03 And isn't that-
37:03 Steven Rinella? The wanderer, right? A guy threw him a tip.
37:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, threw him a tip, and that's such a great way to put it. Threw him a tip that then he took such advantage of. And it actually led to a person who became larger than life.
37:19 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
37:20 Speaker 03 And that's what I love about Chapman too. And it does, I mean, we have this today. We talk about a writer's writer, right? Everybody knows Stephen King, but who's the, who's the guy Stephen King admires, who's maybe not as well known, or comedian's comedian? And we all know the big names, but who, who are those littler guys who maybe never got out of the honky tonks, but they influenced, you know, our great outlaw country singers or our great comedians. And that's, I love finding those moments of history. Do you know who the guys?
37:49 Steven Rinella? I do, and I've written it and said it a thousand times. Randall's here, he'd remember. What was the guy's name?
37:54 Speaker 05 I don't know.
37:54 Speaker 03 It's all right, it's all right.
37:55 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
37:56 Speaker 03 It's all right.
37:56 Steven Rinella? No, not John Finley. Was it John Finley? John Finley.
38:00 Speaker 03 Well, I, listen, I did, while I was working on this-
38:02 Steven Rinella? I'm almost certain it was John-
38:03 Speaker 03 It's John Finley? All right.
38:05 Steven Rinella? We're on with it.
38:05 Speaker 03 Shout out John Finley. We can come back, yeah. But there, I found a bunch of these guys. Um, and I, I'm, I'm gonna blank on the name, but, we, I think we should talk about him becoming the, the Paul Revere of the War of 1812.
38:19 Steven Rinella? Well, I got a, I got a more detail oriented question.
38:22 Speaker 03 It was- John Finley. All right.
38:25 Steven Rinella? Yeah. John Finley was like, he, he in his grave is like, come on, dude. I told him about Cumberland Gap. Like, why is he in all, like, why is he in all the paintings going through Cumberland Gap?
38:39 Steven Rinella? It's like, I was there way before his ass. I told him about it. He goes through there and it's like, good lord.
38:46 Speaker 03 But again, I'm sorry, there's something so American about that. It's what I love. It is oftentimes the loudest. Or the person who maybe in Chapman's, I don't think he really even sought out fame.
38:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
38:59 Speaker 03 It really happened to him after his death, and that's a whole other part of this. He, I genuinely believe was trying to be a humble person. But you have no control over what parts of history get kind of scooped up and then lionized. And then put on a pedestal. And then you do, you have the person who's right. Your, your character, John, he's right. He's like, I should be more famous than Boone. But for some reason, whether they pushed it themselves, or it's just the way history worked out. Boone's the one that gets put in the paintings.
39:31 Steven Rinella? In that's why him, I could get into it, cause I got my, Johnny, I was in his story, why him? It also comes down to why him? Because of a guy he met.
39:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:41 Steven Rinella? A guy he met and it started the thing. I mean, a guy he met wrote like, oh, I met this crazy, you know,
39:49 Steven Rinella? guy and he like built him up and made him crazy and, and changed his, you know, took aspects of his biography and, and birthed a legend.
39:57 Speaker 03 Exactly.
39:57 Steven Rinella? He just happened to run into a guy that put him into a book and birthed the legend. And it probably, and it winds up being similar way, but similar to this story.
40:06 Speaker 03 So often.
40:06 Steven Rinella? Where I'm sitting here, he had a pot on his head.
40:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, but it is so often a writer who comes across the story is maybe getting paid at the time by some magazine. Or, and, and they're the ones that absolutely, I'm, I'm also drawn thinking of writers. Mark Twain, a great example of somebody, Chapman is this way too. Every state he enters and some that he didn't. They like to lay claim to him.
40:28 Steven Rinella? Got it, yeah.
40:29 Speaker 03 They like to build a statue to him, often carved out of wood. Lemon Sir has a wooden statue. They, they usually carve it out of a tree. Mark Twain, the same way, right? Here's this man who gets so many statues built about him. They, they all across the country, all these different states lay claim to, oh, home of Mark Twain. Well, he lived here once. I mean, George Washington too, right? Like we have this like. George Washington slept here, or like hotels that have more of a sense of humor, like George Washington took a shit here.
40:57 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
40:57 Speaker 03 Like all these different ways of doing it, right? But what I love about that, kind of that, that aspect of it is that it ma- it makes the person first and foremost larger than life. But when you actually look at Mark Twain, what he used to do was just go to bars, listen to stories.
41:18 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
41:20 Speaker 03 Usually for the price of a couple of drinks. Sometimes he would give them a little extra cash. He would then just say to the person, can I use your story?
41:28 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
41:29 Speaker 03 And he would pay them just a little bit of money.
41:31 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
41:31 Speaker 03 And next thing you know, that's how so much of his work got built. And again, that is, it just feels so American to me, the way that these stories kind of start to outgrow. I mean, I want to say outgrow history, but the fact of the matter is, is sometimes the stories become history.
41:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
41:47 Speaker 03 Even though they aren't factually accurate, like the Tim Potter.
41:51 Steven Rinella? Uh, on a return of a, a, a, a more detailed, the kind of like practical matter.
41:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:58 Steven Rinella? Can you explain real quick, you've touched on it, but can you explain real quick that the, the land, the, the land speculator orchard?
42:07 Speaker 03 Yes.
42:07 Steven Rinella? Connection?
42:08 Speaker 03 Yes, I'm s- you've asked me this twice now, and I apparently have not done a good enough job.
42:12 Steven Rinella? Yeah, how, how does that work? Like, like, walk me through that.
42:15 Speaker 03 Okay. Um, I mean, I am probably not fully educated in the history of how this country was taken over.
42:24 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
42:24 Speaker 03 To speak about it super accurately.
42:26 Steven Rinella? No, I just mean from his perspective.
42:28 Speaker 03 But yes, from our, from our perspective, I can easily say, you basically have European settlers coming over and wanting to lay claim to land.
42:36 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
42:37 Speaker 03 You have Native American countries, you have Native American peoples, you have Native American tribes that already exist here. So there is, as we know, right? And again, how historically accurate is this? But there's a lot of trading, there's Manhattan sold for beads, which again, maybe not exactly accurate, but you get the idea.
42:54 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
42:54 Speaker 03 Europeans start coming in and basically making trades for different parts of the country as they continue to move westward. All the while, of course, signing treaties where they say, we swear, we're not going west of the Alleghenies, we swear, we're not going west of the Ohio, we swear. And of course, those then become violent confrontations. As- Makes sense, as has been true of all history.
43:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:20 Speaker 03 Like, that's the other part that I think is so important. We can look at these moments in American history and be like, oh, this is brutal and oh, this is difficult, which, don't get me wrong, it is. But this is how land has been taken and fought over in the old world and everywhere else.
43:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:36 Speaker 03 Um, but part of what happened with land speculation is you had giant European corporations, like the Dutch Holland Land Company. They would pay somebody like Dan McQuaid to just go west, build a log cabin, lay claim, put down markers, basically, to the rights for that forest so that he could log it.
43:59 Speaker 05 Good.
43:59 Speaker 03 If there were native peoples there, see if you can figure out a way to say, hey, can we cut down some of these trees? Is that cool? Sometimes that works out. Sometimes it turns into a confrontation. Um, so that's like the, that's like the massive scale. That's like, I'm sorry to use like modern terms, but like, that's like the Facebook. That's like the Google. That's like the big scale stuff was you literally had European governments, East Indian Training Company, something like that's like the big. On the much smaller scale, you had this desire, right? For westward expansion and settlers. And so the idea was if you were to plant the land, and I can't remember the exact number, but there was like X number of trees.
44:39 Speaker 05 It was called the donation tract.
44:41 Speaker 03 Go.
44:41 Speaker 05 And, and I think it was like a hundred apple and 50 peach.
44:45 Speaker 03 Yep.
44:46 Speaker 05 Or something like that. It was, it was those.
44:47 Speaker 03 What to plant?
44:48 Speaker 05 It was those two specifically. And then I think you had to have a structure on the property. And those were like your three requirements. Um, and, and their thought when they were making those requirements, like, if you are dedicated enough to put a fruit tree in the ground, then you're married to that property, kind of. You're going to see it through to where you can harvest that fruit. If you're putting 150 fruit trees in the ground, um, that's going to make you want to stay there and just like keep improving that zone.
45:14 Speaker 03 Okay, first off, I'm so glad you're here. So that was perfect, because that's correct. Second, that's what makes Chapman such an interesting person. So he wanted to do that. He wanted his name down as somebody who owned that land, but he did not want to stick around to see it through. So that was his type of land spec. Like Dan McQuaid. Builds the hut, stays there, is getting paid by the Holland Company. He's taking the wood down the rivers, coming back. That's his place.
45:45 Speaker 05 Yep.
45:45 Speaker 03 Chapman just starts bouncing around. Now, he'll, he'll walk back seasonally. He comes back. That's, it's, it's something that's very beautiful in his movements that I found, that I actually try and do a little bit of in the book, too. There's almost a seasonal circular nature to it that I absolutely love. But he basically will partner with somebody, say, hey, will you stick around? Will you look over this land? It's now our land, which again, he lost so much of it, especially when he passes away, like a bunch of, I'm sure not everyone went looking for his siblings to be like, by the way, I was in a 50 50 split. I think they're like, wow, look at that. Now this is mine. But that was the way that you got to lay claim.
46:26 Speaker 03 And I mean, to think about it in modern terms, imagine if we could just, I mean, this country is so vast. Don't get me wrong. It is so big. It's so beautiful. But the idea that you could just go and plant a few trees and be like, this now is mine. Of course, especially to young people, that was such a draw. And so it's such a draw. And so that, that kept people moving westward.
46:49 Speaker 05 And one of the goals of the donation tract was to like, put a buffer zone between the east and the native tribes that were further west. And so Johnny is, is sort of encountering some of these tribes along the way. Can you talk about his relationship with them?
47:05 Speaker 03 Yes, absolutely. Um, so again, I, I mentioned, uh, I mean, this is, this is part of the book that fascinates me. I, I grew up in this area where the Wapinaw, uh, led by this guy who the Europeans called King Philip. His name was Medicom. Um, and his father and, uh, basically a colonialist father were the ones that made peace around Thanksgiving. And then a generation later, you can just see the way the younger generation was like, neither of us like how this is working out. In a very interesting fact, just real quick, this not so much linked to Chapman, but one of the issues was gun control. Because settlers brought guns.
47:47 Speaker 03 And very quickly through trade, Native Americans then had guns. And then all of a sudden, the colonists started making rules around guns. And the Native Americans were like, what are you talking about?
47:59 Steven Rinella? The tendency to wanna be the guy with the gun. The other guys don't have the guns has not gone away.
48:06 Speaker 03 It never has, never will. It's a joke, I'm sorry, but it is a joke I could not make in the book was like, and then the Second Amendment was ratified. And there's never been any gun issues since, which of course has not been the case.
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49:31 Speaker 00 What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?
49:45 Speaker 03 Apparently we celebrate.
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49:58 Speaker 03 But so that started what was called King Philip's War, Medcom's Rebellion. As with everything back then, there's a bunch of different names. 3,000 Native Americans perish, 1,000 colonists perish. And a very interesting, again, oftentimes, especially in elementary school and earlier histories, this is seen as like civilization versus the wild, which of course it's not. It's so much more complex than that. The colonists do eventually kill Medcom. They then get his head and they put it on a pike outside of Plymouth for decades. Which is amazing because that's such a European, like that's, you know, that's William Wallace type stuff, right? That there is this like history of that.
50:40 Speaker 03 And there's a play somebody made, kind of making fun of bureaucracy much more modern. That was, uh, Medcom's head is still rotting on a pike down the road. Like basically it's this, they basically made a play about what the town hall meeting was to be like, well, at what point should we, like the 90 year old guys still really like it, but at what point should we actually take this head down maybe? But yeah, so there was this brutality. Chapman himself runs into the Seneca.
51:08 Speaker 03 He runs into the Shawnee in Ohio, 100%. You have to remember a lot of the tribes that we think of as Westward and Plains Indians actually were pushed out that way. So they kind of started around here.
51:22 Speaker 03 The one that, that I in my head really link him to though is the Seneca. Like they, you don't know for sure, but you really think the Seneca are probably the ones in the area of war in Pennsylvania that helped him with the, with his brother. But the War of 1812 is, uh, oh, you might have to fact check me on this.
51:47 Speaker 03 Because the war of eighteen, again, like, like with all these, right? Like, like with the French Indian War and the, which was part of the Seven Year War, you have natives on both sides.
51:57 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
51:58 Speaker 03 Right? So like, the Mohawk and the Mohegan actually side with the settlers in King Philip's War. It's the Narragansett and the Wampanoag and many other smaller tribes that are kind of at, that are fighting. And Medcom's father made peace with the earliest colonists because he was in a fight with the Narragansett. And so, right? So there's all this, there's this ever shifting generational divides.
52:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the War of eighteen twelve is kind of like the American Revolution, part two.
52:26 Speaker 03 Exactly.
52:27 Steven Rinella? And the English still had certain holdings. They had certain tribal affiliations. And they, and there was a lot of, there were some issues that had been sort of punted around borders and things at the end of the American Revolution. And the War of eighteen twelve brought all those hostilities forward and led to a further diminishment of English influence.
52:50 Speaker 03 I want to-
52:50 Steven Rinella? And defeated a lot of tribes, because there was a lot of tribes in the Ohio Valley that threw in with the English during the War of eighteen twelve.
52:57 Speaker 03 Correct.
52:57 Steven Rinella? And it led to their defeat.
52:59 Speaker 03 Well, and, and, and also because they were, they were basically saying, we will make sure the colonists stop expanding west. That was part of the way the British, I want to say the Delaware. The Delaware is what's popping into my mind, but again, probably a fact check. But basically, during that time, Chapman has made it far enough west to Mansfield. And if, if you'll allow me just real quick, Ohio is an incredible thing to look at. It is the heart of the country. It's shaped that way. There's, nobody thinks of it as the West, but at one point, especially for land speculators, Ohio was like the land of milk and honey. That's where they really, we had all these kind of deals that we'd made that were holding us back from it. And basically settlers just said, screw those deals.
53:43 Speaker 03 And they started moving inland. Then the War of eighteen twelve breaks out. Chapman is in and around Mansfield, Ohio.
53:50 Steven Rinella? Good.
53:50 Speaker 03 Again, he never has a home address, but it's probably as close to a home base as he has, because he's walking in these seasonal circles. He's coming back to Mansfield a lot. And there is rumor, a shopkeeper gets murdered. To this day, we're not actually sure what happened. But a shopkeeper is murdered, very quickly, news travels.
54:14 Speaker 03 Native Americans killed the shopkeeper and they're coming and they're backed by the British.
54:18 Steven Rinella? Okay.
54:19 Speaker 03 Which was, just to be clear, a very understandable fear at the time. That was not delusional to think that that might be happening. Town gathers.
54:29 Speaker 03 A call goes out, there are soldiers in Mount Vernon, Ohio, which is about thirty-five miles west.
54:36 Speaker 03 Again, can't remember the tribe, I believe it might be Delaware, but Native Americans might be coming to attack. We need those reinforcements. Sun is setting. Who will go? Who will go thirty-five miles, basically the length of a marathon, then some, to go get some soldiers down to Mount Vernon, alert them to our plight and bring them back? And the way this story is told is that a shiny-eyed, long-haired, uncapped, skinny, probably mid to late thirties at this point in his life, has already gotten a reputation, as you said, as like almost a news carrier, as a man who, who, who was a little bit of an eccentric in the area, seasonally would come around preaching about Swedenborg, raises his hand and says, "I'll go."
55:22 Speaker 03 No gun.
55:24 Speaker 03 Depending on legend, no shoes. Eh, but no horse, no horse for real, that's, that's legit. And he on foot goes on a newly cut, newly cut road, uh, down to Mount Vernon. Um, a lot of the facts that we have about Chapman come from children of the time, because he gets lionized after his death, like I mentioned. So those children eventually grow into adults. And then they're the ones that are recorded, which again, of course, there's legend.
55:53 Steven Rinella? But recording.
55:54 Speaker 03 Oral history, right?
55:55 Steven Rinella? A version of firsthand experience.
55:57 Speaker 03 From an eight-year-old.
55:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
55:58 Speaker 03 So take it all with a grain of salt, of course.
56:02 Steven Rinella? He's like, "The way I remember it."
56:03 Speaker 03 Right, but they, he apparently was running by, basically saying, "The Native Americans are attacking Mansfield. The Native Americans are attacking Mansfield. I, I run to Mount Vernon to get, to get help." And again, this is one of those interesting things, which I love. This is what I love. About this project that I got to do, I think this country is more interesting when you look at it in its three dimensional complexities. I think my family, which is also a tie through this story, starting with my father and those lovely walks that I had back in the day, is more complex. When you look at it through this three dimensional complexity, my first book was very much like the worst moments of my family's story. This is more about, what about the camping? What about the canoeing trips? Yes, we grew up really broke, but what were those nice moments
56:48 Speaker 03 that happened as well? And then John Chapman's story is so much more interesting when you think about it with this complexity. So was he a friend of Native Americans? There's a lot of proof that he was. But again, when war showed up right in front of him, he chose a side.
57:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
57:04 Speaker 03 And, and he went and he got those soldiers, brought the soldiers back, came back with them, mind you. So he went the 30 miles down and did the 30 miles back, which that's the last walk that I do in this book, is I also walked from Mansfield to Mount Vernon, Ohio, and then turned around the next day and did it back. Wasn't fun. Wasn't fun, but he did it. Turned out the attack doesn't come. But that gives him notoriety and fame in his lifetime. That is what almost gets him. That's what levels him up and he becomes known as the Paul Revere of the War of 1812, which again is a story they, Disney never tells us. They never tell you you're near elementary school because it, it, it makes him more complex and therefore it's easier to just brush it to the side.
57:47 Steven Rinella? What is the Disney version? You, you've, you've mentioned it a couple of times, but I don't, I don't even, this is probably the one I have in my head, but what is the Disney story?
57:55 Speaker 03 The Disney version, there's this, it's 1947, maybe 48, 1947, late 40s. There is a melody time. They make all these different kind of musicals. I mean, basically what, what Disney's looking for, if we can get into the capitalism aspect of that real quick, is what's a story we can tell without having to pay anybody money?
58:13 Steven Rinella? Good.
58:14 Speaker 03 American legends. Nobody's gonna come knocking on our door looking for the life rites. We make some cartoons that, what?
58:20 Steven Rinella? Pocahontas.
58:21 Speaker 03 Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Beauty and the Beast. All the movies.
58:25 Steven Rinella? It's like that joke from the producers where he says, next time, no writers.
58:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so one of their, they, they came out with a bunch of these different melody times. One of them was the story of John Chapman. And it starts with him, he looks super skinny and he's meek because it's true. He is the gentlest of our American legends. He is this country at its most peaceful ideals. It's one of the things that I really love about him. It's one of the things I really respect about him. They give him a Bible. Do they get into Swedenborgianism? No.
59:02 Steven Rinella? Oh.
59:03 Speaker 03 They put a little.
59:04 Steven Rinella? He just got a straight up Bible.
59:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. He just gets the Bible. He gets the, right down the middle of the lane. And the, the, the whole, the whole video opens up and they show this in elementary schools across the country. They showed this after churches. If, if this isn't ringing any bells for you, that means you might've had an interest in upbringing.
59:21 Steven Rinella? No, and I also pictured the character played by him. He's got like a, like a canvas sack with his seeds in it.
59:30 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
59:31 Steven Rinella? Like a shoulder bag full of his seeds.
59:32 Speaker 03 Exactly right. He's got a man purse full of seeds.
59:35 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah. And, and. I'm ringing, I'm ringing back.
59:37 Speaker 03 And, and it opens with like all these very hardy men walking west. And he's kind of like, oh, I can't go west. Like an angel comes to him and is like, yeah, you can. They need apples. And then he walks west and he throws his apple seeds willy nilly. No orchards, no capitalism, just out of the goodness of his heart. And then they grow and then people have apple pies and they have apple tarts. And it even, I will say, it gives, it gives Swedenborg like a little bit of a nod because they do believe in angels and they do believe in ghosts. And so then he gets older and everyone loves him. The animals love him, the Native Americans love him, the settlers love him. He's got no shoes on and we can get into those facts real quick. Like this is, this is the same John Chapman that like befriended a wolf and had a pet wolf for many years.
1:00:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:00:24 Speaker 03 This is the same John Chapman who like, once came across some bears living in a stump that he called his home, and he decided, oh, I should let the bears have the stump. Cause he's a good man. No, cause it's bears. Cause it's bears. You don't go mess with bears, I think is the easier part of that story.
1:00:40 Speaker 05 He purchased a horse that was about to be slaughtered, um, because he didn't wanna see it killed.
1:00:44 Speaker 03 And suppose that one might be real.
1:00:46 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:00:46 Speaker 03 They, they do.
1:00:47 Speaker 05 Tell me more. And he wouldn't even ride it, right? Because that, that was wrong to him, was to like, put the horse, you know, make it do his labor.
1:00:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, he really, there was some part of Swedenborgianism that really made him respect animals. So he didn't hunt, supposedly, which isn't, that's a, we also have ledgers where he got jerky. Like, you know, like, but like, maybe.
1:01:06 Steven Rinella? But he wasn't armed.
1:01:07 Speaker 03 He might've been eccentric later, right? He wasn't armed. The horse thing was, there, there is paperwork that he bought a horse.
1:01:13 Speaker 05 That's great.
1:01:14 Speaker 03 And then partnered with one of his orgard guys and was like, will you just make sure this horse lives out the rest of its days?
1:01:19 Speaker 05 Uh huh.
1:01:19 Speaker 03 So like, he had, he was apparently really good with children. He would often, cause he, he did have big, thick, calloused feet, from how much walking he did. So he would like, walk on embers, or stick his feet with needles, to much to like, the horrification of children.
1:01:36 Steven Rinella? To like, wow little kids.
1:01:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, to like, wow little kids, exactly.
1:01:39 Steven Rinella? So if you wind up being an eccentric old man.
1:01:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
1:01:42 Steven Rinella? Don't do the wowin' little kids.
1:01:43 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:01:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's, you gotta stay away from that one a little bit.
1:01:47 Steven Rinella? We had one of those in our town.
1:01:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:01:49 Steven Rinella? They get a bad reputation.
1:01:51 Speaker 03 I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. We had them run. That's a bad joke. That's a bad joke. Uh, we had a lot. Um, but no, genuine, like, another one is, he didn't use a campfire, cause he thought it would kill mosquitoes, cause they were drawn to the light. Another one was, he thought he stepped on a warm ones, and that's why he didn't wear shoes. He, so there's all these eccentricities.
1:02:11 Speaker 05 And it's, it's why he wouldn't graft trees, because you're like, causing some pain by cutting into a tree, right? And so that's why he goes straight to sea.
1:02:20 Speaker 03 Well, so this, this is a, this is a two parter. I think it's both.
1:02:24 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:02:24 Speaker 03 Some people argue it's one or the other. He either didn't graft trees, because like you just said, he did not believe in hurting other living creatures.
1:02:33 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:02:33 Speaker 03 And a tree in his, like, this is like, the prototype hippie, in a way.
1:02:37 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:02:37 Speaker 03 This is, he is the American legend for our first Jesus-driven hippie.
1:02:42 Speaker 05 Because by grafting, you're cutting into live trees.
1:02:45 Speaker 03 Exactly. You're cutting a hunk of the live tree, you're replanting it. That's how you can ensure that you are getting the clone, as you so beautifully put it earlier. Other people say he just loved God so much.
1:02:57 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:02:57 Speaker 03 That to do that would be to mess with God's plan.
1:03:02 Speaker 05 Got it.
1:03:02 Speaker 03 Which is, I'm just gonna put the seed in.
1:03:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:03:05 Speaker 03 If the best apple happens to grow from it, it'll be great. Of course, that never happened. But I would argue it's probably both.
1:03:12 Speaker 05 My, yeah, my cynical wife has a third theory. When I told her about Johnny Appleseed, the, the real version a few years ago, she's like, well, no, he was, he was clearly a businessman. And so he was saving money by just like using seed. He wasn't, uh, he wasn't following his religion. Um, he was, he didn't have other motives.
1:03:31 Steven Rinella? If you could interview him now, he'd be like.
1:03:33 Speaker 05 This is the cheapest way.
1:03:34 Steven Rinella? You know, you know what I get these seeds for?
1:03:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:03:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, zero dollars. No, that's exactly, to be honest, your wife is probably, if, if not a hundred percent right, a big part of the pie. But anyways, to get back to that is the Disney, the Disney version of him was the sweet person. And the Disney film ends with Angel Michael coming down from heaven, taking his old hobo looking soul up in, and putting him in like the wall, like he's our first American saint.
1:03:59 Speaker 05 This has some very Mormon, um, like tones.
1:04:01 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
1:04:02 Speaker 05 It's, uh, I'm glad to hear you say that, that some of that was influenced.
1:04:07 Speaker 03 A hundred, a hundred percent.
1:04:08 Steven Rinella? I need to, I think it's important here that I betray, that I, that I admit to a level of ignorance about, uh, apples.
1:04:16 Speaker 03 Oh, let's talk. This is, you're gonna come, you're gonna come in here.
1:04:19 Steven Rinella? I thought that, I thought for some reason that when you do buy seed, like in America, when you do buy seed, it doesn't work out and that you, that they always graft onto American crab apple.
1:04:35 Speaker 05 No.
1:04:36 Steven Rinella? That, that, that, that the root, I bet someone's gonna write in maybe, that the root, that all, if you go to any apple orchard.
1:04:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, in America.
1:04:43 Steven Rinella? Yep, that it is, that it is grafted onto the American crab apple root stock.
1:04:51 Speaker 05 I I
1:04:52 Steven Rinella? Is that not true?
1:04:52 Speaker 05 Well, I think our apples have become so corrupted. At one point, I think they say there were seventeen thousand species of apple on the continent. Now we're down to only a few thousand. And and there's like these dudes and women who their whole life goal after they retire, they like, you know, have a have a job that allows them to retire at fifty two. They become lost apple hunters and they're going out looking for these varieties. So I'm sure I'm sure we have many species that
1:05:21 Steven Rinella? I know the nastiest apple tree in the world by where I grew up.
1:05:23 Speaker 05 Somebody would like to know about that, I'm sure. But the version you're saying that they're all grafted onto crab apples, some certainly are, but not all.
1:05:31 Steven Rinella? Okay, alright. And I thought somehow when you planted a seed, it just like, it's not like idiot now. I thought it somehow just didn't work.
1:05:39 Speaker 03 No, it works.
1:05:40 Steven Rinella? You just get a bad apple.
1:05:41 Speaker 03 You just get a really bad apple unless you want to make alcohol, in which case it's a great apple.
1:05:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:05:46 Speaker 03 Because you just need to be able to grind grind them up. What I will say real quick, shout out to Michael Pollan.
1:05:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:05:52 Speaker 03 Who wrote a great book, Botany of Desire.
1:05:54 Steven Rinella? One of those was, yeah.
1:05:55 Speaker 03 Which gets into some of the different aspects and very much was informative for this book as well. Because apples, the other thing is everyone thinks American is apple pie, so we think of apples as American.
1:06:07 Steven Rinella? Not native.
1:06:07 Speaker 03 They are patriotic. They're from like Kazakhstan.
1:06:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:06:10 Speaker 03 They they were brought over here and I have like, I have a few different apple theories, which are just like more barroom talk than like science where you're talking, which is, I think delicious apples have the best PR on the planet.
1:06:21 Speaker 05 Mmm.
1:06:21 Speaker 03 They look good.
1:06:22 Speaker 05 Red delicious.
1:06:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, but they're not delicious.
1:06:24 Speaker 05 I agree.
1:06:24 Speaker 03 They're terrible.
1:06:25 Steven Rinella? No, Honeycrisp is kicking all their ass.
1:06:27 Speaker 03 Honeycrisp is and doing great.
1:06:29 Speaker 05 In the great land of Minnesota.
1:06:31 Steven Rinella? A real shit apple is the Macintosh.
1:06:35 Speaker 03 Oh, here we go.
1:06:36 Speaker 05 I like Macintosh.
1:06:37 Steven Rinella? No, it's a junk apple.
1:06:38 Speaker 05 What do you think of Golden Delicious?
1:06:40 Steven Rinella? Has taken over the apple world.
1:06:42 Speaker 05 What what do you think of Golden Delicious?
1:06:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah, not bad.
1:06:44 Speaker 05 The the
1:06:45 Steven Rinella? Macintosh, that's a mealy, thick skinned.
1:06:50 Steven Rinella? Bullshit apple.
1:06:51 Speaker 05 Johnny apple seed.
1:06:52 Steven Rinella? Apologies, any McIntosh producers out.
1:06:54 Speaker 03 No, no, I'm with, I'm with you 100%.
1:06:56 Steven Rinella? Sorry, what were you about to say?
1:06:57 Speaker 05 Johnny apple seed gets some credit for the Golden Delicious, which is a modern apple that's, you know, survived to make it to grocery store shelves. He didn't make that, but he made its like parents in the apple lineage, which was like a West Virginia Delicious or a West Virginia Golden, something like that. So, uh, like of, of all this Johnny apple seed talk, um, you'd still see a little bit of them in the grocery store.
1:07:21 Speaker 03 Now, listen, when you, when you take that many at bats, eventually you gotta have a couple, you gotta have a couple of good ones.
1:07:26 Steven Rinella? Is what he's saying, does that check out with your research?
1:07:28 Speaker 03 I, I, I will say, I think this man knows apples better than me. When it comes to the, when it comes to the botany aspect of this, this is where I get, this is where I get the loosest in, in my research. The one thing I, you bring up McIntosh, one thing that's fun is that in the book I go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is where his story ends. It's where he, he dies. But they now have this incredibly huge, beautiful, wonderful Johnny apple seed festival. It happens every year.
1:07:53 Steven Rinella? Oh, they do?
1:07:54 Speaker 03 If you have a chance, you should get, it was so much bigger and more spectacular than I thought it could be.
1:07:58 Steven Rinella? Huh.
1:07:59 Speaker 03 I had some of the best food I've ever had. Granted, some of it was like chicken dumplings by Amish people. And when you have that much workforce for free, of course, you're going to make some really, really good stuff. Uh, but one of the other aspects of it is that Fort Wayne has a farm league team that their players go to San Diego, which is interesting. It's very far away, but they are called the Fort Wayne Tin Caps.
1:08:23 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:08:23 Speaker 03 And it is a gorgeous stadium.
1:08:25 Steven Rinella? To this day.
1:08:26 Speaker 03 To this day.
1:08:26 Steven Rinella? Good.
1:08:27 Speaker 03 But the reason Usain McIntosh brought it up for me was I was like, so how did you come up with the name? And they had all these different aspects and they had some voting and there are other parts that were linked to Fort Wayne. And one of their aspects was, well, we know we want to do something with apple. And immediately they were like, oh, there's a little company in Cupertino, California, that might start writing us some cease and desist letters because it's apple. Like when you think about, when you think about how American app, like, like apple's one of the biggest companies on the planet. And that is their logo. It's just an apple with a little bite taken. And out of it, it's this universal symbol that has really taken over like every culture in a way has these this draw to apples. But the tin caps, they eventually went with tin caps.
1:09:10 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:09:10 Speaker 03 And I'll never forget, I interviewed this guy, Michael Limer. It's in the book. I call it, it's like the Moneyball aspect of the book. It's like when I get into sports a little bit. And I just took him for a big walk and we, we did a big interview. And he was just like, yeah, people got real mad at the tin cap because it's not historically accurate.
1:09:26 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:09:27 Speaker 03 And I was like, it's a cartoon, like the apple also has a face on it. Is anyone mad like, like it's, you're a farm league team, like you're having some fun. And he was like, you're writing a book about Johnny Appleseed. You'll see. And, and he was like, he was all these armchair historians, like just really, he was like, I thought we were making a team for like the local area and community. And just for the record, they sell the most merchandise of any farm league team. They've won the division, like they're really good. It's right downtown. If you, the tickets are inexpensive. If you ever in Fort Wayne, go to a Fort Wayne tin caps game. It's so, so fun. That said, he genuinely was like, we became a national story. Like people were calling into CNN being like,
1:10:08 Speaker 03 there weren't handles on tin cap at that, this is historically inaccurate. And like, this is all the, and they got dragged. They got dragged. Yeah. People feel so, like this is, I mean, it's Daniel Boone, like, right? People find their little slice of American history and they feel so impassioned about it. And I think that's a good thing in the end. But like eventually you do run into like, hey, guys, it's okay. It's just a, it's just a baseball team. You can calm down.
1:10:32 Steven Rinella? Uh, here's what I want to do next.
1:10:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:10:35 Steven Rinella? How does he die?
1:10:37 Speaker 03 Great question.
1:10:38 Steven Rinella? Like bad?
1:10:39 Speaker 03 No, no. War of eighteen twelve happens. He becomes the Paul Revere of the war of eighteen twelve. He becomes the Paul Revere of what at the time was the West. And again, it's so easy to forget that Ohio used to be as far as, as we were when it came to that kind of American destiny that like march west.
1:11:01 Speaker 03 Eventually, and I love this fact about him. When he enters Ohio, it is so unpopulated by white colonists. His life and the population of white settlers is like a never ending graph. Like, like the, the years that he was there is just, um, what's the word I'm looking for in math? Exponential. It's an exponential graph of how many settlers move into that land of milk and honey. So he's one of the earliest, not earliest people, you know, there, there were some, some, some land purveyors and stuff, surveyors and stuff, but he is definitely one of the earliest settlers to really make Ohio his home. And by the time he's hitting his 40s and 50s, it's gotten, in his mind,
1:11:46 Speaker 03 overpopulated by white people. And so he keeps pushing west. Now, again, this gets back to almost your wife's view of him as a perfect capitalist, which again, this, some people view him as a religious person, some people view him as almost our first American saint. Some people view him as the first pacifist hippie. Some people view him as just like a really shrewd, albeit eccentric businessman. Yeah. And so there's something he said for, well, these people all have orchards. And all I do is I know how to get free apple seeds, so I have to keep moving west. Yeah. To keep up with my market. So he moves westward as things expand into Indiana.
1:12:29 Speaker 03 Now, my thing, which is not true, this is me just adding to the legends. This, this is the part of me that's my father. I like to think of, he's trying to relive his glory days. Got it. He's trying to recap, you know, he's got, he. The old magic. Yeah, man, they don't, they don't talk about me in Ohio the way that they used to. I need to get back.
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1:14:23 Speaker 03 He makes his way to Indiana. Indiana starts as a fort settlement.
1:14:28 Speaker 03 This is where, I'm sorry I ever get his name, but there's this incredible character that I discover and I write about briefly in the book, which is this guy who was basically, he had red hair and he was born of settlers. Then Native Americans captured him and took him as a child. He was raised by Native Americans. He fought on the side of the Native Americans during, again, something we've touched on but haven't given nearly enough. Like, when you're taught in education in elementary school and public school, it's like Revolutionary War, westward expansion, Civil War, ugh, complex. Anyways, moving on, World War I. Sorry about some of that slavery stuff. Moving on, but we win, World War II, huzzah!
1:15:07 Speaker 03 And then it kind of, we gloss over so much of the brutality and fighting that happened to win basically the middle of the country. We kind of jump straight to that kind of wild, wild west. This character, his name, I'm sorry that I cannot remember it, but it translates to carrot top. I'm not joking.
1:15:28 Steven Rinella? Really?
1:15:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:15:29 Steven Rinella? That's where that came from.
1:15:29 Speaker 03 It's not where it comes from at all, but he had red hair. He fought on the side of the Native Americans. He eventually then gets won over back by the US government. He becomes a spy. He comes back and fights for the union, basically, the federal. Then marries and moves back. He basically is a spy. He's a, again, just like Daniel McQuaid, somebody should write a book about this guy. I will look up his name, we can put it up later. Anyways. John Chapman is moving into Indiana, into Fort Wayne during that time.
1:16:04 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:16:05 Speaker 03 And he's redoing orchards, but he's in his 60s. He lives into his mid 70s, which is really good for that time period, especially sleeping outside that much. But it's this walking. But he dies on the floor. They're not strangers. This is, this is part of, you know, yes, he slept on a lot of strangers' floors, but because he walked in these seasonal circles.
1:16:26 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:16:26 Speaker 03 He eventually, strangers became friends. There's a story of somebody building him a room off their house just for him.
1:16:37 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:16:37 Speaker 03 Right? Just, they construct an extra room just for him, so he's not sleeping in the barn or outside. But they do not build a door that goes from that room to inside their house.
1:16:49 Steven Rinella? Huh.
1:16:50 Speaker 03 Because he is covered in, and this is a direct quote, wee beasties. Because at this point in his life, he has been living outside so long, he is accumulating bugs.
1:17:01 Steven Rinella? Got it, wow.
1:17:02 Speaker 03 He is somebody you do not.
1:17:03 Steven Rinella? He's all full of fleas.
1:17:04 Speaker 03 He smells pretty bad and you probably don't want him in your house. So they like basically build him a glorified human dog house that is attached to the house.
1:17:16 Steven Rinella? But that's not what he dies in, does it?
1:17:17 Speaker 03 But does not have a door, no.
1:17:18 Steven Rinella? Oh, okay.
1:17:19 Speaker 03 I'm sorry, in, outside of Fort Wayne.
1:17:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah, doghouse, man, yeah.
1:17:22 Speaker 03 He dies on the floor of a family's home. They write a beautiful piece of writing about, they say that he looked excited to pass to the other side. Which he'd spent his whole life proselytizing. He gave a great sermon before he died, warm by their hearth. And they say that he walked 15 miles earlier that day.
1:17:45 Steven Rinella? Really?
1:17:45 Speaker 03 So he went out exactly how he wanted to go out.
1:17:50 Steven Rinella? And they but and they recognized him as a person of notoriety.
1:17:53 Speaker 03 A hundred percent. At that point, again, that war of eighteen twelve thing kind of pushed him over. Where like he became a known entity in the areas. But again, it's not until twenty years later. So he dies in his seventies. But it's the eighteen hundreds when we are really trying to figure out how to coalesce as a country. We are looking for stories that talk about our best ambitions. Again, as we kind of move west and as there is this brutality. And for Harper's Bazaar, a man writes an article that's like thirty pages. All about this incredibly sweet, incredibly Christian, incredibly loving, beloved.
1:18:36 Speaker 03 Guy who was just out there planting apples out of the goodness of his heart. So that people had things to survive off of as they moved westward. And that in like the eighteen, especially we're talking about civil wars happening. So we are trying to say, no, no, no, no, no, we're not just this brutal, terrible country. That's mad at each other, fighting over these really terrible issues. No, there's there's a goodness to us too. And that article is the is the beginning of the basis of what becomes John Chapman, the man. Transitioning to Johnny Appleseed.
1:19:07 Steven Rinella? Who coined, what's the first, what's the first time you see Johnny Appleseed?
1:19:12 Speaker 03 In print, it is almost certainly that. But some people did call him that even at the time. That was like a nickname, John Appleseed. Because again, he would just go to cideries. And the cideries, they didn't give the like they, it was, it was, it was.
1:19:27 Steven Rinella? So it came about naturally, it wasn't coined by a writer.
1:19:29 Speaker 03 No, no, no, yeah, we can't give it to like one specific guy. Is that, does that work with a fact check?
1:19:34 Steven Rinella? Well, I was gonna.
1:19:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, they were calling them that at the time, it seems. Um, but like, I, I, I just clearing up a number I said earlier. The donation tract, it was 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees. Those were the requirements.
1:19:48 Steven Rinella? He said 150.
1:19:49 Speaker 05 Yes, so I was, I was, had doubled them. Um, but like, if the marketing had been different around him, he could have been Johnny Peach Pit. Or Johnny, Johnny Fennel Seed.
1:19:58 Steven Rinella? Peach Pit.
1:19:59 Speaker 05 Like, talk, talk about some of the other stuff he was planting.
1:20:01 Speaker 03 Thank you so much for bringing that up. Oh, my gosh, I spaced on one of the things I most wanted to talk about. So it's alcohol. It's all alcohol, right? We talked about that earlier. It's all for booze.
1:20:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:20:11 Speaker 03 So why does that get forgotten? Well, you could easily make the argument of, well, we're trying to teach it to elementary school. And unlike the time, we don't booze up children anymore the way that we used to.
1:20:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:20:23 Speaker 03 Um, but it's not. It's prohibition. So apples were seen as grapes. They were an alcohol-making fruit. Back then, it wasn't, oh, it's for.
1:20:35 Steven Rinella? That's interesting, man, that that would have been, you'd have viewed it that way.
1:20:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, you would not. It was not.
1:20:41 Steven Rinella? You'd have been like, oh, you guys are making a little bevy.
1:20:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:20:43 Steven Rinella? You wouldn't have thought, you guys are making some pies.
1:20:45 Speaker 03 Right, exactly. It was not, apples were not for, they was, that was their main thing. And people were eating them on the sides. That was like the side thing. Then prohibition happens. Um, Grandma Hatchet, she's making the great fight against booze across the country. You know, um, um, T-tollers are coming out of the woodwork. And part of their war is a war on booze. And part of their war is a war on bars. And part of their war is a war on apples.
1:21:15 Speaker 05 Good.
1:21:15 Speaker 03 And it becomes clear, like, we have records of federal agencies coming to be, like, your uncle has an apple tree in his backyard. He's probably using it to make some kind of homebrew.
1:21:27 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
1:21:27 Speaker 03 And so agents are literally cutting apple trees down. And so prohibition happens. Then the 21st Amendment, God bless, happens. We're back, baby. Booze is a part of America. But we all, I think, to be honest, I always look at prohibition as like, just like a, a drying out period where everybody kind of got to get their legs back.
1:21:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:21:47 Speaker 03 And then they could kind of move forward from there. All right, like, maybe we shouldn't be doing it all the time. Um, and genuinely, the apple industry needs new PR.
1:21:57 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:21:58 Speaker 03 And that is when an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Oh, no kidding, really? I swear to God, that is when we come to think of apples as a healthy treat. And what's nice is they actually are. They actually are healthy. But for a very long time, they, just the way that the grape is linked to wine, apple was linked to cider. And that was their main true calling. And now what's interesting is only with modern breweries. Like, like, the other thing prohibition killed was small batch alcohol making. Then these giant conglomerations moved in, took over the booze business. And for many, many decades, you only, you know, you'd have your five beers that you could choose at any bar.
1:22:43 Speaker 03 Only recently have people become reinvigorated in remaking their own booze or remaking small batch booze to serve local communities. Which I love, like, that's, America at its best is when it's the most diverse. And so cider making is also coming back in a real way. And I love seeing that. So cider making is on the rise. Um, Riverhead Cider House, I live on Long Island and there's a cidery right by where I live. And that's where I wrote a lot of this book. And they have just had tremendous success bringing back kind of old school styles of making cider. And, and selling it to the local community with no dreams of going national, no dreams of becoming the next, you know, just like, this is something that serves these towns here.
1:23:25 Speaker 03 This is a place to gather like a church, like a baseball stadium. Uh, you know, that's what a bar is. It's a public house. It's a place, I think, you know, you guys care about conserving land. And it's something that's so important to me, too. Like in this book, I'm in so many state parks, national parks. But there's also this, this need to, to, to protect places where humans can just come together and gather. And places like the Riverhead Cider House do that, which I really love.
1:23:55 Steven Rinella? I won, I was never able to replicate this.
1:23:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:23:58 Steven Rinella? But I one time made the perfect batch of hard cider on accident.
1:24:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:24:02 Steven Rinella? We were out hunting in the winter.
1:24:04 Speaker 03 Oh, my gosh.
1:24:04 Steven Rinella? And we found all these frozen apples under an apple tree. It was on a farm owned by a man named Alan Zerlot. And he had his orchard apples, then he had these stray apple trees out and about that he didn't harvest. And I always thought those were the better apples. He has all these frozen apples. We put them in one of his wooden crates, a wooden apple crate. I took them home and put it in there frozen solid. I put them in the basement in a five gallon bucket. Okay.
1:24:34 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
1:24:35 Steven Rinella? And I don't know what they had already fermented, or I don't remember, but like, all of a sudden, it was just that you could like dip into that and drink it and it was booze, dude. It was good. And we later tried, you know, whatever I did, it never like, it just never happened again. Do you know what I mean? It never happened again, but it just made this perfect. It just somehow these apples thawed and in my mom and dad's basement like made a hard cider.
1:25:03 Speaker 03 So what you, what you just experienced.
1:25:05 Steven Rinella? And never again, like you could, I could go get apples again that are frozen and throw them in my mom and dad's basement. It would just make rotten apples.
1:25:11 Speaker 03 But, but we have, but we have evidence of animals doing this. What you are talking about, um, there are some monkeys that do it in certain places. We have evidence of deer sometimes knowing during wet seasons to return to air. Like, I think a lot of animals enjoy.
1:25:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:25:30 Speaker 03 Getting a little tipsy and you as like a human being, a full grown, you got.
1:25:38 Steven Rinella? I was a high schooler, but yeah.
1:25:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, all right, all right, sorry. Maybe not fully grown. That's like 26 is when the brain is fully developed. But you got to experience basically grabbing this thing, having it go bad, but going so bad that it went good.
1:25:53 Steven Rinella? My old man, I don't know if this is the right word, my old man called it applejack.
1:25:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's exactly, yes. So apple cider is the like sipping all day stuff. But then you can make this harder apple brandy, which was very popular at the time. And that's what you call it, applejack. That's right.
1:26:07 Steven Rinella? Here's my last question.
1:26:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:26:08 Steven Rinella? You, and I think that this is true of you because some things you've said.
1:26:12 Speaker 03 Okay.
1:26:14 Steven Rinella? This is, this is a thing I harp on all the time.
1:26:18 Steven Rinella? About American culture. The narrative, if you imagine your online life, your online life, the online narrative is about that America is divided. That partisan fractures, right? We're leading to some great civil war. Okay. And I know, and I understand, like, my online life is like, I got it. It's as true as true. The country is splitting apart at the seams. But my lived life,
1:26:52 Steven Rinella? my lived life, I don't get it.
1:26:55 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
1:26:56 Steven Rinella? I don't see it.
1:26:56 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
1:26:57 Steven Rinella? The people, my neighbors. And I've said this before.
1:27:03 Steven Rinella? My most immediate neighbors, I do not know what their political leanings are. I honestly don't know what their political leanings are. I know that if my home was on fire, they would rush in to check if my family is okay, and I know I would rush into their home.
1:27:21 Speaker 03 Amen.
1:27:22 Steven Rinella? I do not know their political leanings.
1:27:23 Speaker 03 Amen.
1:27:24 Steven Rinella? I don't even care, like, I don't need to know their political leanings.
1:27:27 Speaker 03 I'll do you one better. I know my neighbors' political leanings. They are not mine.
1:27:32 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:27:33 Speaker 03 And I know that my blizzard, a blizzard, I'm sorry, I know that a blizzard came while I was out of town, and they were the first people over there using their plow to plow out the driveway with a snow blower, making sure that my wife was safe.
1:27:48 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:27:49 Speaker 03 And I know that if their house was ever in any kind of situation, anytime I'm able to help them, those are your neighbors.
1:27:55 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:27:56 Speaker 03 That is the point of community. That is the point of trust.
1:27:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah, you've said a couple of things about your wanderings, your rant, your American ramblings.
1:28:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:28:05 Steven Rinella? That, um, just, I don't know, you seem to express a sort of optimism about America.
1:28:10 Speaker 03 A hundred percent. I have walked outside and I've seen this country at an eye level. People are good, for the most part. Don't get me wrong, you're gonna meet jerks everywhere. The hospitality, the kindness, the...
1:28:27 Speaker 03 One of my favorite things, the curiosity about one another is really strong. I love going to new places. I love meeting new people. And in no way do we start the way that they would start you on whatever Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. Oh, so what do you think? Nobody, you don't sit down and you're on, ask, what do you think about proposition one A? Like, no, man. Maybe baseball, maybe basket, like, maybe sports, maybe we can have some fun. No, you walk into a place and you have a meeting with another fellow human being. And if I can say honestly, we've talked so much about the history because I know that's what's of interest. Talked about westward expansion because I know that's what's of interest.
1:29:12 Speaker 03 But the core of this book is it is a non-political look at where this country is right now. And what I saw, don't, you know, Ron Chernow is going to be able to write the great biography of John Chapman. That's like 7,000 pages long or Howard Means is this great writer. He came out with a book about John Chapman in 2011 from Simon and Schuster. It's a great straightforward biography. What I did was slept in a parking lot that's probably near where John Chapman used to sleep in the woods. That's what I did. Yeah. And I got to meet so many individuals in this country. This country is not on the verge of civil war.
1:29:52 Speaker 03 This country is not this divided partisan place that you see when you look at your screen. Don't get wrong, phone's nice for a map. I can't be totally anti-screen. The phone is nice for taking photos or recording a voice memo. But the more time I spend off of social media, the more time I spend listening to podcasts of people that I enjoy instead of just staring at this. Large media that I believe is genuinely invested in making sure that we feel scared, isolated, alone, and angry at each other, the better I feel. And the tough thing for me is there is, there is family history in this book as well. There is things that
1:30:37 Speaker 03 my family have grappled with in the last couple of years, and I have seen firsthand what happens when you give in to isolation, when you give in to loneliness. You cannot be scared of your fellow neighbors.
1:30:49 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:30:50 Speaker 03 I understand that we are human beings and we have the potential to do harm. History is long and bloody. But at the same time, there are so many stories of coming together, figuring out problems, working with one another to make a safe haven for all of us. And I think this country, we are approaching 250 years. This country is an experiment. Is it perfect? No. Have we done some atrocious things? Absolutely. But when you look at our ideals, when you look at the better of our angels, when you look at the things that we are reaching for, when you look at the way this country comes together and still
1:31:33 Speaker 03 works 250 years later, covering vast, but Montana could be its own country. Texas could be its own country. New England, put all those nerds in their own country. Like that, it could be that way. But we are one country and it works. And I think that is a beautiful thing. And when I walked out into the world, I want to be very clear. My father said to me, you're gonna get shot. I did not walk. Everybody's dad says that, right? You're gonna get shot. And not to mention.
1:32:04 Steven Rinella? Like, if you go doing what you do.
1:32:05 Speaker 03 We didn't even get into the lack of preparedness. I'm almost horrified to be on this podcast. I want to be clear. I've learned more. I know how tents work. I've gotten a little bit better at it. I want to learn more, if I'm being honest. Like, hunting is something that I'm trying to get more interested in. I think that that's a really incredible part of the human experience. But real quick, my dad was like, you're gonna get shot. I walked out into the country with no preconceived notions. That was an important part of this project. And what I found was so much more.
1:32:37 Speaker 03 Life-affirming, heart-filling, soul-booing than I expected. And I'm so happy I did it. And I hope that people feel that when they read this book. Because this is a book of coming together. It's a book about walking away from loneliness and towards community.
1:32:56 Steven Rinella? You got any more you wanna ask, Mo?
1:32:57 Speaker 05 Did you go to Nova, Ohio?
1:32:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, man.
1:33:00 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:33:00 Speaker 03 Did I see the la- oh, here we go. We're gonna get the real fact check?
1:33:02 Speaker 05 Tell Steve.
1:33:03 Speaker 03 Okay, so Patty Smith, the Allegra Farm. This is what we're talking about.
1:33:07 Steven Rinella? Patty Smith, the musician?
1:33:08 Speaker 03 No, no, no. Oh, my gosh, that'd be cool. Wait, hang on, it's not Patty Smith. Sorry, let me try that again.
1:33:15 Speaker 03 A woman named Patty, on the Allegra Farm in Nova, Ohio. There's a claim that it is the last apple tree planted by John Chapman, and it still bears fruit. And I go and I talk to Patty. There is some interesting science.
1:33:31 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:33:32 Speaker 03 It is exceptionally rich soil.
1:33:35 Speaker 03 People have taken seeds from this tree, and they have brought them to space. That is true. In the 90s, this tree was so popular that people used to show up in buses, Field of Dreams style.
1:33:48 Speaker 05 Wow.
1:33:48 Speaker 03 Just to take photos with it.
1:33:50 Steven Rinella? In the 1990s.
1:33:51 Speaker 03 In the 1990s. Then kinda the farm kinda went through some different iterations. Patty, I think, is kinda bringing it back. I showed up, I'm not joking, you wanna talk about a wonderful moment in America? I didn't call ahead, I didn't write an email. I just rolled up, knocked on the door, immediately was apologetic. I was like, I'm so sorry, I can come back later. Let me leave my number. This is weird. And she was like, stop being weird, man. And just was like, come on in. You want iced tea, lemonade, or water? And she just sat, and she just talked with me. And so the story she had about not just the tree, she also had stories about that, um, that town was a stop on the Underground Railroad, on the Underground Railroad. She had stories about her great-great-grandparents and-
1:34:34 Speaker 03 Basically trying to help slaves get up into Canada. She had stories about the ways she used to take the apples and go. She always wanted horses, but they only had sheep and cows on the farm. So she'd go to the cows and pretend they were horses when she was a child. All these wonderful, like, again, this, this book is also very much about what's legend? What's fact?
1:34:52 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:34:53 Speaker 03 And at the end of the day, how much does it really matter? But it is also a rainbow tree, which some people take a little umbrage with. Could that possibly be a tree that John Chapman planted? He himself did come to that area. That's documented because there was a Swedenborgian minister who lived in that area.
1:35:12 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:35:12 Speaker 03 So he would come through in commune. So he definitely visited that farm.
1:35:16 Speaker 05 Do you think he planted that tree?
1:35:18 Speaker 03 Me?
1:35:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:35:20 Speaker 03 I have to believe.
1:35:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's fun.
1:35:22 Speaker 03 I have to believe. I will, I will say in the book, I hedge it more.
1:35:26 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:35:26 Speaker 03 In the book, I hedge it more. But you to me, the person that I am.
1:35:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:35:31 Speaker 03 Half my father, half my mother.
1:35:33 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:35:33 Speaker 03 I go with my father on that one. I love the idea. There's a, there's, so there's three trees there now, but one of them very, very old. And basically the idea is that like the roots almost died and then regrew.
1:35:45 Speaker 05 Got it.
1:35:46 Speaker 03 There you go. You can, I get into the science of it in the book. You can, you can make up your own mind.
1:35:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's, it's like not uncommon. If you had a plum tree and it failed in year five, if you leave it for a season or two, something else may start growing there. And it could, it could even be a fruit that's not a plum anymore. So that like, could happen, what, what you're saying.
1:36:07 Speaker 03 It could.
1:36:07 Speaker 05 And there's now multiple online sellers who will sell you a tree that they say came from the Johnny Appleseed tree. There's, there's a couple of different places and I see my.
1:36:17 Speaker 03 Did you buy one?
1:36:18 Speaker 05 I see my orchard going through phases. Like I have a 2027 plan, a 2028 plan. Next year, I want to put a Johnny Appleseed tree in the ground. But I, I want someone to tell me that's a good idea and be like, yes, that's a Johnny Appleseed tree.
1:36:30 Speaker 03 Let me, let me do it for you right now. Cause I will say this, I do, I talked to Patty about the person that's licensed the right to sell the seeds. And that to me almost felt a little bit like, I was like, this is going to be like a succession style story. And I decided, I was like, I already got a lot going on in this book. So I decided not to chase that one down. Remember I mentioned the football or sorry, remember I mentioned the baseball team?
1:36:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:36:52 Speaker 03 So they have a tree in front of the stadium, which they won't cut because it's a Johnny Appleseed tree. So it's actually kind of blocking sign. It grew bigger than they expected. And I'm pretty sure it's from that patty tree and this guy who's kind of licensed it and done it. But I will do you one better is what I'm trying to say.
1:37:10 Speaker 05 Please.
1:37:11 Speaker 03 I have these apples.
1:37:12 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:37:13 Speaker 03 I will come back to Montana. I'm not joking. This is the kind of dumb stuff I do. I will come back to Montana. I will give you the seeds.
1:37:20 Speaker 05 Please.
1:37:20 Speaker 03 And you don't have to figure out whether real or not, you can plant the legendary.
1:37:26 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:37:26 Speaker 03 Johnny Appleseed tree on your property.
1:37:28 Speaker 05 I would love it.
1:37:29 Speaker 03 Let's do it.
1:37:30 Steven Rinella? That's so centric right there. That's a future, that's a future old.
1:37:34 Speaker 03 Don't stick needles in your feet when you're in your.
1:37:37 Speaker 05 The property value is going to go way up once I've got a Johnny Appleseed tree there.
1:37:42 Steven Rinella? That's great, man. All right, everybody, the, the name of the book, American Rambler, Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald. It's brand spanking new.
1:37:54 Speaker 03 It's brand spanking new. It's out May 12th, New York Times bestseller. A lot of nice people have said a lot of nice things about it.
1:38:00 Steven Rinella? Man, you got a boatload. I don't think you get into that. You got a boatload of great writers saying great things about the book. Check it out.
1:38:06 Speaker 03 I hope it's because they like it.
1:38:08 Steven Rinella? Thank you very much, man.
1:38:10 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me on, gentlemen. I really appreciate you.
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Previous Ep. 885: Game On, Suckers! MeatEater Trivia CCXIX Next Ep. 887: The Lizards Went Down to Georgia, Securing Hunting Rights in Colorado, and Big Ol' Lake Trout Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated