RIGHT FRESH FROM HEAVEN

A lively biography of an elusive character who manages to sustain reader interest and teach us something about the early-19th-century American pull toward the West.

Journalist Means (The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation, 2006, etc.) finds the lack of hard evidence about the life of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) a liberating way to tell the story of early American migrations. Born in 1774 in Massachusetts, Chapman left home as a young man and headed steadily west, arming himself with apple seeds from cider presses and following waterways and Indian paths into virgin land that he would then clear and border with the seedlings. This constituted the marking of new settlements, and though Chapman speculated in land, he never stayed anywhere long enough to make a profit, but embraced a peripatetic, vegetarian life: “Chapman had the eye of a speculator, the heart of [a] philanthropist, the courage of a frontiersman, and the wandering instincts of a Bedouin nomad. His nature was almost self-canceling.” He was also a zealous evangelical, fond of sitting with an audience to spread the Gospel as shaped by Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Compulsively restless, Chapman kept moving, employing elaborate buying-leasing schemes and often paying in apple trees. Means estimates that during his life, Chapman (who died in 1845) purchased 1,200 acres of “often prime bottom land, plus an assortment of city, town, and village lots.” Why did he do it? Maybe it was to “find the exact seam between past and future, between encroaching civilization and resistant wilderness.” The author examines the making of the Appleseed myth—from the 1871 article by W.D. Haley in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine to Walt Disney’s 1948 cartoon classic Melody Time—as fodder for a country desperate for a model of, as Disney Story Department manager Hal Adelquist wrote, “brotherly love and unselfishness.”

A somewhat improbable study that Means infuses with all the sympathy and interest he holds for his subject.