Johnny Appleseed: A Long Walk into Indian Territory A Novel

By Norbert Aubrey

John Chapman walks from Massachusetts to western Pennsylvania and Ohio and into American folklore as the renown Johnny Appleseed. Rather than tossing apple seeds hither and thus as many have learned in the children's tale, this true story is far more complex and interesting and continues the story of the author's The Warrior series of the Americ

• Language: English
• Publisher: Norbert Aubrey
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781734843095

Book preview

1

Bullies

John was cutting through Forest Park near his home in Longmeadow, Massachusetts with a broken carriage wheel strapped to his back when he stopped to rest under a big chestnut tree. It was hot and muggy, with not a whisper of wind. The wheel was heavy, plus he hadn’t slept well the night before. He brushed aside the twigs with his boot and sat down leaning against the trunk, leaving the wheel still tied to his back. The shade of the tree and the ground underneath were cool.

He was troubled, and on the walk home had been thinking about what he should do. The Bible was the only place he knew to look for answers. He pulled from his pocket his Bible and turned to Luke where he had been reading.

He read a few lines, but his eye lids were heavy and he closed them. He wanted to do something with his life but here he was, still working for his father. Today, he was running this errand for him. He had no money of his own and his family hadn’t the means for higher education. He didn’t want to be a wheel-wright like his father. His school chums were off doing exciting things. One had signed on with a clipper headed for England. Another hopped aboard a whaler out of Boston. One pal had gotten a job as a school-teacher in Philadelphia. Another was practicing law. Many had gotten married. They were all doing something, but he felt he was doing nothing.

He was caught in a maze and he couldn’t find his way out. What should he do? His father expected him to keep working for him, but he didn’t want to. It ate at him and he thought about it all the time but there were either no choices, or too many. He couldn’t even make up his mind about that. He was hoping to find the answer in his Bible. He was smart enough to know that it was a good guide, but he had to make his own decision. His hand fell to the ground still holding the Bible as his breathing slowed and deepened. He drifted off into a dream. The Pharisee was dressed in fine clothes with a prayer shawl wrapped over his head and he was asking nearly the same question John had been agonizing over. When will the Kingdom of God come?

He was awoken by a noise and opened his eyes to see three sets of Hessian boots. He glanced up. Lefty Jones and two of his friends, Ace Carter and Jim Bold stood there smirking at him. Those three ruffians had picked on him all the way through school.

Look who we have here, Lefty, said Ace. It’s little John Chapman.

He’s his Daddy’s mule, said Lefty.

More like his Daddy’s chicken. Buc, buc, buc. Jim clucked.

Hey John, what’re you reading? Lefty snatched the Bible out of John’s hand.

John struggled up clumsily, with the wheel weighing him down. That’s mine. Give it back, he demanded, reaching out for it.

Lefty held it out of reach. What are you going to do about it? Tell your Mommy?

Gonna pray for us, Bible thumper? Jim Bold quipped, and they all laughed.

Lead us in a little prayer, Johnny, Lefty said, opening up the Bible.

John reached for it. From behind, he was shoved and he lost his balance and fell into Lefty.

Here! Lefty said. Lefty pushed the book into John’s chest and John went flying back into the tree and fell to the ground. One of his ribs hit the wheel hub.

Ow! John screamed. Dang you! Leave me alone! He started to cry as he held his rib.

Ace picked up the book.

Look at the little crybaby, said Lefty.

Please! John pleaded, between sobs. I didn’t do anything to you. Leave me alone.

Here, let me help you. Jim held out one hand like he was offering to help John up. When John reached up, Jim slapped John across the face with his other hand.

Ow!

Going to turn the other cheek, Christian? Ace started tearing out pages and tossing them in the air.

John struggled to his feet and took off running, with the heavy wagon wheel bouncing.

Run on home to your Mommy, Lefty yelled and the three, rather than follow, just laughed. Ace threw the book into the air and Lefty kicked it as it fell

2

Nate

John ran all the way home. His father, Nate, was in his workshop. John was huffing and puffing and out of breath when he entered his father’s workshop. His face was red and the salty tears had dried on his face.

Nate looked up from a sleigh runner he was planing smooth. What happened to you?

I was . . . I was . . . I was just minding my . . . minding my own . . . minding my own business. Lefty and Ace and Jim Bold . . . they . . . they. . . they tore up my Bible. They pushed me. I fell on my rib. Ace slapped me in the face. Wanted me to turn the other cheek.

Oh, for Christ’s sake! I’ve got work to do. Nate went back to planing the runner, blowing as he went. He started coughing, and pulled out a rag from his pocket and spit into it.

Are you alright? John asked.

Aw, it’s nothing. God-damn dust. He looked back up at John. Just put that wheel over there, he pointed to the cluttered bench. Get yourself some water and take a break. Then I need a cord of wood cut for Roy Stockton, you hear me?

Yes sir.

And John, he said, looking up again and shaking his head. You need to grow up. Jesus Christ! Stand up for yourself. You’re 21 years old, for God’s sakes. Quit being such a God-damn baby.

3

Childhood

This was not an isolated incident. John had been picked on much of his life.

Trouble had been brewing for John from the time he was born. Three weeks before his birth, war broke out and Nate had volunteered.

Nate was good with tools and his skills at carpentry were needed to make and repair wheels for cannon carts. Earlier, wheels had been needed to cart purloined cannons to the top of Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill and Nate, along with the other carpenters and wheelwrights, had been kept busy. General George Washington then ordered the cannons pointed down onto British controlled Boston.

His Majesty’s forces had no choice but to evacuate Boston. Nate requested a leave of absence to return home. Leave was denied.

On John’s first birthday, Nate returned home gaunt and sickly, but as soon as he was well, he was off again to join up with a Continental Company of Carpenters in New York.

Nate barely knew his son John. When he heard from his wife, Elizabeth, that she was doing poorly, Nate again requested leave. Again, it was denied. Soon after Elizabeth had given birth to their third child, both she and the baby died.

John was a toddler, not yet two years old. He and his five-year-old sister Elizabeth were taken to live with their grandparents.

A year later, Nate Chapman, now a Captain of Wheelwrights, was assigned closer to home, to Springfield, just north of Longmeadow, as an officer on the staff of the newly established Armory. Elizabeth was thrilled to see her daddy, to laugh and play with him, but to John he was a stranger. Nate came to visit on weekends and often brought an apple or a toy he’d carved. The weekend visits lasted for years. When John was almost six years old, Nate took the children to live with him and his new wife, the former Lucy Cooley.

Sister Elizabeth held John’s hand and wiped away his tears when they left the loving home of their maternal grandparents - the only parents John had ever really known. The two children were loaded up into a wagon and moved into a small house with their father and stepmother, Lucy.

Not long after, Captain Chapman was home for good, dismissed from the Continental service after General Washington ordered a house-cleaning at the Springfield Armory. Nate’s service was altogether unnecessary in the present circumstances, the letter from Congress informed him. The war had shifted from New England to the southern states and the War Board had determined that the Armory in the north was a waste of precious funds. It fired the top two officers for mismanagement and negligence, and two weeks later Nate Chapman, too, was dismissed.

After spending years around other men rather than children, Nate was baffled by his son’s behavior when he was growing up. He tried to develop a bond with the boy, but he couldn’t ever get through to him, no matter what he did. The boy seemed to be starved for love. His grades were good. His school-master declared him one of his best students. But he was in constant trouble. Bullies were attracted to him. He wouldn’t stand up for himself. Crying was his defense. He was a sissy, and an embarrassment to Nate. He hung out with the wrong people, other misfits. Nate knew there was a problem, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t break through a barrier the child had built around himself.

Nate felt guilty about not being there for his two children during the war. He’d lost his own parents when he was a boy. His mother had died of smallpox when he was six, his father when he was 14, leaving him an orphan. He had no idea how to be a father to John. He tried his best.

The only way he could have been there for his son when his wife died in child-birth was to desert the Continental army. He despised those who did that, those who weren’t true patriots. The war had been tough on everybody. Farms had failed without the men around. Wives and children went without food while the bread-winner was off defending their lives and freedom. No one had thought that the war would keep going on and on. And, even if he could have gone home, he hadn’t had it in him. He couldn’t raise two children by himself. They were better off being raised by his in-laws. They’d do a better job of it. After losing his wife, he’d thrown himself into his work. It took an act of Congress for him to go home.

4

Confusion

Nate took in cash work to earn a living, doing what he’d been doing for years in the army. Until John was a teenager, Nate had told him to stand back, stay out of the way, or he’d get hurt. John was observant and learned quickly. He watched everything Nate did. He grasped what tools were good for what jobs, and he saw that tools always needed to be oiled and sharpened. He watched every move his father made.

As he got older, Nate gave his son more difficult jobs to do. Simple ones at first. There wasn’t anybody else to do the work he’d agreed to do, and more and more Nate depended upon his first-born son. John was the only child he had who was old enough to do much of the man’s work on their small farm. John plowed the fields. John cut the firewood to keep the little farm house warm in the winter. John planted and harvested the crop and took it into town to sell. As he got older, his father had started showing John how to do some of his skilled work.

Nate expected his son to follow in his foot-steps. He was a talented craftsman and he was sure that the knowledge he could teach his son would be useful to him someday. But he was a reserved man, and never talked about it.

The trouble was, John didn’t really like wood-working. Having to pay so much attention to detail wasn’t something John liked. He preferred to think big thoughts, like what the meaning of life was and what his purpose was, not the fine art of making a carriage wheel or the angle of the curved runners for a winter sleigh.

John had never trusted his father. He had heard rumors about Nate being a coward in the war and he believed it. He tried to love his father. He wanted to. That’s what he was supposed to do. And he wanted his father to love him, too, but if Nate loved him, he hid it well. To John, his father sure didn’t act like he loved him. He didn’t feel loved. He felt used.

As John was growing up, he saw the relationship other boys had with their fathers and he envied their bond, and he heard the whispering about Nate’s cowardice, too. He wanted a father to hug him and encourage him and love him; someone he could be proud of, like his Gramps, but instead there was this interloper, this disgraced former army officer that people talked about behind his back. His father worked all the time. and made John work. And his stepmother wasn’t warm and caring like his grandmother. She was always busy having babies, taking care of babies, and doing the endless chores on a small farm.

John craved his father’s attention, his approval, but rarely got it. He was sure his father was a coward. Why else would he get kicked out of the army? The kids at school had made fun of him, calling John a sissy just like his father. He was sure that was why Nate never talked about the war. Why would a coward, John reasoned, talk about his disgrace?

John tried to dismiss the taunting of the others, but it ate at him. And to make it worse, Nate was always too busy for him. And Lucy always had little ones that demanded her attention. John was left pretty much to himself. He felt alone in the world, and except for his older sister Elizabeth, who was always busy churning butter, making clothes, cooking meals, he was alone most of the time. The women were in the house. Nate was in his workshop. And John did the farming. There was much work to be done, and around the little farm, with lots of mouths to feed, there were chores without end.

Nate would have been surprised to learn that John was always trying to win his approval. He treated John in the same way he had treated his soldiers, by pointing out their shortcomings and giving them a little extra time off when they’d done a good job. He thought he was being a good father. Nate wasn’t a physically expressive man. He used praise sparingly the way he’d learned was effective in the army. From his years of supervising other army craftsmen, the best praise he could think to say was Good job! When he gave kudos of approval and recognition to John, the boy didn’t respond the way he expected.

But as a child, John seldom heard even those two words. As he got older, he did earn Nate’s respect, but even when he heard praise, he felt that whatever he had done really wasn’t as good as his father could do, and the praise rang hollow. So next time, he tried harder. Not because he liked to do a good job. He believed deep down that he would never be good enough. He would never measure up in his father’s eyes, but he couldn’t help himself from trying.

John spent his free time off by himself, either reading or hunting for frogs and turtles and snakes. That’s when he was happiest. He had few friends and since graduating from school he rarely saw anyone outside of work or church. The house was always full of crying babies and children running everywhere and he had no space for himself. John loved to read, and often had a book if he could borrow one from somebody, and occasionally chopped firewood for a book instead of cash. To John, that was a great deal.

Father and son exchanged words over accepting books for his work. The family needed money, not books. The way Nate saw it, his son could chop a cord of wood faster than he could and he should be bringing in badly needed money. John did his best to please his father in every way he could. But he wouldn’t give up reading. He needed to visit far-away places for fun and adventure, to get out of that crowded and noisy house. His only escape was through books.

John wanted to do something important, something meaningful. He didn’t want to be a farmer or a carpenter, or even a craftsman like Nate was. He didn’t know what he wanted to do or be, but he knew it wasn’t that. He admired his Gramps, a minister, but that took higher education and his family had no money for that extravagance. The Bible taught that he should obey his father. He tried, but his helplessness and frustration had been building for 15 years.

He felt that he was trapped with no way out. He was a young man, past the age when he should have left home and made a life for himself. But he had no idea what he should do, where he should go, what he wanted to do with his life. He was needed around the Chapman farm he was told, over and over. There were ten mouths to feed and another on the way. His father worked all the time and expected John to work, too, and eventually become a wheelwright like he was. John saw no point in it, no future in it. He was stuck.

John had been reading and studying the Bible every chance he got, believing it must have the answers he sought. Gramps had told him it had the answers to everything. Gramps had been a Congregational minister, one of the Calvinist churches of Massachusetts.

But, in spite of his conscientious studying, John couldn’t figure it out. He didn’t know what to do. He felt he had needs, but didn’t know what they were or how to go about filling them. His father needed him, he was told over and over, and the Bible had told him to respect and obey his father. It was like a puzzle that didn’t have all the pieces. He was confused. Jesus taught that He was the Way, and everyone he knew claimed they were Christians, but he didn’t see anyone acting like it. They didn’t turn the other cheek. They smacked the other guy. They didn’t love their enemies. They killed them. Growing up, he had seen the widows and orphans and limbless veterans of the war everywhere. Nothing made any sense.

Jesus taught love, but he didn’t see it. Everyone was out for himself. The rich got richer, the poor poorer. He loved the stories in the Bible, but couldn’t see their relevance to his own life.

5

Church

The night before Sabbath, Lucy cooked and packed a picnic dinner of chicken stew with cornbread. John readied the wagon so all he had to do was to hitch up the horse in the morning. Nathaniel carried in firewood to last the family until Monday. Abner got the food ready for the livestock. All the children helped feed the animals: extra hay for the cow and horse, the slop bucket for the pig, table scraps for the dog and a double scoop of dried corn for the chickens. The cats could fend for themselves. They did it ahead of time because no work was allowed on the holy day.

When all was prepared and ready to go, the children roasted apples and drank fresh cider while Lucy read aloud the Bible lesson for the week.

Nate rarely went to church, but Lucy usually did. But this Sunday, Lucy stayed home, too, to take care of Percis she said, although he wasn’t ill. John, being the oldest, loaded the rest of the family into the wagon for the ride to the meeting house. It would be an all-day affair. The first half of the service – the hymns, prayers and sermon would go on until dinner time. It promised to be a warm summer day so they could eat outside on the grass. After dinner, the second half of the service would again have the hymns, prayers and another sermon. They expected to be home by late afternoon.

They were all up at the regular time. Hands and faces were washed and everyone put on their best clothes, with Lucy looking them over and helping Elizabeth brush the hair on the younger children.

The town of Longmeadow was already crowded when they arrived. The church had no heat, so attendance was usually higher on warm days All parking places were taken near the meeting house, so John let out his sister Elizabeth with the children and found a place to park the wagon down by the tavern. The tavern was closed, as were all other businesses on the Sabbath, but there was a crowd of people standing around reading a flyer posted outside. John walked over and read it:

I’ve the ability

And the agility

To make you dance like nobility

With civility,

Dr. Jedediah Q. Goodbody, Esquire

Dancing and other recreations

7 cents weekly. Saturdays

Ladies:  3pm to 5 pm

Gentlemen: 5:30pm to 7:30pm

Andelynne Ross was a young woman two years younger than him who John had always admired from afar. She was reading the poster when she suddenly turned and said, Wouldn’t that be fun! Are you going, John?

John turned red. Gosh. I’d sure like to.

We could dance together. You and I could wake snakes! She laughed gaily. She smiled at him as she sashayed past.

John stood there dumbfounded, watching her two-step down the street. She was dressed, like he was, in her Sunday best and to John she looked dashing and worldly and beautiful!

John doubted his father would let him take lessons, but he made note of it anyway. Man alive! Wouldn’t that be a rip-roaring good time! And with Andelynne Ross! They couldn’t take lessons together – that wasn’t allowed - but if there was an actual dance, then they’d both know the same steps and they could dance together! Gosh! He could hardly contain his excitement.

Then he started thinking about what Nate would do. He was always challenging John to bring a girl home.  I’ll show you what to do with her! he would laugh, and squeeze Lucy’s buttocks. John would never, ever bring a girl home only to be embarrassed like that.

The small church bell began to clang and John dashed down the dirt street bordering the Green. He noticed the copper weather vane, a four-foot-high rooster with green eyes, was plopping back and forth from the east to the west. It would be another hot day without a whisper of wind.

The Chapman family pew was near the back of the church. Elizabeth made room next to her and John scooted in and his