[On September 26th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21st century!]
On two contrasting
contexts for the iconic folk figure.
Just over
11 years ago, I shared a
wonderful Guest Post from William Kerrigan, one of our foremost authorities
on Johnny Appleseed. (I also had the chance to return the favor and Guest Post on Kerrigan’s American
Orchard blog.) In lieu of my own first paragraph, I’d ask you to check out that
great post and then come on back for some more AppleseedStudying.
Welcome
back! There’s something really beautiful and inspiring about the legend of
Appleseed planting trees as he moved through his Revolutionary-era American
world, and iconic science fiction author Ray
Bradbury must have felt the same, as he dedicated a chapter of his novel The
Martian Chronicles (1950) to a character and story entirely inspired by
Appleseed. In that chapter, “The
Green Morning,” Bradbury creates the character Benjamin Driscoll, who makes
it his mission to plant trees on the barren landscapes of Mars (and achieves
results far beyond his expectations). In a book largely defined by at best
ironic and at worst (and the majority of the time) horrifying
stories, “The Green Morning” doubly stands out as a depiction of how an individual
can influence his world for the better, and thus clearly reflects Bradbury’s
perception of Appleseed having done the same.
Many of
those horrifying Martian Chronicles stories connect to a very different potential
context for Appleseed, however: histories
of colonization and their negative effects on both places and indigenous
communities. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Appleseed was in any direct
way a colonizer, much less a participant in the era’s very much ongoing
genocides of Native American communities. But at the very least, our images
of Appleseed depend on portraying the American landscape as open and available
for his intervention, which in its own way is an extension of the “virgin
land” argument which fueled so much of the conquest, colonization, and
genocide histories that unfolded in the Americas after European arrival. And
given, again, how much those processes were continuing to unfold in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries—indeed, how much they were really only
beginning for many Native American communities across the continent—it’s
important to make sure not to reify that inaccurate part of the Appleseed
story, even as we rightly celebrate other layers to this iconic folk figure.
Special
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?
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