Johnny Appleseed: A Man Going His Own Way?

So yesterday I quoted some random Spearheader who described women (well, white women in particular) as “complete parasitical whores roaming the landscape spreading VD like Johnny Appleseed and fucking men over.”

One reader wondered if Mr. Appleseed really went about spreading VD. So I did a little research, and it turns out that it is exceedingly unlikely that Mr. Appleseed – who actually was a real person — spread anything other than the magic of apples. And his Swedenborgian beliefs.

Why? Because Mr. Appleseed – real name John Chapman – was what these days we might call a Man Going His Own Way. Seems he didn’t have much truck with the ladies, according to one contemporary account quoted in his Wikipedia entry:

On one occasion Miss PRICE’s mother asked Johnny if he would not be a happier man, if he were settled in a home of his own, and had a family to love him. He opened his eyes very wide–they were remarkably keen, penetrating grey eyes, almost black–and replied that all women were not what they professed to be; that some of them were deceivers; and a man might not marry the amiable woman that he thought he was getting, after all.

So what led poor Mr. Appleseed to these dire thoughts about women? Apparently the underage girl he hoped to some day get with was more into dudes who weren’t him:

Now we had always heard that Johnny had loved once upon a time, and that his lady love had proven false to him. Then he said one time he saw a poor, friendless little girl, who had no one to care for her, and sent her to school, and meant to bring her up to suit himself, and when she was old enough he intended to marry her. He clothed her and watched over her; but when she was fifteen years old, he called to see her once unexpectedly, and found her sitting beside a young man, with her hand in his, listening to his silly twaddle.

That ungrateful little strumpet!

I peeped over at Johnny while he was telling this, and, young as I was, I saw his eyes grow dark as violets, and the pupils enlarge, and his voice rise up in denunciation, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion. How angry he grew! He thought the girl was basely ungrateful. After that time she was no protegé of his.

But Appleseed, despite giving up on women in the real world, held out hope for the afterlife – explaining to others that he expected to have two spirit wives all his own after he died. Which I guess is the 19^th century equivalent of the MGTOWers today who fantasize about the sexy robot ladies who will eventually, it is hoped, make actual human females – with their troubling “thoughts” and “needs” and “desires” of their own – obsolete.

Mr. Appleseed’s quest to remain alone was probably also helped by the fact that – if the illustration I found on Wikipedia is any indication – he looked a bit like Dale Gribble from King of the Hill. Only much, much sloppier, with long hair. Oh, and instead of wearing a baseball cap, he wore “a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot.”

So, yeah, a creepy weirdo who hates women — definitely an MGTOWer all the way.

Oh, except that he actually did something with his life — you know, helping spread apple trees to a big portion of the midwest — instead of spending all his time going on about how all women are whores.