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Johnny Appleseed was the name given to John Chapman, an eccentric wanderer who planted apple trees on the American frontier. Like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, Chapman was a real person from the early history of the United States whose deeds were romanticized and embroidered by later writers until the man became a folk legend.

Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774, shortly before the outbreak of the American Revolution. As a young man, he settled in Pittsburgh, which then looked out on the frontier of American settlement in the Ohio River valley He became an orchardist, someone who cultivates trees to sell their fruit or the seedlings of new trees.

In the early 1800s, Chapman began traveling west into the Ohio Territory with bags of apple seeds and loads of seedlings to sell to the pioneers settling there. When he came upon pioneers who could not afford to buy from him, he gave his seeds and seedlings away or exchanged...