Publisher's Synopsis
"This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the boldness of an iconic American life and the sadness of his last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward. And it shows how death liberated the legend and made of Johnny a barometer of the nation's feelings about its own heroic past and the supposed Eden it once had been. It is a book that does for America's inner frontier what Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage did for its western one. No American folk hero--not Davy Crockett, not even Daniel Boone--is better known than Johnny Appleseed, and none has become more trapped in his own legends. The fact is, John Chapman--the historical Johnny Appleseed--might well be the best-known figure from our national past about whom most people know almost nothing real at all. One early historian called Chapman "the oddest character in all our history," and not without cause. Chapm
