“About the time of the survey of the lands in the United States military district, northwest of the river Ohio, preparatory to their location by those holding the warrants which had been issued by the government to the soldiers of the revolutionary war, for services during that war, there came to the valley of the Muskingum and its tributaries, the Tuscarawas, Walhonding, Mohican, &c., a man whose real name, if ever known, is not now remembered by the oldest inhabitants here, but who was commonly known and called all over the country by the name of Johnny Appleseed. [...]

“Immediately upon his advent, he commenced the raising of apple trees from the seed, at a time when there were not, perhaps fifty white men within the forty miles square.  He would clear a few rods of ground in some open part of the forest, girdle the trees standing upon it, surround it with a brush fence, and plant his apple seeds.  This done, he would go off some twenty miles or so, select another favorable spot, and again go through the same operation.  In this way, without family and without connection, he rambled from place to place, and employed his time, I may say his life.

“When the settlers began to flock in and open their ‘clearings’, old Appleseed was ready for them with his young trees; and it was not his fault if everyone of them had not an orchard planted out and growing without delay.”

Hovey’s Magazine of Horticulture, April 1846

“The urgent need of the frontiersman for apples is something that the twentieth century can easily overlook.  […]  It is hard to realize that in the pioneer history of most American communities the first apple crop once marked a first stage of permanency.  No other fruit could be started so easily, and none could be put to so many essential uses.”  (pg. 39)

“Every settler, therefore, hoped to have a goodly plot of appletrees set out and bearing in the shortest stretch of time.  Often, the trees were even a legal prerequisite to a claim, as in Kentucky’s ‘Sapphire Country’ where the planting of appleseeds or peachstones was a common guarantee to warrant the establishment of a title.  At Marietta, when the Ohio Company in 1792 set up the ‘Donation Tract’ to encourage migrations to the backlands up the Muskingum and Duck Creek, they stipulated specifically that to acquire a hundred acres a settler put out not less than fifty appletrees and twenty peachtrees within three  years.  When orchards had been established, the land had been mastered.”  (pg. 40)

“But it was seedling stock that started the pioneer apple orchards across America.  Not that grafting and budding were unknown.  These arts were already highly developed in the 1790’s.  But the transporting of such stock into new country was a difficult and expensive venture.  When trips from Connecticut to Ohio often took many weeks, a considerable number of young grafted appletrees would have pre-empted precious baggage space needed for family essentials, and would have demanded a constant vigil to keep the tender roots moist and alive.” (pg. 41)

“A few seedlings in every lot were bound by the law of chance to be fairly good, and some would be superior.  Sooner or later a Northern Spy would appear in New York, a Grimes Golden in West Virginia, and a Stark in Ohio.”  (pg. 42)

“In time, apples would even pioneer in a broader commerce, for apple brandy from the trees that spread over the Ohio Valley’s hillsides in the first wave of settlement would be one of the first important inland products to be shipped down the Mississippi to the markets of New Orleans.”  (pg. 40)

All from Robert Price's 1954 book Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth.