"If John Chapman, when he died near Fort Wayne in 1845, had merely lain down to the long rest like ordinary men, then the history of his labors – though remarkable – could have been told quickly and simply, for the old Yankee tree peddler had taken little care to leave himself in the records.

"Instead, because even in his dying John could not be commonplace, he stepped spryly out of the flesh that snowy March day, straightened his mushpot hat, girt up his coffee-sack shirt, eased his bare feet in celestial sunshine and started off to longer travels and greater labors than he had ever known before.  He had walked more miles than any other recorded borderer of his generation – now he belonged to the American trails and rivers forever.  He had strewn appleseeds over much of the land between the Allegheny and the Mississippi – now he would become the mythical planter of all the first orchards from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  And when American horticulture had been well established, he would turn his hand, during the next hundred years, to anything else that would make the land fruitful and beautiful.

"He had been a hero on the Indian border and a kindly, humanitarian Christian missionary who left folk talk like his seeds growing wherever he had gone.  In the Middle Western wilderness, he had helped make straight the paths for the march of American democracy.  Now that these paths had overlaced a continent, he would become a symbol of a nation's philosophy setting an example of faith and industry and common neighborliness among all races and levels of men and –to use Vachel Lindsay's metaphore – even conjure an apple barrel out of the sun from which the Rambos and Baldwins of democracy might go rolling around the world." (xii-xiii)

From Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth by Robert Price.