“WESTWARD HO!” IN AMERICA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18324, 15 August 1921, Page 8

“WESTWARD HO!” IN AMERICA.

THE STORY OF JOHNNY APPLESEED. One of the most wonderful and most romantic episodes in modern history has never received its meed of fame. -Its glory, its history, its fascination have almost perished. Up till now (says the Spectator) we have been compelled to say of it: “It had no poet and it died. This episode was 'the great migration westward in the twenties, thirties and forties of the adventurers and pioneers of the eastern states of America supplemented by the wanderers of many lands and peoples. Then was seen what we know must have taken place before in many countries, but of which till the New England frontiersmen led the way across the Appalachians we have no certain record. A sudden impulse to drive onward to fresh woods, new pastures, new hills, and a new horizon took men and women by the throat. Though there was no Pied Piper, they followed as if under a spell of power. As the movement was at its height in 1835 to 1845, it is within living memory. And yet the dull Old World and the equally dull and decorous “high-brows” of the New World seem very seldom to have realised what was going on at their doors. They sat stupid and bemused, strumming their little tinkling lyres to Adelaide and Mariana, While there passed them a woman with the West in her eyes And a man with his back to the East. None heeded, or, if they did, only in Statistics and Reports to Congress “on the increasing population in the Western Territories.” And after all these years comes a Homer to sing in adequate words with a poet’s passion the great and strange revel of our race. Mr Vachel Lindsay in a memorable poem, takes one of the most curious incidents in the whole whirling story, and tolls us how “Johnny Appleseed” went forth before the host, a sort of Roland of the Wild West, singing his songs and planting his apple orchards, for that was his special mission. He kept always ahead of the incomers in order to plant hi& Apple Trees so that those who followed him might enjoy the kindly fruits of the earth in due season.. They sound pretty mad, these orchard oriflammes, but if they were mad they were of a piece with all else that was happening. .Anyway, Mr Vachel Lindsay in his poem makes us feel that it was all quite sane and natural. But he does more than tell us the legend of ‘‘Johnny Appleseed.” He makes ns feel, as most of us have never felt before, the magic and the glorv of the rush across the Appalachian ridges into the prairies of the West. Even his bees go crazy and join the rabble rout. Walt Whitman would have loved the poem, for in his own verse we see that he understood what was happening. His “Pioneers ! O Pioneers!” breathes the authentic air of the new Paradise. Mr Vachel Lindsay has laid ns all under a debt of gratitude. He has given us the first lay in the great Epic of the West. He must give us more and then weave it all into an organic whole. It is better to do that for oneself than wait 70 years for a Pisistratns who might never come or possibly turn mil- to be a publisher’s hack, or ■ an official assigned for special duty by the Education Board.

Of the bare facts of Johnny Apnleseed’s life the best account is to be found in Mr Vachel Lindsay’s volume “The Golden. Book of Springfield, published last year in New, York by the Macmillan Company. Johnny Appleseed’s real name was John Chapman. “John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) began his labours m a region a little north of Alexander Campbell's diocese, in the {Jnio basin. He remains a tradition among tne more northern group of those wno worshipped Campbell, and among similar pioneers. He is especially honoured by that splendid sect, the . Swedenborgians, for hrf was a preacher and teacner of the doctrines of -Swedenborg. But he was even more notably a nurseryman. He was deserving of the laurels of Thoreau, three times and more, and by the test of life rather than writing, to him belongs nearly every worth-whilo crown of Whitman. He skirmished on the very *edg* of the frontier, but fought the wilderness, not the Indian. The adorigines thought him a great medicine man and holy man, became of his magical bag of seeds, for along their trails wherever he tramped, there soon came up pennyroyal and all beneficent herbs. With the tenderness of St. Francis he wept over every wounded biro, and with the steadiness of a nation builder he planted orchards of apples in the openings of the forest, fenced them in, and left them for the pioneers to find, long after. He wore for a shirt and sole article of clothing an old gunnysack with holes cut for arms and legs, and winter or summer slept in the hollow tree on the pile of old leaves, and weathered it past 70 years, while the great Whitman lived in houses, and Thoreau was on Walden but a season or two. These nidii 'left behind them certain writings, but Johnny Appleseed left behind him apples, orchards heavy with fruit, beauty from the very black earth, and a tradition whose wonder shall yet ring through all % palaces of mankind. He was as swift as the deer, and gentle as the fawn—and stern with himself, as the Red Indian. Like Christ and Socrates he wrote only in the soil. He was welcomed more like an angel than a man in the pioneer cabins, and if ever there -was an American saint left uncanonised in 1920, it is John Chapman, Johnny .Appleseed.'*’