Actually I looked up the real story of Johnny Appleseed and he was more about making hard cider and selling land. 🙃

  • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I thought he made his name by basically being a consultant and helping others plant their trees. The law at the time was you had to grow X number of apple trees and the land was yours. That was because apple trees take multiple years to grow so it proved you were taking care of the land for multiple years.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, Appleseed would generally move ahead of pioneers and start nurseries on land he thought would be settled. It wasn’t some land shakedown scam like the original comment is implying; it was a very useful service that Appleseed would even forego payment for to those who couldn’t afford it. Apples were a dietary staple on the frontier, often used for bartering, and sometimes, as you said, you even legally needed an orchard.

      • in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        Well it was useful for the pioneers, however you have to acknowledge the massive genocide that was committed to make that land “available” to those same “pioneers”.

        Apples were a dietary staple in so much as they could be brewed into cider and the resulting mash was then used to bulk up food stocks as feed for invasive farm animals.

        Your comments don’t seem to address any of this. Why is that?

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Your comments don’t seem to address any of this. Why is that?

          Because that’s not at all what the original comment was about. Why am I expected to offer up a treatise on the consequences of apples on the American frontier in order to debunk someone purporting – unsubstantiated and evidently with no regard for the truth – that Appleseed was running “a land grab scam based on the laws of the time”?

          Edit: I guess since the original comment mentioned it, I could mention the obvious that, no shit, this was stolen land just like effectively every parcel of US land. But what good does this do our discussion of Appleseed’s character as an alleged scam artist? It’s generally understood that Appleseed had a very good relationship with the Native Americans he encountered, and yes, sometimes you can be an overall well-meaning person while advancing a deeply unethical system.

    • GhostPain@lemmy.worldBanned from community
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      1 day ago

      “Consulatant”: “Hey guys here’s a way to lay claim to government land taken from the natives. Just plant a bunch of crabapple seeds like I did and you can claim to be “working the land”, too.”

      I’m not buying any good intentions here, sorry.