264 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Mr. Chapman was usually thinly clad, often in old clothes given him 

 in exchange for trees. And it was an invariable rule with him to give 

 part of his scant wardrobe to anyone he met who seemed to be more needy 

 than himself. He was the friend of all, young and old, Indian and white, 

 and had free pass everywhere. Morei than once his warning of an Indian 

 uprising — -passing through the country with almost the speed of a race 

 horse — gave time for flight or security and saved many lives. 



Many time he slept in the woods, and was on the best of terms with 

 the denizens of the forest. It is related that one cool night he had made 

 a fire in the woods for his comfort, and after lying down he perceived 

 that the mosquitoes were flying into the blaze and losing their lives. He 

 got up, carried water in his hat from a nearby stream and extinguished 

 the fire. Strange, unheard of tenderness and consideration. 



Mr. R. J. Curtis, of Moundsville, W. Va., in a letter to the Ohio 

 Pomological Society (published in the report of 1859) states that he 

 never knew him to give way to revenge or resentment in any form. He 

 once saw him outrageously abused by a man much smaller than himself, 

 but he bore it all with meekness, wholly unruffled. He never carried a 

 gun, never killed any game, pushing to extreme the principle of his life, 

 never to do harm to any creature. He considered that he was living as 

 the primitive Christian did; and if his practical piety did assume un- 

 usual forms who shall say that it was less acceptable to Him who "seeth 

 not as man seeth?" 



Dr. Henry Howe, in his most admirable work, the "Historical Collec- 

 tions of Ohio," relates that one of the early itinerant ministers, preaching 

 in the public square in Mansfield, Ohio, came on a passage not in the 

 original plan of the* sermon. Raising his voice at a certain point, he 

 asked — doubless without any expectation of an answer — "Where is the 

 Christian traveling to heaven barefooted now?" 



"Here he is," cried Chapman, raising his bare feet aloft from a pile of 

 lumber on which he was stretched at full length. 



A part of his regular business was the free distribution of religious 

 literature, which he carried, along with the New Testament, in the bosom 

 of his shirt. If he happened to have plenty of books or pamphlets they 

 went out intact; but if he ran short at any time he separated them into 

 small portions, so each person could have at least a partial benefit. 



In church relation he was a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg. And 

 one peculiar phase of his oddity was that he considered he had angelic 

 communications, and particularly in regard to marriage. Though once or 

 twice his heart seemed touched with, tenderness toward persons of the 

 opposite sex, he never took to himself a helpmeet. But he was consoled 

 in his loneliness by the promise — which he said he had from two spirits 

 — that if he continued single and upright in the present life they would 

 both be his wives in the life to come. In this particular he may be said 

 to have antedated the late Joseph Smith and surpassed him as well in 

 that he postponed the "peculiar relation" to the future state of existence. 



To endure the toll and privation he did he must have had a fine con- 



