WHENCE COMES THE APPLE-TREE? 61 



ment of permanent habitations, succored him in his emer- 

 gencies. What the apple has contributed to sustenance 

 can never be known, but we are aware that it yields its 

 fruit abundantly, that it thrives in widely unlike regions 

 and conditions, that the tree has the ruggedness to endure 

 severe climates and to provide food that can be stored and 

 transported. In the ages it must have stood guard at 

 many a rude camp and fireside. It would be fascinating 

 to know what the apple-tree has witnessed. 



These early apples must have been very crude fruits 

 measured by the produce of the present day. But other 

 food was crude and man was crude. The North Amer- 

 ican Indians found the apple to be worth their effort; 

 remains of some of the so-called Indian orchards of the 

 Five Nations in New York persisted until the present 

 ■generation. These were seedling apple-trees, grown from 

 the stocks introduced by the white man. The French 

 missionaries are said to have carried the apple far into 

 the interior, and early settlers took seeds with them. The 

 legends and records of Johnny Appleseed, sowing the 

 seeds as he went, are still familiar. My father, like other 

 pioneers, took seeds from the old New England trees into 

 the wilderness of the West ; the resulting trees were top- 

 grafted, some of them as late as my time ; I can remember 

 the apples some of these seedling trees bore, the like of 

 which I have never seen again, probably poor apples if 

 we had them in this day but to a boy at the edge of the 

 forest the very essence of goodness. As early as 1639, 

 apples had been picked from trees planted on Governor's 

 Island in Boston harbor. Governor John Endicott of 

 Massachusetts Colony had an apple-tree nursery in the 

 early day ; in 1644 he says that five hundred of his trees 



