The Truth About Johnny Appleseed, Womens Rights, Prohibition, and the Mafia

So it turns out that Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) was a real guy. Not a tall tale. He was not, however, intelligent. If you plant the seeds of an apple, what you get is a sour apple, not a sweet one. Apples evolved in Kazahkstan, on the west slope of the Himalayas. Their DNA is all over the place. Sweetness is a recent and rare mutation, so apple orchards are filled with trees cloned from the branches that make sweet apples. All sweet apples come from these mutant clones. All of them. The seeds in an apple are different, and only produce sour apples. These are largely useless, so Johnny Appleseed covered the Midwest and West with sour apple trees because he was a numpty.

So what did the settlers do with sour apples? They made hooch. You can put those apples in water barrels and they ferment. In the winter, you remove the ice that forms on the surface, and the fermented juice concentrates. You end up with Applejack, which is strong alcoholic drink.

Westerners drank applejack because there's not much to do once you finish the day's tasks, and in dry country, there aren't many of those. Until folks dug wells in the Ogalalla Aquifer, the great plains were pretty useless. Once they had wells, they had terrific crops. Then the aquifer went dry and the wells did too and their farms died. It was fossil water. Left over from the ice age. Not being refilled. (It should be).

So they drank applejack and beat their wives, enough of them did, that women got fed up and went after their abusive husbands with the copper stick used for laundry. And they got together and formed the Salvation Army, and created Dry Towns, and then Dry Counties, where nobody was allowed to drink and everybody was too pious, spied on their neighbors, and murders were committed out of envy instead of booze. The primary problem was poor economic opportunities in places crippled by frequent drought. This is not a new thing, after all.

So the women got together and got the vote, and the first thing they voted to do? Ban alcohol. Prohibition. People don't LIKE to be told what to do. They everybody drank to spite the mean old crones, and organized smuggling suddenly got a LOT of money to bring in hooch from Canada. If yo want to know what that stuff tasted like, Canadian Mist and other brands of "Blended Canadian Whiskey" are good examples. The guys smuggling this organized to the point that they expanded the Mafia families out of their prior immigrant hellholes in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Eastern craptowns into the Midwest and western towns. They found that the demand for smuggled booze was enough to enrich them and when prohibition ended their ranks and sophistication had grown into all sorts of unpleasant markets.

So women voted to increase crime. It wasn't on purpose, but that was the unintended consequence. And that is the connection between Johnny Appleseed, women's rights, and the mafia.