Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Abram Waterbury, L. Ron Hubbard's great-grandfather, playing the fiddle
carved with a negro's head that became part of the family legend.
Diminutive in stature, Ida was a gentle, intelligent, strong-willed young woman whose mother had
died in childbirth, with her eighth child, when Ida was sixteen. John DeWolf, her father, was a
wealthy banker who clung to a fanciful family legend about the origins of the DeWolfes in Europe.
Details and dates were vague, but the essence of the story was that a courtier accompanying a
prince on a hunting expedition in France had somehow saved his master from an attack by a wolf;
in gratitude the prince had ennobled the faithful courtier, bestowing upon him the title of Count de
Loupe, a name that was eventually anglicized to DeWolfe. [No records exist to support this story,
either in Britain or France; Vice-Admiral Harry De Wolf, twelfth-generation descendant of Balthazar
De Wolf, the first De Wolf in America, says he has never heard of Count de Loupe.[3]]
DeWolfe offered the young couple the use of a farm he owned in Nebraska on condition that Lafe
would maintain and improve the property. It was at Burnett, a settlement on the Elkhorn river, one
hundred miles west of Omaha, which had recently been opened up by the arrival of the Sioux City
and Pacific Railroad.
Burnett was an unremarkable cluster of log cabins, dug-outs and ramshackle pine huts huddled in
a lazy curve of the river and surrounded by gently rolling prairie. It might never have appeared on any
map had not the homesteaders persuaded the railroad to make a halt nearby. The first train arrived
in 1879 and thereafter the town developed around the railroad depot rather than the river; within a
few years a general store, saloon and livery stable were in business. The Davis House Hotel,
opened in 1884, was considered the finest on the whole Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley
Railroad.
By the time Lafe and Ida Waterbury arrived in Burnett, soon after the opening of the hotel, Ida was