Born on March 13th, 1911, L. Ron Hubbard’s early years were spent in a typically Wild West Montana with periodic jaunts to California, Oregon and Washington.

As a broad introductory word, however, Mr. Hubbard himself explained: “I was born in Nebraska and three weeks later went to Oklahoma,” where his grandfather had established a horse ranch and where he took his first steps before the age of one. From Oklahoma, he next moved on to the state of Montana where, as he quipped, “they say I showed some signs of settling down, but I think this is merely rumor.”

Then came several notable adventures, including an extraordinary friendship with a Blackfoot medicine man and eventual acceptance as a tribal blood brother. He was also breaking range broncs at an early age, and narrowly escaped a pack of coyotes astride a mare named Nancy Hanks—a particularly telling event for the fact it was not initially believed. Hence his later admission, “I had my adventures but I learned to tell the lesser tale.”

While if only to round out an otherwise rough and tumble youth, his mother, Ledora May Hubbard, was that rarity of her time—a thoroughly educated woman—who introduced her son to the classics of Occidental literature even before his seventh birthday.

In another note on his youth, Mr. Hubbard described a hair-raising journey through the Rocky Mountains in his grandfather’s Model T Ford. The roads, at best, were paved with sand, and generally little more than winding deer trails above a sheer abyss. Then followed equally challenging treks across Nevada deserts (where water went to the radiator and the tires blew out every thirty miles) before finally arriving in San Diego where his father, Harry Ross Hubbard, served the United States Navy aboard a destroyer.

As for the story of L. Ron Hubbard as America’s youngest Eagle Scout, it began with his entry into Scouting in 1923, and saw him soon thereafter representing American Scouting before then-President Calvin Coolidge.

While as the son of a US naval officer, he was soon sailing for rather more exotic lands, including remote South Pacific ports and a prerevolutionary China. In all, he logged more than a quarter of a million miles before the age of nineteen and was otherwise well on the path of his greater life’s journey by 1929.

Or as Mr. Hubbard himself put it when speaking of his early years: “From the age of three I knew exactly where I was going.”