Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

and play his fiddle, which had a negro's head carved at the end of the shaft.
Tutored by Lafe, who was considered to be one of the best horsemen in Madison County, all the
children learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk and each of them was allocated a pony
from the Waterbury livery stable. Also quartered with the horses was the family cow, Star, who
obligingly provided them every day with as much milk as they could drink.
In 1902, because of confusion with a similarly-named town nearby, the good folk of Burnett decided
to change the name of their town to Tilden, thereby commemorating an unsuccessful presidential
candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, who had contested the 1876 election won by Rutherford B. Hayes. May
was the first of the Waterbury children to graduate, in 1904, from Tilden High School. Tall,
outspoken and independent, she was an unashamed feminist - she was outraged when she read
in the newspaper that a policeman in New York had arrested a woman for smoking in the street
and thrilled to learn that deaf and blind Helen Keller had graduated from Radcliffe College the
same year she graduated from Tilden. It surprised no one in the family when May announced that
she wanted a career, declaring her belief that there must be more to life than caring for a husband
and bearing children. Accordingly, and with the blessing of her parents, she set off for Omaha to
train as a teacher. But by the time she had qualified as a high school and institute teacher,
certificate of Nebraska, she was writing letters home about a young sailor she had met called
'Hub'.
Harry Ross Hubbard was not a descendent of a long line of Hubbards but an orphan. Born Henry
August Wilson on 31 August 1886 at Fayette, Iowa, his mother had died when he was a baby and
he had been adopted by a Mr and Mrs James Hubbard, farmers in Frederiksburg, Iowa, who
changed his name to Harry Ross Hubbard.
At school, Harry was not a high flier. He briefly attended a business college at Norma Springs,
Iowa, but dropped out when he realized he had little chance of a degree. On 1 September 1904, the
day after his eighteenth birthday, he joined the United States Navy as an enlisted man. While
serving as a yeoman on the USS Pennsylvania, he began writing 'romantic tales' of Navy life for
newspapers back home, earning useful extra income. He was posted to the US Navy recruiting
office in Omaha in 1906 when he met May Waterbury and it was not long before her plans for an
independent career were more or less forgotten. They married on 25 April 1909, and by the
summer of 1910 May was pregnant; her husband, now discharged from the Navy, had found work
as a commercial teller in the advertising department of the Omaha World Herald newspaper.
The Waterburys, meanwhile, had left Tilden and moved to Durant in south-east Oklahoma, close to
the border with Texas. Lafe had seen the first Model T. Ford trundle cautiously through the main
street of Tilden and realized that his livery stable faced an uncertain future; when a close friend in
Durant suggested to him that the warmer climate in the south would be better for all the family, he
talked it over with Ida and they decided to go, making the eight hundred-mile trip by railroad. Ray,
then sixteen, travelled with Star and the horses and fed and watered the animals during the
journey.
Only Toilie stayed behind in Tilden. She was twenty-three and working as a nurse and secretary for
Dr Stuart Campbell, who had opened a small hospital in a wood-frame house on Oak Street, just a
block away from the Waterbury family home. Toilie was reluctant to give up her job and her parents
readily accepted her decision not to go with them to Oklahoma.
Campbell, who had set up a practice in Tilden in 1900, had delivered Ida Waterbury's two youngest
children, but it was the fact that Toilie was working for him that persuaded May to return to Tilden to