He was born, this boy, of generations of pioneer ancestors, the line of his mother’s side running back to Flanders of three hundred years ago, through Michael Paulus Van Der Voort, who came to America from Dendermonde, East Flanders, and whose marriage on 18th November, 1640, to Marie Rappelyea, was the fifth recorded marriage in New Amsterdam, now New York.  A branch runs back in England to John Rogers the martyr.  It is the boast of this family that none of the blood has ever been known to “show the white feather.”  Among those ancestors of recent date of whose deeds he was specially proud, were the great-grandfather, Samuel Rogers, a pioneer preacher of the Church of Christ among the early settlers of Kentucky and Missouri, and the Grandfather Hubbard who took his part in the Indian fights of Ohio’s early history.  On both mother’s and father’s side is a record of brave, high-hearted, clean-living men and women, strong in Christian faith, lovers of nature, all of them, and thus partakers in rich measure of that which ennobles life.

The father, Leonidas Hubbard, had come “’cross country” from Deerfield, Ohio, with gun on shoulder, when Michigan was still a wilderness, and had chosen this site for his future home.  He had taught in a school for a time in his young manhood; but the call of the out-of-doors was too strong, and forth he went again.  When the responsibilities of life made it necessary for him to limit his wanderings he had halted here; and here on July 12th, 1872, the son Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., was born.

He began by taking things very much to heart, joys and sorrows alike.  In his play he was always setting himself some unaccomplishable task, and then flying into a rage because he could not do it.  The first great trouble came with the advent of a baby sister who, some foolish one told him, would steal from him his mother’s heart.  Passionately he implored a big cousin to “take that little baby out and chop its head off.”

Later he found it all a mistake, that his mother’s heart was still his own, and so he was reconciled.

From earliest recollection he had listened with wide eyes through winter evenings, while over a pan of baldwin apples his father talked with some neighbour who had dropped in, of the early days when they had hunted deer and wolves and wild turkeys over this country where were now the thrifty Michigan farms.  There were, too, his father’s stories of his own adventures as hunter and miner in the mountains of the West.

It seemed to him the time would never come when he would be big enough to hunt and trap and travel through the forests as his father had done.  He grew so slowly; but the years did pass, and at last one day the boy almost died of gladness when his father told him he was big enough now to learn to trap, and that he should have a lesson tomorrow.  It was the first great overwhelming joy.

There was also a first great crime.