The Secret of Treasure Island, one of a number of films L. Ron Hubbard helped script for Columbia Pictures during the 1930s.

     As a matter of fact, recalled Pohl, “Nobody was doing the sort of thing he did any better . . . colorful, exciting, continually challenging.” Case in point: L. Ron Hubbard’s first full-length novel, Buckskin Brigades. Acclaimed as one of the first popular works to offer an accurate view of the Blackfeet Indians, Buckskin Brigades was all that Pohl described and more. A “decidedly rare type of romance,” declared the New York Times, the novel constituted one of the first real reversals of what had been a fairly ethnocentric cliché: the native American as a murderous savage. Rather, as Council Members of the Blackfeet Nation were to declare, “Never have our morals and ethics been presented with such clarity.” Additionally marking Buckskin Brigades as unique is the fact that it rose to the bestseller lists some forty years after original publication.