As high school history teacher Matthew Cowcert shoves open the creaky front door of a decrepit, abandoned ranch house in south Texas, he has no way of knowing that it holds a priceless treasure: a handwritten journal penned in 1901 by one ofhis own distant relatives, Redland Cowcert. Matthew is soon captivated by the poignant tale scrawled in the journal's yellowed pages. It's a brutally frank recounting of a life of hardship in the Old West: growing...