It is 1866. Nineteen-year-old Jason Collins is sent from New Orleans to the Colorado Territory with instructions to his father's friend to either make him a man or break him totally. Kidnapped off the stagecoach by highwaymen, abandoned in the middle of the untamed prairie, and alone in a land he doesn't know, Jay must survive buffalo stampedes, Indians, and the Colorado winter. But what is the real reason his father shipped him west? Is it actually to "make him a man" or is he merely an innocent victim used as a vehicle for vengeance between bitter enemies?