Wilson Rawls was born in the Oklahoma Ozarks on a small farm. His youth was spent in the Cherokee nation, roaming the hills and river bottoms with his only companion, an old blue tick hound. The small town that he grew up in did not have a school so Wilson's mother taught him and his siblings to the best of her ability. She made it a practice to read to them. He thought that all …showed first 75 words of 968 total…

…showed last 75 words of 968 total…moving into town, Billy went up to the grave of the two dogs to say a final goodbye. As he went up to the gravesite, he noticed that something was different. A beautiful red fern had grown right in between the two graves. Then he remembered an old Indian legend about how only an angel could plant the seeds of a red fern and that they never died; where one grew that site was sacred.