Rourke ran a spread in the Huerfano Valley, south of Walsenburg, from 1871 until his death in 1903. He was regarded by his neighbors as a competent and methodical man, more interested in soil moisture and wind patterns than in the social events of the county seat. He served two terms on the county water board and was known to be precise about weights and measures in a way that impressed the territorial assessors who visited his land twice in the 1880s.

The notebook habit began, according to his own account in a letter to his brother in Kansas, after he survived a lightning strike in the summer of 1879 that killed the horse he was riding outright and left him unconscious in a pasture for approximately four hours. He wrote that he had experienced, during that interval, a conversation with someone whose face he could not subsequently recall, concerning the specific conditions under which he would die. He did not claim this was supernatural. He described it as receiving information and said he spent the remaining twenty-four years of his life attempting to verify it. The notebook was his verification instrument.

He named the date correctly on the final page. The hour was off by twenty-three minutes. The archive holds three documents related to Rourke: the main feature account of his death and the notebook's final entry, a full biographical record, and a collection of ten witness statements gathered from neighbors and county figures in the weeks following his death. All three are filed below.